I hold her gaze. This is the moment. The fulcrum. The point on which everything balances, past and future, love and violence, the waitress in the church pew and the woman holding a gun in my living room.
"The same source," I say. "The same pipeline. The same man who has been feeding the Ferrantes for years. The dossier that got your parents killed was provided to my family by Domenico Ferraro."
Valentina
The room tilts. Not physically. The marble floor stays level. The walls stay vertical. The bay through the windows holds its position on the horizon. But the room tilts because the architecture of my life, the structure I've lived inside for fourteen years, has just lost its central column.
Father Domenico.
He fabricated the intelligence. He built the dossier. He fed it to the Sorrentinos. He made my parents look like traitors. The Sorrentinos acted on information they believed was credible.
He loaded the gun. They pulled the trigger.
Angry floods thru me like a damn bursting with water. I raise the gun a point directly at Niccolo’s head. “Don’t fucking lie to me! There is no way in hell my uncle ordered the hit on my parents!”
I hear Niccolo's voice, but it comes from a distance. As if he's speaking through water.
Without flinching or chaining the expression in his eyes, he continues.
“Let me ask you this. If you don’t want to tell me that’s fine, answer this to yourself. Have you ever been to the Vatican and talk to anyone else about your so-called ordination besides your uncle? If not, how do you know it is from the Vatican? That sounds like some conspiracy bullshit he fed you because you were young and impressionable.”
Just hearing him say it out loud is causing me to slowly lose my grip on reality. I can feel the still tilting. My finger is still on the trigger, refusing to believe what Niccolo is saying right now.
"So for your parents, your uncle set them up. This I know for sure. He gave us the information that made it look like your parents needed to die. And then he took you and turned you into a weapon aimed at the family that pulled the trigger he loaded."
I look at the folder. The financial records. The communication patterns. The historical analysis that traces the pipeline backward, year by year, layer by layer, to its origin fourteen years ago. The paper trail of my parents' murder, assembled by Niccolo's people, presented to me in a brown folder on a kitchen counter.
Something rises in my chest. Not grief. Not rage. Something older. The sound of my mother screaming through the wallsof our apartment while I hid in a closet with my hands over my ears. The sound I've carried for fourteen years. The sound I thought belonged to faceless men who entered our home for reasons no one could explain.
The reasons have a name now.
The gun is still in my hand. I look at it. The Beretta M9. The weapon I brought to kill the man standing three feet from me. The man who just handed me the evidence that my uncle, the man who raised me, the man who built me, the man who gave me the candles and the ritual and the prayer and the knife and every kill I've ever made, engineered the murder of my parents.
"Valentina." His voice. Closer now. He has stepped toward me. One step. His hand is extended, not for the gun, just extended. Open. The gesture of a man offering something he can't name. "I know what you came here to do. I know my life is in your hands. I'm showing you this because you deserve the truth. Whatever you do next is your choice."
Whatever I do next.
I look at his face. The silver temples. The dark eyes. The open collar he wears because formality suffocates him. The scar on his forearm he traces when he's thinking. He is nottracing it. He is looking at me with his hands open, his body unguarded, standing within arm's reach of a loaded weapon held by a woman he knows could use it.
He's not afraid.
He should be. I have killed thirty-four people. I killed his childhood friend. I am the deadliest person he has ever met and he is standing in front of me unarmed, barefoot, in reading glasses.
"I killed a man in the restaurant," I say. "The night we had dinner in Posillipo. A man followed you to the restroom with a silenced pistol. I put my knife through his throat before he could reach the door. Dragged him into the women's bathroom. Sat him on the toilet. Washed my hands. Came back to the table."
His face changes. Not shock. The recalibration of a man who is rebuilding his model of reality in real time. His eyes move across my face, looking for the lie, finding nothing, because there is no lie.
"The bread basket," he says.
Silence. Three seconds. Four.
"You really are an assassin?" he asks.
I set the bag on the counter. Next to the folder. My hand is still on the Beretta but the barrel is still pointed at the floor and my finger is still on the guard.
" Grazie alla tua famiglia. Cerco chi ha ucciso i miei genitori da anni. E si dà il caso che sia l'uomo di cui mi sono innamorata."
(Thanks to your family. I've been looking for whoever killed my parents for years. And it happens to be the man I've fallen in love with.)
