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He hadn’t gotten far from the house before a burst of gunfire shattered the peace of the morning.

The car had been riddled with so many bullets that my father was almost unrecognizable. But despite the carnage, his wedding ring was still there, hanging from his finger—the same ring he had worn every day since our mother died. He had never taken it off. It was the last thing he had left of her.

The assassination had been meant for me.

Everyone knew it.

No one said it.

The days that followed were a blur. A murderous, violent rampage through the men responsible for my father’s death. I hunted them down one by one and made sure their bloodlines ended with them.

It was only when the last of them was dead that I could finally grieve.

And when the grief came, it nearly destroyed me.

I had lost my father.

Not to old age. Not to illness. Not to some quiet death surrounded by the people who loved him.

He had been butchered because someone had been trying to kill me.

I made it as far as a church outside Siena before my legs finally gave out. I collapsed into the last pew, my father’s death still fresh on my hands, and sat there in silence while an old priest stood at the altar and spoke about forgiveness.

When the church emptied, I asked him whether God forgave murderers.

The priest studied me for so long that I began to wish I had kept the question buried.

Then he asked me the one thing I would spend the next ten years trying not to answer.

“Do you want God to forgive you, or are you searching for a punishment that will never end?”

At the time, I hadn’t understood the difference.

Forgiveness required a man to believe he could still be saved.

Punishment asked nothing of him except that he keep suffering.

So I took the collar.

For ten years, I prayed until my knees ached and mistook every good deed for another link in the chain I had wrapped around my own throat.

I told myself I was serving God, though the truth was far less noble. I had built a prison inside the Church and called it repentance. And until Adriana walked through my doors covered in blood, I had never once considered that the door might not be locked.

I placed my hand on the banister and climbed the stairs. It still bore the shallow groove Tone had carved into it with a pocketknife when she was fifteen.

Voices carried from the rooms below. Low conversation. A glass set down on a table. The brief sound of laughter that stopped almost as soon as it began.

They were giving me space.

I didn’t know whether they were being cautious or showing me some measure of kindness.

At the top of the stairs, the corridor stretched before me, narrow and dim, with doors lining either side. My room had been at the far end.

The door was closed. I stopped walking. Ten years disappeared without warning.

Alessio stood in the corridor in bare feet and an unbuttoned shirt, holding a bottle of whiskey by the neck. His dark hair stuck up at the back, and there was dried blood beneath one nostril.

He grinned when he saw me.