Vendetta for the Daughter She Rejected

When my messages failed to reach whoever she was calling, the Donna lost the thin patience she had left. She slid the phone back into her coat and swore under her breath, the words falling low and vicious across the war room. "Days now. Not a word from her. What is she doing, selling herself on some corner in the westside? With that sullen face of hers no man would take her for free. A worthless girl. Always making trouble for me, always."

I could not help the bitter thing that pulled at my mouth, though no one in that room would ever see it again. Did you truly loathe me so much, Mother? Well. You'll never have to look at me again. That ought to please you. Even now my hand rose to my throat, reaching for the silver chain that was no longer there, the one my father had fastened around my neck before the sickness took him. There was nothing under my fingers but the cold of the air I no longer breathed.

The soldiers around her had never once heard the Donna speak that way, least of all about her own blood. They traded quick, uneasy glances across the long table, the kind of look made men learn to hide fast, and said nothing. In a family like ours silence was a currency, and just then it was the only thing anyone dared spend. Only the sound of paper turning filled the room, dry and endless, while the old grandfather clock in the corner marked off the hours with a patience none of them possessed.

At two in the morning, the thing finally broke open.

Emilio came up from the back room where he handled the Family's dead, the ones that never saw a courthouse or a headstone with a real name on it. He looked hollowed out, sleeves rolled, a stack of papers in his hands. He crossed to the Donna and set his instruments down on the table beside her in that way he had, laying each one in perfect parallel, and then he paused. He always paused over the ones he cared about. The longer the pause, the worse it was. This one stretched long enough that Nico stopped rubbing the back of his neck to watch him.

"There are many wounds on this one," Emilio said at last, and his voice carried a disgust he did not bother to bury. "Whoever did it took his time. We found something else. A necklace. It looks as though the killer stripped it from her and hid it inside the body itself, so it wouldn't be found."

The Donna seemed to drift somewhere far off. She fixed on the necklace in the photograph laid before her as if the whole room had gone quiet and distant, as if Emilio's words had never reached her at all.

I leaned in close over her shoulder, close as breath, and I knew it the moment I saw it. It was the silver necklace I had worn since I was small, the delicate chain, the engraving worn smooth by years against my skin. My father's last gift to me, pressed into my palm before the end, the one thing in that house that had ever been mine and mine alone.

The Donna's hands closed on the photograph and would not stop trembling. When she finally spoke her voice had lost its edge and found something worse beneath it. "You're certain. This necklace. It belonged to the victim."

"Certain," Emilio answered. "It was hidden well. I nearly passed it by. And from the bones of the pelvis, she was no older than twenty. A child, near enough. A real tragedy, this one." His anger had nowhere to go, so it sat in the lines of his face and stayed there.

Around the table the men murmured low sounds of sympathy for the young dead, the way even hard men do when the years are counted out that short. Nico had been watching the Donna the whole while, watching how her eyes had fastened to that photograph and refused to move, and something in her stillness pulled him closer. He came around the table for a better look.

It did not take him long to find it. He leaned over the image, and his brow drew down, and he kept talking a beat past where the question ended, the way he always did when the thing in his mouth was heavier than the words could hold. "There's something on it. Writing, isn't it. Right here on the silver." He tilted his head. "Y. And a C. Y. C. What's that supposed to stand for?"

They were my initials. Adriana Falcone. The name my father engraved with his own hands, the name my mother had spent a lifetime learning not to say.