“What the hell is going on, Enzio? What do you mean poisoningyou, too?” The way her voice shook confirmed all my doubts, not that I needed a confirmation.
“I thought I warned you what would happen if you lied to me again.”
She looked down for a second, sighing. “Well, you’re not the one holding the knife.” When her gaze returned on me, it was calm and steady, no more fear, no more pretending. “What gave me away?”
“I had to give it to you. You were smart about it. Drinking her tea the day she offered it to you, poisoning yourself with Marta to look like a victim, and framing Vincenzo for that one? Brilliant.”
“When you told me he was the only one left, I had no doubt Vincenzo was the real traitor, and Marta…don’t get me started. That day she insisted I drink her tea, I barely touched it by the way. One cup wouldn’t have poisoned me, but I wouldn’t risk passing it to Mario in my milk. The kind I used in my tea was much stronger. With what was already in her system, it finished her right away. With me, it took longer. I admit it was risky, you know, one of my impulsive moments, but I knew what I was doing, and I made sure the doctor was coming.”
“Food Science,” I chanted.
“Yeah.”
“I stayed up all night at the hospital like a fucking idiot, thinking you were going to die, praying you wouldn’t.”
“You did?” she asked in surprise, her eyes twinkling, as if she was happy that I did. As if she gave a fuck.
I gritted my teeth, dismissing any flicker of humanity triggered in me by her false emotions. “You’d been poisoning my mother since the day you set foot in the house.”
“No.” She rose to her feet, my knife shining in her hand. “Only after you…” She shook her head as if shaking off a bad memory. “Don’t get me wrong. I did want and plan to kill each one of you since Cosimo, but I couldn’t find it in me. I had many chances to stab you or shoot you right from the start, right? But I couldn’t. And I was ready to give everything up and just disappear with my son.”
“But I stopped you.”
“And fucked me like an auctioned slave in front of the sick Lanza bastards.” She snarled. “I started poisoning the serpent the day after the fucking ceremony.”
“So we created a monster.”
“You shouldn’t have killed him, and you should have let me run away.”
“Doesn’t matter now.”
“Right.” She mused. “You didn’t tell me what gave me away.”
I smirked. “When you knew Marta was dead, you said you were sorry because if you hadn’t given her that tea she’d have been alive.”
“So? It was clear it was the tea that poisoned her because it’s what I drank, too.”
“There was something in your voice that I’d recognize anywhere, or more likely not in your voice, and it tipped me off.”
“What’s that?”
“Remorse, guilt, you had none. Any normal person, even if they hated someone and wanted them dead, would feel some sort of guilt if they caused their death by accident.” I grabbed my tie, using it to scrub the blood splatter off my chest and arms. “Then there is the M.O. itself. Women use poison. Marta taught me that much. So it was highly unlikely for the killer to be a man. Certainly not a mobster like Vincenzo. Besides, he didn’t have the knowledge to cook untraceable homemade poison.”
I hung the tie loose on my neck and walked behind the chopping block where a little sink I’d built specifically to clean myself up after any job nestled in the corner. I turned on the faucet and started washing. “And the last thing is rushing to kill Vincenzo when he was trying to warn me about you.”
“He had a big mouth. Was really getting on my nerves. It felt so good to finally shut him up.” Her heels approached behind me. “And it felt so good to be the one killing Cosimo’s real murderer. It soothed my heart.”
I shut the running water and shook my hands, water splashing the air. “I’m very familiar with the feeling.” I twisted before she took another step. “So…were you saving me for last?”
“Yeah. That was the plan. I wanted you to feel how it was to have your world crumble to dust over your head, to lose the people you love the most, to be betrayed by the closest people to you.”
The bitterness in her voice stung at my heart. “How were you going to do it?”
“Poison, just like what I did to the serpent bitch.”
“Why haven’t you started?”
“How do you know I haven’t?”
