“I’ll bet my entire fortune that there is mayhem upstairs. That girl can’t handle them.”
“I can hear you,” the girl shouts from the room, “And if youdon’t stop calling me a girl, we can resume what we started. I can also handle myself quite well.”
Kat laughs, and I roll my eyes.
“I am just saying,” I say with a raised voice so she definitely hears everything, “Someone in the ranks will think it was his legacy to inherit, and the Commissione will come after her with every force they have.”
“What commissione?” she asks, and sticks her head out of the door.
“See,” I say to Kat.
“You can prep her,” says Kat.
“Or I can take it, because he is family.”
“She killed him, and they know it. Word travels fast,” she says.
“I’ll kill her then,” I say coldly.
“You won’t,” says Kat. “Not on my watch.”
“You'd better leave then and go back to your wife,” I snap at her.
“You’ll have to deal with me for the moment,” she says, “At least until we know your reckless stupidity didn’t collapse world order.” My nostrils flare as I breathe out.
“Do you mean the Cosa Nostra Comissione?” asks the girl from over in the room.
“Yes,” I say and walk over where she is. “How did you find that out?”
She is sitting on the desk she was tied to, her legs crossed, a pile of notebooks, files, and documents around her, one open in her hand.
“They prepared it,” she says and waves a journal at me. “Years ago. With the Commissione. Everything. My father was to take over. Giuseppe was sick; it must have progressed. He said the timeline moved up. It’s all documented here: How to bring it to the commission, how to deal with the men, how the structure is—not for me, but for and by my father. It was all planned, and regarding me, I have the men who heard it is to be me.”
She is so naive that it hurts.
She is a girl. Sitting there like a teenager on a bed with their favourite magazine, in a floral dress, like a child who has no idea of the brutality of life. Especially not the brutality of family structures.
My head wanders to the side as I read what she reads, because she holds it vertically.
January 2014 – June 2014,I read. At that moment, she lowers the book and looks at me with a drawn-up eyebrow.
I snap my head back up.
“Don’t you have things to do?” she asks me, and I have to breathe in and out very slowly to not end her right now.
“The things on my to-do list annoyingly include you,” I snap at her.
“Do it over there then,” she says, pointing at an armchair in front of which one of the dead men lies.
The audacity she has is unprecedented, and since I am no one to be ordered around, I do what I do: I walk around the desk, grab the chair, move it as close to her as possible, and sit down—legs spread confidently, one arm resting on the armrest, the other loosely with my hand on my inner thigh.
I stare at her provocatively as she looks at me over her shoulder. She scoffs, pursing her lips as the hint of a smirk appears on her face.
She leans forward, a black thing in her hand that looks like a square ball made from knotted leather strings. She holds the hand in my direction, leans slightly back, and it drops from her hand.
That thing is not a ball at all. It is a heavy paperweight, and it lands exactly on my foot.
“Cazzo!” I curse at her and jump up.
