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I reach up and untie the scarlet silk ribbon from my face, stuffing the fabric into my pocket.
I don't need to hide my scars anymore. I won’t. No more hiding.
I turn my cloudy green eyes toward the dark silhouette of my husband.
"Where are they, Romeo?" I ask, my voice dropping into a razor-sharp whisper that cuts through the sterile hum of the hospital room.
Romeo stares down at me, his midnight eyes burning with raw fire.
"Upstate," he answers softly, a deadly smile curling his lips. "At the old monastery."
"Then give me a gun," I command, my chin lifting with the bloodline of two mafia empires coursing through my veins. "We finish this tonight."
Romeo does not argue with the fierce determination in my voice. He only loads the gun and puts it in my hand.
TWENTY-ONE
FATHER DONALD
The consecrated wine tastes sour on the back of my tongue, but I drink it down anyway, letting the sting burn the numbness out of my throat.
Outside Saint Jude's Monastery, the storm tears through the hemlocks and pitch pines of the Catskills. Thunder rattles the tall leaded glass windows of the chapter house, shaking the dust from the crucifix mounted high on the stone wall above my desk. Every few minutes, a split of lightning turns the courtyard into bone-white light, carving out the silhouettes of the two sentries pacing with Austrian assault rifles beneath their black rain slickers.
Holy men with automatic weapons.
Fools call it hypocrisy. The press would call it terror. They do not understand the ancient covenant that bound our dioceses to the ports long before the Italian vermin crawled across the Atlantic in the hulls of steerage ships.
For two centuries, the Irish Catholic Church owned the souls and the commerce of the northern coastline. We blessed the ships, we buried the dead, and we took our tithe from every crate of whiskey, every bundle of steel, and every cache of armaments that cleared the wharves between Boston and Halifax. The syndicate was never separate from the cloth; it was the secular sword that kept the flock in line and the collection plates heavy with gold.
Until Daniel O'Connor grew soft.
Until that drunken coward let the Messina scum seat themselves at our table and dictate shipping percentages.
I set the silver chalice down on top of the open ledger. Across the mahogany surface lie three glossy black and white photographs, wet at the edges from the courier who brought them through the storm thirty minutes ago.
The first photo is old, stolen from the files of the Boston clinic where the child was treated after her first purification: Iris O'Connor at four years old, her left palm bandaged, her red hair wild, tears frozen on her cheeks.
The second is from the cathedral three years ago, captured on the security feed right before the sacrilege: the girl strung up on the cross before the altar, stripped of worldly vanities, marked with the sign of the cross in her own blood. She was supposed to be the final offering. A sacrifice to remind Danny O'Connor that his blood belonged to the church, that no daughter of his could be bargained away to Sicilian degenerates.
The third photo is from this morning.
A grainy telephoto shot taken at JFK International Airport in the pouring rain. Iris stepped out of a private transport, her pale face uncovered, the jagged scars around her eyes bare to the gray New York sky. She wears an expensive black coat, walking with her chin lifted like a sovereign, a massive black Doberman at her knee, and beside her, looming like the devil himself, Romeo Messina.
My hand clenches around the heavy silver cross hanging against my cassock until the edges bite into the meat of my palm.
"She walks like a Donna," Father Kenneth mutters from the corner of the room. He sits near the hearth, rubbing his liver-spotted hands over the fire, his thin lips pale with dread. "Danny is dead in Queens, Donald. The O'Connor boy, Jamie, has already burned two of our holding houses outside Edinburgh. If Romeo brings her into the city, the Sicilians will claim every dock from Brooklyn to South Boston."
"Romeo Messina is a rabid dog who thinks a tailored suit hides his filth," I snarl, my voice echoing off the vaulted stone ceiling. "He killed the bishop on holy ground. He shot my predecessor through the chin and let consecrated stones run with the blood of our brethren. Did you think God's wrath had a statute of limitations, Kenneth?"
Kenneth swallows hard, his watery eyes darting toward the window as another boom of thunder shakes the monastery foundation. "Victor was supposed to handle the Messina girl in Moscow. The Russian promised us thirty men to secure the Queen's hospital. Where are they?"
"Victor is a mercenary who smells which way the wind blows," I say coldly. "He took our gold to arm his Bratva foot soldiers, and now he hesitates because Romeo offered him port concessions. It matters not. We do not need the Russians to cleanse our own house."
I push back my heavy wooden chair, the legs scraping across the flagstones, and walk toward the narrow iron staircase that leads down to the crypt.
Kenneth scurries behind me like an obedient rat, his robes rustling in the drafty corridor.
At the bottom of the stairs, behind a double-locked door of reinforced oak and wrought iron, lies the monastery armory. Rows of wooden crates stacked six feet high, stenciled with the seals of European shipping firms: automatic rifles, fragmentation grenades, night vision optics, and crates of Czech plastic explosives.
