Page 102 of Deadly Confessions
I don't find them.
There’s no way he knows his father ordered the murder of my parents. If he does, he's the most accomplished liar I've ever encountered, which is possible, because he runs a Camorra clan. But improbable, because I've watched him lie to other people and I know what his lying face looks like. Thejaw tightens. The blink rate increases. The charm amplifies by a half-degree, polished to cover the grinding beneath.
He doesn't show those tells with me. He never has.
Which means he either doesn't know or he's hiding it so deep that even my training can't find it.
I’m starting to feel something very familiar, yet foreign. Something that has eaten at me since my last assignment: Doubt. I trust my instincts but convinced myself God would never give me an assignment to kill the innocent. But my discernment afterwards, coupled with the way my uncle acted, proved that my instinct may have be right all along. Now a wife’s a widow, a daughter and son fatherless, and I must live with that for the rest of my life.
Now I have that same doubt creeping into my bones.
Either way, his family killed mine. Either way, the blood is there. The debt is there. The marble floor with my parents' bodies is there, fourteen years ago, preserved in my memory like an insect in amber. Nothing time does will dissolve that image. Nothing love does will overwrite it.
I stand. Walk to the closet. Open it.
In the back, behind the winter coat Father Domenico bought me three years ago, there is a bag. Black canvas. Zipper. Inside: a Beretta M9, disassembled, wrapped in cloth. A suppressor in its own case. Three loaded magazines. A secondary knife, longer than the thigh blade, serrated on one edge. Zip ties. Gloves. A change of clothes, dark, nondescript.
The kit I assembled four years ago in case the day ever came when the routine kills weren't enough. When a target required more preparation than the standard loadout. When the assignment was personal.
I haven't opened this bag in two years. The weight of it is familiar. Dense. The specific gravity of intention.
I set the bag on the bed. Unzip it. Lay the components on the mattress.
I assemble the Beretta. The muscle memory is seamless. Slide, barrel, recoil spring, frame. The parts click together with the mechanical certainty of a system designed by people who understood that precision saves lives. Or ends them. Depending on which end you're standing on.
I attach the suppressor. Thread it carefully. Test the fit. Load a magazine. Chamber a round. The slide racks with a sound I feel in my teeth.
The secondary knife goes in my waistband. The zip ties in my jacket pocket. The gloves, black latex, in the other pocket. The thigh knife goes back on my thigh. All of it.
I put on the dark clothes. Black jeans. Black jacket, the reversible one. Dark trainers. I pull my hair back. Tight braid. Glasses on.
I look at the crucifix.
The bronze Christ on the wall. The same one I've knelt before after every kill. The same one that watched me cut my thigh and pray and believe that the blood I shed was holy.
I don't kneel.
I pick up the bag. Sling it over my shoulder. Check my reflection in the bathroom mirror. The girl looking back is not the waitress. Not the girlfriend. Not the bookish girl with the dry humor who blushes when caught looking. The girl in the mirror has flat eyes and a loaded weapon and the address of a penthouse on the Bay of Naples memorized in her bones.
I leave the apartment. Lock the door.
The vicoli of the Sanità close around me. Narrow walls. Hanging laundry. A cat on a dumpster. The same route I walk to the church, but I'm not going to the church. I'm walking south. Toward the waterfront. Toward Posillipo. Toward the building where a man with silver temples is sitting in a penthouse drinking whiskey or reading Augustine or tracing the scar on his forearm, unaware that the woman he loves is coming to end his life.
My pulse is steady. My hands are still. My breathing is even.
I’m the instrument. I’ve always been the instrument. Father Domenico built me for this. The training, the system, the candles, the ritual. All of it leading here. To this final assignment.
The Sorrentinos killed my parents.
The man I love is a Sorrentino.
I'm going to look into his eyes and decide whether to love him or kill him.
I don't know which one yet.
Chapter 32
The Confrontation
