Page 3 of Deadly Confessions
Chapter 1
The Confession
Valentina
14 years later
I'm at the kitchen counter eating leftover pasta from work, standing up because I never sit down to eat when I'm alone. A fork in one hand, a crime novel propped against the olive oil bottle in the other. The pasta is cold. I don't care. Reheating takes time I could spend reading.
My phone buzzes at 6:14 PM.
The text is from my uncle, Father Domenico.
Stasera. Ore 20. Appuntamento in confessionale.
(Tonight. 8 PM. Confessional appointment.)
I set the fork down. Close the book. Mark my page with the receipt from the electric bill because I've never owned a bookmark.
Two hours.
I eat three more bites of pasta, wash the fork and put the container in the fridge. I brush my teeth, change into dark clothes, check my reflection in the bathroom mirror. Glasses clean. Hair pulled back. Nothing memorable about the girl looking back at me. That's the point.
I leave my apartment at 7:22. The streets of the Sanità are loud with evening noise. Motorini weaving between parked cars. Kids kicking a ball against a wall tagged with graffiti. A woman yelling at her husband from a third-floor balcony about something he did or didn't do, her voice carrying over the rooftops with the precision of a church bell. Naples doesn't whisper.
I walk. The route to Santa Maria della Sanità takes eleven minutes if I go through the main streets. Seven if I cut through the vicoli. I take the vicoli tonight. The narrow alleys swallow me whole, stone walls so close I could touch both sides with my arms outstretched. Laundry hangs between buildings. A cat watches me from a dumpster with one good eye.
The church.
I enter through the side door, the one near the sacristy that sticks in the humidity and requires a specific pressure on the lower hinge to open without noise. I've been opening this door since I was ten years old. My body knows the angle.
Inside, the nave is empty. Tuesday evening confessions are by appointment only, which means Father Domenico has arranged this one specifically. The air is cool after the street heat, thick with the residue of morning incense. Marble floors the color of cream. Wooden pews dark with age and oil from a thousand hands. The large crucifix above the altar catches the last daylight through the clerestory windows, the bronze Christ twisted in agony that I have studied since childhood, memorized the way other children memorize cartoon characters.
I know this church the way a soldier knows the terrain where she trained. Every shadow. Every sightline. Every place a body can hide and every place it can't.
I usually sit in the back, in the last row. Not tonight. Tonight I wanna hear.So I sit in the third pew from the front.
I've done this once before. Two years into my training, when I was twelve, uncle Zio allowed it so I would understandwhat the candles meant. What kind of men confessed the sins that lit them. I heard a man describe what he'd done to a child in language so specific I vomited in the church bathroom afterward. My uncle held my hair. Told me this was why God needed us.
I believed him.
I settle into the pew. Fold my hands in my lap. Still. Patient. The wood is hard under my thighs and the kneeler digs into my shins when I adjust my feet. I look like a young woman praying before evening Mass. That is what I am, if you subtract the knife strapped to my inner thigh beneath my skirt.
7:51. The sacristy door opens. Father Domenico crosses the sanctuary in his black cassock, rosary beads clicking against his hip. He doesn't look at me. He never looks at me when the system is active. We are strangers in this space. Priest and parishioner. He enters the confessional booth on the priest's side. The wooden door clicks shut.
I wait.
7:58. The main doors open.
A man walks in. Mid-fifties. Expensive shoes, leather soles that click on the marble with a specific authority. Charcoalsuit cut by someone who charges by the millimeter. Gold watch on his left wrist. Heavy. Rolex, probably, though I can't confirm from this distance. His hair is silver on the sides, dark on top, combed back with product that catches the candlelight as he passes beneath the sconces.
He carries himself like he’s made of money. Shoulders back. Chin level. Eyes that scan the church with the discomfort of a man unaccustomed to being in rooms he doesn't own.
He walks past me.
He doesn't look down. I am a girl in a pew with glasses and folded hands. I am wallpaper. I am furniture. I am the least interesting thing in this church.
Good.
