I laugh. A displaced one, slightly maniacal, coming over my lips without my control, because the thought is so absurd that my mind snaps.
“My father was an architect,” I get out between laughs. “Hedidn’t hide me. No one hid. I would remember if I killed anyone, wouldn’t I?”
“So you’re trying to convince me that your father wasn’t Antonio Amato?”
“Who?” I ask. “I have never heard that name before!”
“I think you’re lying.”
I am at a loss as to what to do. “Please, take my phone, call my mother, my friends, my mother’s brother, do whatever you need to do. But I don’t know a man by that name!”
“What was your father’s name?”
“Ian,” I say. “Ian Onto. Look him up, he was a renowned architect. Can you please, please let me down?”
Sickness spreads through me as my head becomes lightheaded.
“I can’t—I’m—“ Consciousness fades from me.
“Kat,” says another voice far away. It was the woman from before. I didn’t even recognise that she was there. Or maybe I am imagining it?—
“Swab her, we can match the DNA.”
DNA,I repeat in my mind.Where the hell did I end up?
4
ROSALIA
PLAYLIST: MAN OR A MONSTER – SAM TINNESZ, ZAYDE WØLF
Iglance at the screen as Kat pulls up the DNA matching results.
99,9%,I read in my mind.
“She is a liar,” I say.
“Or she really doesn’t know.”
“She was twelve; she must know something. You cannot just forget the past,” I say, my voice trailing off. “Let’s see how she reacts.”
“Some people don’t know because of trauma,” Kat says. “She might not know what she has done, especially if, you know, they did something to her, too.”
I stare at Kat for a moment, with a heavy chest. Because somehow, this one sentence made my son’s killer a person to me. A person who might have gone through what I had to. An uncomfortable sensation rushes through my chest. Kat made the inhumane thing humane to me. But I cannot overlook what the girl has done. She killed. She killed my blood. And I have to kill her.
“It doesn’t change what she has done,” I say coldly, pushing away and kind of feeling I just had and walk down the stairs leading to the catacombs. Kat follows me in silence. I know Kat is righteous in her acts; she does not act until she knows for sure. I am different. I trust my gut, and my gut says the girl knows what she did and has to pay.
We put on the night vision goggles. I have found that thedeprivation of the senses, such as vision and the sense of time and space, makes people crack far more easily. Adding humiliation and starving—the perfect mix to make someone talk.
We enter the catacombs and the cell to the right, and she hangs lifeless in the chains. I slap her awake.
“You lied to us,” I say.
She is weak, I don’t care.
“I didn’t—“ she says faintly.
“Yes, you did,” I say. “We matched the DNA we have of Antonio with yours, and he indeed was your father. And your father was therefore the man who stole from me, who betrayed me, who caused many deaths with his lies—just like you are lying. Lying that you don’t remember, lying that you didn’t do the horrible act of taking my child’s life.”
