Page 54

“I was ashamed.”

His eyes flicked toward me.

I forced myself to continue.

“I was ashamed of what I had become. I was ashamed that I was good at it.”

The words scraped painfully past my throat.

“That killing did not horrify me the way it should have. That sometimes I liked the certainty of it. A problem. A decision. The silence after.”

Zeno’s face remained still. Behind me, I heard Adriana draw in a careful breath. I didn’t look in the mirror.

“I left because if I stayed, I would have become something none of you could love without becoming damned beside me.”

Zeno’s expression twisted.

“You idiot.”

I looked at him.

“You absolute fucking idiot.”

He shook his head, fury returning in a quieter form.

“You think we loved you because you were perfect? We loved you because you were ours.”

The words opened something I had spent ten years sealing shut. I looked out of the passenger window. I became aware of Adriana’s reflection again. This time, she was not looking out of the window. She was looking at me. There was no fear in her expression, even though she should have been afraid. Zeno had just dragged the truth of me into the light. Not all of it, but enough for her to understand that the priest who had hidden her was not simply a man forced into violence by circumstance. Violence had known my hands before she had.

I held her gaze for one second. Then two. She didn’t look away.

“When Tone finds out,” Zeno declared, “she’s going to lose her mind.”

“I know.”

“Then she’s going to kill you.”

“She may have to wait in line,” I remarked.

His mouth curved in a half smile.

He drove in silence for several kilometres. The road began to climb. Stone walls appeared along the verge, followed by the first vineyards belonging to the Orsini estate.

Zeno looked into the rear-view mirror again, directing his words at Adriana. “Does he know what your father died protecting?”

She frowned. “Who?”

“Demi.”

Her eyes moved to the back of my head.

“No.”

Zeno glanced at me.

“You’ve dragged her across Italy without asking what her father may have left behind?”

“She was traumatized.”