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Maybe people are after him. Who knows? Not me! I’m freaking out. “I can’t listen to the dead,” I hiss.
A tourist walks by us and turns to look, but the man standing in the aisle barks at him. The tourist scurries away.
My dad grabs my hand. I try to pull away, but he holds on firmly. A little too firmly.
“You’re hurting me.”
“You need to listen,” he says.
“I am. I promise.”
“They think you’re Severio Mancini’s fiancée.”
“Who arethey?”
“The people I’m working with.”
Oh no. Oh no. “Who are you working with?”
“You know better than to ask.”
“You’re right, Daddy, I do know. It’s just that I don’t know what kind of trouble you’re in that made you disappear on us in the way you did.”
“Severio Mancini made me disappear.”
My body turns toward him as if I’m the needle on a compass. I look him in the eye.
“What do you mean Severio made you disappear?” If Severio made my dad disappear the way he did and he’s been lying to me this entire time, I don’t know if I will ever forgive him. I anticipate the answer, and when my dad rears back for some reason, likely because I’m glaring and I’ve never glared at him before, I hiss, “Tell me!”
The tourists in the church start to watch us, inching closer, trying to scope out the situation. They ought to mind their business. The men with my dad look dangerous.
“Severio made it clear that my place in the Order was unwelcome and unprecedented. If I were unwelcome, then I couldn’t bring in my business partners, the ones I promised I’d bring into the Order. When it became clear my partners were going to kill me for lying, I did what I had to do. The idea was that we’d reunite when Gio took over.”
Severio didn’t make him disappear. “Severio is the Head of the Serpentine Order. You should’ve contacted him. Instead, you got involved with God knows who doing God knows what, and you left Mom and me at Gio’s mercy. At Severio’s mercy, and let me tell you, he is not merciful.”
“Fucking Mancinis.” Daddy sneers. He looks around again as if someone’s following him, growing more on edge as time passes. Maybe someone is following him. I wouldn’t be surprised if Severio has people watching me.
Daddy has at least two men. One beside him, the other on the other side of the aisle.
“What do you want?” I ask. Inside, I hurt over my dad and the stranger he’s become.
“Watch your tone, young lady. That is no way to speak to your father.”
“You’re not my father.”
Daddy backhands me.
I grab my cheek, tears filling my eyes, not because the slap hurts, even if does, but because this man, this person claiming to be my father (and is my father) is soiling the memory of my daddy for me. “Severio will kill you for touching me.”
“Not if I kill him first.”
I swallow. “And how do you propose you’ll do that?”
“I’ll use a rocket this time.”
This time. “You were behind the drone attack on the villa.”
“Not me. My partners.”
