I don't need to search the boat. I need to prepare it.
I work for forty minutes. When I finish, I leave the way I came.
Wednesday. 3:47 PM. He boards.
I watch from behind a stack of lobster traps on the adjacent pier, a position I've held for two hours without shifting. My legs are numb below the knee. I don't care. Patience isn't a skill I learned. It's a muscle Father Domenico built into me the way other uncles build their nieces' confidence or teach them to ride bicycles.
He moves down the dock with his uneven stride. Suit jacket off now, draped over one arm. Shirtsleeves rolled to the elbow. He looks like a man walking toward relaxation. Toward the only three hours of the week where nobody asks him for anything.
He boards theBella Fortuna. Unlocks the cabin. Steps below.
I count to one hundred and twenty. Two minutes. Enough time for him to pour the first scotch, settle into the leather seat, begin whatever private ritual of drinking and silence he performs on this boat every Wednesday.
I move.
Across the dock. Quiet. The rubber soles make no sound on the weathered wood. I step onto the swim platform with the same precise weight distribution as last night, though the boat sits differently now with a body on board. Slight list to port where he's sitting. I compensate.
The cabin door is unlocked. He didn't relock it. Men who feel safe in their private spaces don't relock doors.
I slide it open.
He is sitting in the leather chair facing the bow, his back to me. Scotch in his right hand. His phone on the table beside him, screen dark. The back of his silver-and-black head. The collar of his white shirt. A mole on the back of his neck I didn't know about.
I cross the cabin in three steps.
His body registers me before his mind does. The animal part, the old brain, the part that kept his ancestors alive. His shoulders tense. The glass tilts.
Too late.
I grab a fistful of his shirt collar with my left hand. My right hand brings the blade across his throat in a single lateral motion, left to right, deep enough to open the carotid on both sides. The edge catches on the trachea for a fraction of a second before severing it. A sound like tearing wet linen.
He drops the scotch. The glass hits the carpet, doesn't break. The liquid darkens the beige pile.
I release his collar and step back. He lurches forward, both hands going to his neck. Reflex. The body's last attempt to hold itself together. Blood pulses through his fingers, between them, fast at first, then slower as the pressure drops.
He turns.
He sees me.
A girl. Young. Dark hair braided tight. No glasses. Standing in his salon holding a knife with his blood running down the blade onto her gloved fingers.
His mouth opens. No sound. I cut through the trachea. He will never make another sound.
His eyes. They are not afraid. They are confused. The deep-set eyes in their bony sockets, the ones I memorized in the church, staring at me with the bafflement of a man who cannot understand how this is happening. In his space. On his boat. On a Wednesday.The last thing he ever expected was a young assassin the Vatican uses to deliver justice in God’s name.
He slides off the chair. Knees hitting the carpet. Then sideways. Then down.
I watch him die. It takes ninety seconds.
The blood spreads across the carpet in a shape that looks like nothing, means nothing, is nothing except the interior of a man who beat his wife on Tuesdays and raped his seven-year-old daughter and killed them both when the management of their suffering became inconvenient.
I clean the knife on his shirt. Sheathe it. Check my clothes. Blood on my gloves, on my right forearm, a spatter on my left shoe. Contained. The gloves go into a sealed bag in my pocket. The shoe I'll clean at home.
I wipe the surfaces I touched. The pick set goes back into my braid. I check the cabin once more. The scotch stain on the carpet has merged with the blood. The crystal glass lies on its side beside his hand.
I leave the boat and take the same route I came the night before. The marina is empty. Naples hums in the distance, the city that never finishes its sentences, that talks over itself, that swallows its crimes the way it swallows its garbage, with practice.
I am home by 4:40 PM. I take a hot shower. Stand under it until the steam fogs the bathroom mirror. The water runs clear. My skin is pink and raw, the last trace of him circles the drain.
