Normally she stays. We sit in my office. I make espresso on the small machine I keep on the bookshelf. We talk aboutthe parish, the week, the small mechanics of her life at the restaurant. She tells me about the customers. The difficult ones, the generous ones, the one who sends back his pasta because it's "too Italian." I laugh. She laughs. The laughter of two people who share something no one else shares, a bond forged in blood and prayer and the work that gives both our lives meaning.
Yesterday she drank half the espresso. Checked her phone. Said she had to go.
I asked where.
She paused. The pause of a woman deciding how much to reveal. A familiar pause. I taught her to pause like that, to measure disclosure the way a chemist measures compounds. Precisely. Deliberately. Giving nothing away that doesn't serve the objective.
"Dinner," she said. "With a friend."
She has never lied to me before. Not in words. She has kept silences, omitted details, navigated around questions with the agility I trained into her. But she has never used the word "friend" to describe a man she is sleeping with. The word was a door closed in my face by a girl who has never closed a door on me.
I felt the lock turn.
I sit in the pew. The votive candle for Tomasso burns. The church settles around me with its nightly sounds. The stone cooling. The wood contracting. The pipes in the old heating system ticking as the metal adjusts.
I have work to do.
Tomorrow morning, a contact I've maintained for six years will receive an envelope through the usual chain. The chain is simple. I leave the envelope in the confessional booth, inside the kneeler, in a compartment I built myself during the renovation of the booth in 2014. A small cavity, undetectable unless you know where to press. A man comes for confession at 7 AM, every second Wednesday. He confesses to minor sins. Vanity. Impatience with his children. I absolve him. He takes the envelope from the kneeler on his way out.
He does not read the contents. He delivers the envelope to a drop location in Forcella, a bar that serves as a letter box for men who prefer not to receive mail at their home addresses. The envelope sits behind the bar until another man collects it. That man delivers it to a third location.
By the time the information reaches its destination, three men have handled it, none of whom know what it contains,all of whom are paid in cash through separate channels that have never intersected.
Tomorrow's envelope contains the details of a Sorrentino supply route I learned about during a confession last week. A shipping company owner, Sorrentino-connected, came to me to confess an affair with his secretary. Routine sin. During the conversation, unburdening himself, he mentioned a schedule change. A shipment rerouted from the port of Salerno to a private dock near Torre Annunziata. He said this casually, the way men say things in the confessional that they would never say outside it. The confessional loosens tongues the way wine loosens them. Men forget that the things they say in passing carry weight equal to the things they confess on purpose.
I write down the details after the confession. Not during. Never during. The act of writing while a man confesses would violate something I still hold sacred, though the distinction might seem arbitrary to anyone examining my actions from the outside. The seal of confession prevents me from speaking what I hear. It does not prevent me from acting on it. This is the loophole. The crack in the canonical wall through which I have operated for fourteen years.
I never speak the secrets. I never name the penitents. The information travels in written form, unsigned, undated, traceable to no one. The confessional is a channel. I am the filter. The intelligence flows through me the way water flows through limestone. Slowly. Silently. Changing the landscape without anyone noticing the erosion.
The work serves a purpose. The purpose sustains me the way the candle sustains the flame. Without it, I am an aging priest in a parish that could be served by any seminary graduate with a Roman collar. With it, I am something more. Something with direction, with consequence, with the weight of impact on the world beyond these walls.
I look at Tomasso's candle.
The flame has steadied. Small. Constant. Burning at the rate candle wax burns, which is the rate of patience, the rate of permanence, the rate of a grief that will outlast me.
"Proteggo la tua bambina,"I say. (I'm protecting your little girl.)
The church absorbs the words. The stone walls take them in the way they've taken in three centuries of prayers, confessions, pleas. The words dissolve into the architecture.
I should go to bed. The rectory is through the sacristy, up a narrow staircase, a small apartment with a bed, a desk, a window that overlooks the cemetery behind the church where parishioners who couldn't afford Poggioreale are buried in rows. The bed is narrow. The sheets are clean. The sleep, when it comes, is thin.
I stay in the pew.
The candle for my brother burns. The crucifix hangs above me in the darkness. The confessional booth stands against the south wall with tomorrow's envelope already inside the kneeler, sealed, waiting for the 7 AM appointment.
I fold my hands. Close my eyes.
I pray for Valentina. For her safety. For her focus. For the clarity of purpose that has carried her through thirty-two kills without detection or hesitation. The kind of doubt that corrodes an instrument from the inside.
I pray that the man in her life does not become the crack in her foundation.
I pray for my brother, who I miss the way I miss the sound of my own heartbeat. Constantly. Without noticing until the silence comes.
I pray for guidance, though I have always known the way. The way is the work. The purpose. And that’s what remains when everything else is taken.
Chapter 25
Kill 4: The Order
