Chapter 6 Six

The trip in the car to Giovanni’s house was like traveling through the end of the world. She was sitting in the back seat, her wedding dress still on and staring out the window at the Italian landscape. Her gown’s fabric was now pucker’d, no longer smooth. She was numb, there in her body but somewhere else with her mind. The road curved and the buildings were more and more sparse. Walls appeared first, then gates. The fortification loomed out beyond a dark line of trees as if it had absolutely no place in the real world.

The car stopped. A pair of dark-suited guards came in and opened her door. Mrs. Russo opened the front door, her face adamantine-hard and unwelcome. She was long and lean with grey scrolled hair pulled back tight in a bun. Her eyes were bright and keen, a stranger to nothing. She flung an up-and-down look at Isabella without anything nice to say. Then she darted in the direction of the door, confident that Isabella would trail. Isabella did, her feet killing her in a pair of wedding heels and her brain still struggling to come to terms with what was happening.

On the inside of the estate, it was as cold as on the outside. High ceilings stretched above them. The floors were marble and they rang with every step. There were expensive paintings on the walls, but it did not make the place home. They turned it into a museum. A lovely place that was a dead zone inside.

Mrs. Russo took Isabella up a grand staircase and down a long hallway. Every door they passed was closed. Russo stopped at one door and opened it. The room inside was vast. A four-poster bed with bright white linens covered the wallpaper of one wall. There was a window seat that looked out over gardens with stone walls too close together to see over. Everything was neat and perfect and lonely. There was a bathroom off one corner of the room. The counters in the bathroom were covered in cold marble. Bottles of expensive soap and perfume sat on the edge of the sink.

“Your dinner will be brought to you in here,” Mrs. Russo told her. Her voice was like ice. Not cruel, but not kind either. Matter of fact. “Everything you need is in this room. No one will harm you.”

“I need to call my father,” Isabella said. Her voice shook. “I need to tell him where I am. He’ll be so worried.”

Mrs. Russo did not say anything at all. She walked to the door and shut it. Isabella heard a click, like the sound of a lock clicking into place. She jumped up and grabbed the handle. It was cold and would not turn under her sweaty hands. She yanked. She pounded on the door with her fists.

“Let me out, “ she cried. “Let me out! I need to call my father. Please!” The hallway outside stayed utterly silent. No one came. Isabella’s voice became hoarse and cracked from screaming. She screamed until she had no voice left to scream. She fell to the ground and stopped. The white of the dress covered the ground. She looked like a broken doll, left on the ground as a child walks away.

Her room, too, soon grew dark, as soon as the sun went down. Isabella did not turn the lights on. Instead, she settled back against the door, staring ahead at nothing, trying to remember her father’s face the day he was dragged down on the floor by that masked man. She thought about how much he shook. How he looked at her, his eyes wide open with fear. What was he so afraid of? Of her, or something else? She didn’t remember anymore. It was only later that a slab of food was pushed into her food slot that she noticed it. But by then, it was cold. She didn’t eat from it.

She just stood from her place against the door and strode to her houses’, window seat, watching the darkness outside. The walls that surrounded the estate with their soft light. Nothing and no one could get in. Far more terrifyingly so, nothing, and no one, could get out. She was trapped, so much physically as realistically. Hours passed like that. Isabella could hear nothing but her own breathing and howled wind. She almost didn’t notice the sounds of approaching footsteps. Masculine. Two, maybe three. She moved her body closer to the door.

"Status on the package?" One voice asked. She did not recognize it.

"Taken care of as ordered." That voice she did recognize. It was Giovanni's. Deep and dark and cold. "No loose ends."

"The girl?"

"Secured. She will cause no problems."

The first voice spoke again. "And Lorenzo Vinci?"

"Handled as ordered." Giovanni said, no inflection in his voice at all as if he were discussing the weather. "Body disposed of. This is something the old man deserved for 14 years. The second that motherfucker got involved in the hit against my family, he signed his own death warrant. Payment was already due. I have merely approached it slowly."

Isabella's knees buckled. She put her hand to her mouth. Deep down, she’d known something was wrong. But to hear it so plainly, so matter of fact, was real in a way you couldn’t ignore. Her father was dead. Giovanni had ordered his death. The deal they made was a lie. Her father had been killed by the man she was married to.

She took a step back, hand still covering her mouth. A sound escaped anyway, a tiny gasp she was unable to stifle. She put her ear to the door, but the Aes Sedai's voices were fading then, retreating. She heard nothing else.

Isabella rushed out to the bathroom and vomited, until there was nothing left in her stomach. She sat on the cold tile floor in the aftermath, shaking so hard she could not get up. Her father. The kind, gentle father who had imparted this art and music and beauty to her. Her father who’d had the humility to repent, who’d tried to reform. Her father was dead, because of the man she had just married.

Hours. How many she did not remember. It was a night-light. First she was lying on the floor of the bathroom, then somehow dragged herself to bed. She did not undress, lay on the white sheet in a white dress and looked at the ceiling. The moonlight played on him, shadows floating rapidly as clouds ran. Outside the window, he began to lighten a little.

The morning began. Black sky turned gray, then in white. She did not sleep. She lay and did not sleep. Just lay and breathe. He has not done this. Remembering how her father used to laugh. How he took her hands when he painted however-with his, splattered with paints on his days off but even more importantly, he took her hands when he stood in front of her collections of paintings and sculptures. He doesn’t care. Everything is deleted without turning a page.

A deliberate decision of a cold-blooded person who does not violate his formation. From a cold-blooded, ordered person in a mask. Her dress was wet from tears. She went to the bathroom. And I look at myself in the mirror. And a stranger looked at her. A girl with red eyes and hollow cheeks, something hard and dark in her gaze. It was all new.

The girl placed her palms flat on the marble counter and leaned forward. She whispered the words so quietly that she could hardly hear herself saying them. “I’m going to kill you, Giovanni Genovese. For my father. For myself. I swear this. I swear it on all that I am.”

And the girl in the mirror said it back to her, and for the first time since she had gotten into that car that she did not feel all alone. She had a reason now. She had something that she could use to force herself through this. She would kill the man in the mask, and when she did, the pain would end. She didn’t know if that was true, but she clung to it. It was the only thing that was keeping her from the darkness drowning her whole.