Capo
My wife slipped the rosary over my neck before I left.
A ritual.
A rite of passage.
A symbol of her love and sacrifice to carry with me into battle.
After the killer had made a deep enough cut that my air left my throat instead of my nose or mouth, I took out the rosary and clutched it in my hands before I went down.
Each breath was a struggle.
Each beat of my heart was fought for.
I had thought that the place where Mariposa had found her heaven—her rosary—would touch me. Because I knew where I was headed. Hell. Before my last breath, I wanted to touch the place where she found peace. To touch what the other side did before taking their final breath.
Faith.
There were only a few moments from my first life that stuck with me over the years. One of them was Mariposa’s mother, Maria, before I pulled the trigger.
Maria was the first person I killed who had offered me forgiveness for what I was about to do. She told me she knew that I had no choice. She told me that what I was doing was showing her mercy. She knew the savages I was related to. What they would do to her once they found her.
In that moment, though, I’d tried to think of ways to save them both. A girl should have her mother.
In the end, we both knew it was useless. If I were going to save her daughter, the little girl she called Marietta, all ties to her original life had to be cut.
“I know where I’m going, Vittorio. I might have made mistakes in my life—I married a man who was not a man of God—but still, I am a woman of faith. I do not fear death, because I am onto a new life. Take care of my baby.”
The only fear Maria showed was for her daughter. Wherever Maria felt she was going, it was to a better place. She had followed her husband through the darkest of nights, the coldest of days, and the dirtiest places her feet could’ve touched. When I found them, they were close to starving. They couldn’t leave the filthy place they were living in. They couldn’t even ask a neighbor to bring them food in fear of being found out.
We still found them.
I had killed men who cried like women, shit and pissed their pants, got on their knees and begged when death came knocking. One man even offered his wife instead of him. A life was a life. A body a body.
Not Maria. She had faith, and her faith gave her courage. Her body perished, but her soul lived on.
She had been teaching Mariposa that all along. When she was afraid, she could touch her faith to find peace. Mariposa had something that would forever comfort her.
To some it was beads on a rope. But to Maria, it was a physical representation of her unwavering belief system. No matter how close her fears came, she had something bigger on her side to conquer them.
I had wanted to die with the same peace. I wanted to taste it on my lips, feel it in my veins, have it conquer my heart before my sins came to collect me. I had felt the darkness breaking up, shattering like glass, and from it, all of the monster shadows sucking me under.
One.
Two.
Three.
No more breaths.
Then I’d woken up. Tito sat next to me. I wasn’t able to speak. Still felt like I couldn’t breathe. I knew I was alive, though, because I could feel. Tito wrapped the rosary around my hand and told me to hold on.
There I was, in the metaphorical sense, still holding on.
Maybe this was my last breath.
The final fourth.
