Chapter 15 Massimo
MASSIMO
The next day, I left Hallow Hall and drove into the city proper. The institute sat about a thirty-minute drive outside the city. It had only been a week, and yet I was claustrophobic as fuck. I needed to get out.
I couldn’t imagine how Katarina was surviving in solitary. I couldn’t be locked inside such a small space with my demons. I’d go mad, and I wasn’t sure how much sanity I had left anyway.
The neighborhood was quiet early in the morning.
Woodsmoke rose from stone chimneys, and the storefronts were just coming to life.
Pigeons scattered as I walked across the slick, icy cobblestone.
This was the area where Vargas had served as the local priest. I was willing to bet Katarina’s mother also lived around here.
I made for a small café and ordered a double espresso.
I’d changed into my usual clothes before I’d gotten to town.
The key to being a faceless assassin was not to draw attention to yourself.
Walking around a hushed city suburb would be cause for gossip.
This wasn’t the kind of place that had a high turnover of clergy, I was guessing.
I read the papers while I drank my coffee. The first real coffee since before I’d arrived at Hallow Hall. It was like nectar.
I checked my emails. Hallow Hall was in a Wi-Fi dead spot, but fortunately I had satellite internet on my cell.
An email from Giada popped up.
Good morning,
IT guy here with an update.
So, here is Elena Dmitrova’s address, attached.
Second of all, Centrium Group is an interesting company, and by that I mean suspicious as fuck.
They only own one asset (lol). Clearly they’re a shell corp, and it’ll take me a while to track down what companies they’re associated with.
One interesting fact is that they’re registered in Bulgaria even though they’ve always done business in Italy.
I’ll keep digging. Also, did you know the so-called spiritual leader of Hallow Hall was excommunicated from the Church a few months ago? Give me the names of the rest of the guys who work up there, and I’ll look into them for you.
Talk soon, shithead.
G
I hadn’t known about Vargas. It wasn’t in the brief, and I had a rule of not researching my targets beyond where they lived and how I could get to them.
I had other rules, too. No women. No children.
Any more information, and I risked feeling something about ending their lives.
I wasn’t there to pass judgment on who should live or die, or evaluate a person’s worthiness.
I was just a deadly bullet, shot from a gun my clients fired.
But Hallow Hall was changing my habits and breaking all my rules. No, not Hallow Hall, really. It was her. Katarina. My little stray. If I hadn’t met her, I’d have killed Vargas and already been in Rome on my next job.
She was an unpredictable variable in my orderly life, throwing off my balance.
I wasn’t sure how to feel about that yet.
I could ignore it. I could just leave town right now and never go back. When Katarina got out of solitary, I’d be long gone and we’d never see each other again.
But I wouldn’t do that. I knew it as well as I knew I’d kill both Pavol and Benedict so I could take everything she had agreed to give me.
All her firsts.
The dark possession that filled my veins when I watched her was a new thing. I’d never felt anything like it, and I was sure I never would again.
It was something specific to her. I wasn’t the type to question my instincts; they had always served me well. Now my instincts were telling me to stay and see my deal with my micetta through.
I wouldn’t let someone else have her.
I used my phone to pull up the address Giada had sent me for Katarina’s mother and headed in that direction.
The day was brightening up. The houses of the neighborhood were pretty dusted with snow, overlooked by a backdrop of dramatic white mountains.
The area was at the edge of the city, closer to the mountains than anywhere else.
Such beauty, and yet just up the road a little was a place where people who needed help were locked away from the world and experimented on.
If I hadn’t lost faith in the world long ago, the existence of a place like Hallow Hall would have gotten the job done.
Humanity was over, finished. We were circling the drain.
Good people were few and far between. They had been wrong .
. . the meek wouldn’t inherit the earth.
The powerful and corrupt—the soulless—had already destroyed the world.
And wasn’t I just another of them? I certainly wasn’t one of the good ones.
I turned the corner and noticed a small market being set up. One of the stalls had fresh flowers wrapped in newspaper. An old nonna sat behind the table wrapped up to the nose in a woolen scarf. Only a few bunches of flowers rested on her little table. It was slim pickings in winter.
“Bucaneve?” she murmured when I paused in front of her. Bucaneve. Snowdrops.
I picked up a newspaper cone and looked inside. These snowdrops were beautiful, not small and trampled like the ones I’d slipped Katarina before she went into solitary.
She asked a meager amount for the flowers, and I pressed a hundred-euro note into her gloved palm before walking away.
The address should have been just up ahead. I strode down the frozen street and came upon tall gates at the end.
What the fuck? Giada had a seriously dark sense of humor.
The graveyard was silent at this time in the morning. I walked through the gates and glanced around the small space. A chapel sat a little way off, the windows already glowing. I walked the rows of graves slowly.
I found her at the end. She had a simple headstone. The kind the church would stump up for if a devout parishioner was without family.
Elena Dmitrova. A Mother.
She had passed a couple of years ago. That was why she never visited her daughter .
. . and Katarina was being blackmailed into staying at Hallow Hall to save the life of a dead woman.
I wondered where my mother’s gravestone sat.
I still didn’t know. Did she have one? If she did, would anyone stop by and leave her flowers?
I crouched next to the headstone and brushed the frost off its surface.
“Hello, Mrs. Dmitrova,” I said quietly, just for the ears of the ghosts. “I’ve come to see you.”
I placed the bouquet of snowdrops against the headstone.
“The snowdrops are pushing up through the ground, and soon it’ll be spring. The snow will melt, and the birds will sing again. The world will wake up, and your daughter will visit you.”
What was I doing?
I sighed, and my breath puffed out in a cloud of white. Damn, it was cold here. Cold and dead. All of it.
I straightened up and took a step back, about to leave.
“She thinks about you all the time. Just so you know. And she loved you to the end . . . and beyond.”
Okay. Enough. I didn’t know if I was talking about Katarina and her mother now, or me and mine. Maybe all the women who had been beaten down and forgotten by the world.
My emotions volatile and restless, I turned away from the neglected grave in the tiny cemetery.
Yes, I was breaking all my rules here at Hallow Hall, but I didn’t care.
Those fuckers all deserved to pay . . . and I was here to make them.
And I’d enjoy every second.