Page 87 of Deadly Confessions
My eyes sting. I blink. My vision blurs.
I am crying.
I have not cried during a ritual since the first year. When the weight of what Zio Domenico was asking me to do was still new enough to buckle my knees. I cried then because I was a child. I am crying now because I can’t shake the feeling that something is wrong.
The tears fall onto my thighs. Mixing with the blood. The salt stings the open wound. The taste of both in the back of my throat because I’m crying with my mouth open, silently, the way I cried in the closet when I was ten years old, listening to my parents die.
I killed a good man.
I felt it in the knife. In the way his hand reached for my wrist, not to fight but to understand. In the way his body was warm and his wife was warm against him and the nightlight in the children's room cast plastic stars on the ceiling.
I killed a good man. The candles told me to. I believed the candles.
I press the cloth to my thigh. The cut bleeds through. I press harder.
"Nel Tuo nome, è finita."
The words are a whisper. Broken. Wet.
I blow out the candles. Stand. My thigh screams. The cut is too deep. I'll need to butterfly it closed. I go to the bathroom. Clean the wound. Apply the strips. Press gauze over them. Tape it down.
I look at myself in the mirror. Red eyes. Pale face. Blood on my hands. The girl in the mirror looks like someone I don't recognize. Someone who has started to question the only truth she's ever known.
Tomorrow. I will go to Zio Domenico. I will ask him about Roberto Ferrante. I will ask what the man confessed, what sins lit Candles 2 and 3, what justified the death of a man whose family loved him very much.
I have never asked before.
In fourteen years, thirty-four kills, I have never once questioned the candle. Never asked for details beyond the signal. The system doesn't require my understanding. It requires my obedience.
Tomorrow I will ask.
I go to his office after morning Mass. He’s at his desk. The photograph of my father in the silver frame. The espresso machine on the bookshelf. He looks up when I enter. A warm smile.
"Cucciola," he says. "I haven't seen you in days."
"I need to ask you something."
The smile adjusts. A degree of caution entering the warmth.
"Of course," he says.
"The last confession. The one from Tuesday. Candles 2 and 3."
"What about it?"
"What did he confess?"
Silence. He leans back in his chair. His hands fold on the desk, the priestly gesture of composure, of pastoral patience, of a man preparing to deliver a response he has already chosen.
"You know I can't share the specifics of a confession, cucciola. The seal isabsolute."
"I know the seal. I'm not asking for the words. I'm asking what he did."
"The candles told you what he did."
"The candles told me the categories. I want to know the substance."
He studies me. His eyes move across my face the way a doctor's eyes move across an X-ray. Looking for fractures.
