If you own a man’s secret, he’d told her,you own the man.
And hadn’t that been the point of Errichiello’s business? Powerfulmen invited by Paride Silvestri to abuse underage girls. Compromise and leverage—a ruthless blackmail machine. So where were Errichiello’s files now that he was gone?
Luca was dead, but he’d only been one head of the hydra. His death didn’t stop any of this.
It’s never enough to just take a head, Adriano had once said.To kill the beast, you need to understand it completely…you must watch and learn…find its beating heart.
She needed to find that beating heart. The man Lazarov obeyed. The shepherd.
She strode down the corridor, and left the hospital.
—
Outside, the air was chilly and dry. Pale sunlight bleached the trees, chipped concrete, and asphalt—an unsettling contrast between light and shadow. The sounds of traffic filled the air, and nearby, a dog barked. Behind these noises, she imagined she still heard the choppy static of gunfire.
She shut her eyes, willing it to pass.
Then, she seemed to hear her mother’s voice. Not words of comfort, but that guttural hiss:If the devil doesn’t exist, but man has created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness!
Her mother—with those wild eyes and rigid hands. Spending the last years of her life hunting for the devil who had murdered her son.
She didn’t trust the formal investigation, Raoul had told Nikki.She thought it was corrupt….
Nikki had assumed her mother’s obsession had been a distraction from reality—a place to put her grief. But what if Beatrice’s devil had been real? Like Valerio’s shepherd?
She thought of Adriano again, his voice clear in her thoughts:You must see—must understand the players and how they fit together.
The corruption was so deep, so hidden, the hunt felt impossible. Beatrice had tried, and failed, to find the devil in the darkness.
Was it possible her father had found a clue?
Nikki dialed Raoul’s number.
“What’s the news on the Patalano case?” she asked.
He sighed. “There’s nothing there. We’re shutting down the investigation.”
“But what about the sophisticated system you told me about?” she demanded, striding across the car park. She was exhausted yet oddly animated, as if her body was a puppet, strings frenziedly twitching. “What about the code names—Damascus, Diogenes, Zosima?”
“Patalano’s ledger is two decades old,” he said irritably. “If I’d been able to ask him—or if we’d gotten to it earlier—I could have put the pieces together. It’s just too late.”
—
Fuck.
—
It was too late to ask Patalano. Too late to ask her mother. Adriano. Claire. Gaetano. Federico.
All too late. The dead took their secrets with them.
Even Signora Dorotea, with her cold dry hands and long nails, had seen more than she’d said.You are a child of Napoli…full of light and darkness…the divine and infernal wrestling….
What had she known? What secrets had she hoarded?
Nikki seemed to see the sly black glance as Dorotea adjusted the charms on her rucksack, as she arranged the items in the votive shrine.
“What were you doing?” Nikki asked the dead woman.
