Her face twisted with fury as the words left her lips, low and venomous. "Animale. So damned cruel."
There I stood, a shade at the edge of the killing ground, watching over the ruined thing that had been my body. Even now, unmoored from flesh, the memory of my final torment moved through me like a blade drawn slow. Pain and fear did not die when the body did. I had learned that much already, in the cold hours since.
The abandoned westside stretched around them in the grey light, the no-man's-land where the Family sent its dead and the questions stayed buried with them. Wind carried the stink of rot off the dump, and the men of the vendetta-inquiry moved through it with handkerchiefs pressed to their mouths, their coats snapping like the wings of carrion birds.
Emilio came across the broken earth toward the Donna, the Family's own surgeon, the quiet man who handled the Falcone dead when no honest hand could be allowed near them. He set his instruments down in their case, laying each one in perfect parallel, and then he paused over what remained of me, longer than any of them liked. When Emilio paused that long, everyone who knew him knew the news was worse than they could stomach.
"She bled out through the liver," he said at last, his voice flat as the marble slab he usually worked on. "And..." He hesitated, and the pause stretched. "The hands were destroyed. The proof of the hand is gone. Naming her will be difficult."
The Donna went still. My mother. Vittoria Falcone, who had taken the Boss's seat and made grown men lower their eyes when she entered a room. Her mind was already moving, I could see it, ranging backward across her memory the way a hound ranges a scent line. A killing like this one. She had seen its shape before, months ago, in another territory, another body left as an offering to the wind.
"There was a killing like this out of our reach not long ago," she said, and the soldiers around her straightened without being told. "The same method. The same signature on the work." She turned her head a fraction, and that was enough. "Nico. Open it up. Find me who taught this dog his trade."
Nico rubbed the back of his neck and said, "On it, Donna," and then kept talking a beat too long, the way he did when the ground under him felt unsteady, murmuring something about crossing territories and quiet inquiries, as if the extra words could soften a thing that could not be softened.
I stood in the grey wind, a spirit with nothing left to hold, and watched my mother work. She was terrible and beautiful in it, wholly composed, wholly in command, the cold engine of the Family turning smoothly beneath her hands. She has always been the one I looked up to, I thought, and the thought had no bitterness in it yet, only the old ache of a child who had spent her whole life reaching for a woman who never once reached back. All my life. Every day of it.
The made men had turned up little. This was not the place where I had died, only the place where I had been thrown away, and the ground kept its silences the way the Family taught its soldiers to keep theirs. But at last, perhaps a thousand feet out from the mounded refuse, one of them crouched over something in the dirt and called the rest.
A cake. Crushed flat against the cold earth, its frosting gone grey and sour, the little sugared ribbons of it ground into the mud beneath some careless heel.
"The victim's, most likely," one of the soldiers offered, not looking too long at it.
The Donna bit her lip. She drew out her phone, and for a moment something in her hesitated, some instinct she could not name pulling at her hand. Then she made the call anyway. I heard the flat, patient pulse of a busy signal reach her across the wind.
She ended it fast. Her face clouded over, and when she spoke it was half to herself, hard and impatient. "Where in God's name is Adriana running loose now? Didn't even show her face at Serena's ceremony. The girl grows ruder by the day. She looks straight through me as if I were nothing."
And there, in the grey and the stink and the wind off the dead ground, a grief rose up in me so vast it nearly unmade what little of me was left.
My hand rose to my throat, to the silver chain that should have been there, the one my father gave me, the letters worn smooth under my thumb through a thousand nights of comfort. There was no chain. There was no throat. Still my fingers reached, the way they always would.
Because I understood, standing over my own ruined body while my mother's voice curled with contempt for me, a thing I could no longer un-know.
She had forgotten that Serena's ceremony fell on my birthday.
That day, my birthday, she had walked away with Serena right in front of me, her arm warm around another girl's shoulders, and she had not spared me so much as a single word.
