Chapter 50
Daisy Peonia Mary Parker
Unknown Location
The floor was cold and damp. I pressed my hands against the roughness of the concrete and sat up with difficulty, realizing how sore my throat was from crying.
I slowly dragged myself to a corner and curled up, pulling my knees to my chest, trying to make myself small in the hole they'd thrown me into.
It was a small room, bare concrete, without a single coat of paint. There were pipes running up the walls, stained with rust and limescale, and fluorescent lights on the ceiling. The tightly locked door was made of iron and had a hatch like those on ships. But I wasn’t on the high seas, oh no.
I was almost certain they had dragged me into a basement or something of the sort.
I had felt the steps as we descended, despite the burlap sack they’d stuffed over my head, and considering how cold and damp that space was, I couldn’t be above ground.
I wouldn’t survive the heat of the Italian summer.
I didn’t know how many hours I’d been there. The only thing I knew for sure was that exhaustion had gotten the better of me.
I wrapped my arms tightly around my body, feeling my emotions come flooding back to me like an avalanche.
I felt stupid and alone. I had believed Camillo, after all.
Even after he’d promised to kill me and dragged me to Italy; even after he’d lashed out in a jealous rage for going out with Fabiano, or left me alone in the room after taking what he wanted from me…
It took only a few hours for me to forgive him and let him deceive me.
I didn’t know why that surprised me so much, or why it hurt that way; after all, that was exactly why I was in that country. To die. He had never hidden that from me. But I had believed that…
That he had fallen in love? A man whose profession involved killing people?
I laughed scornfully, and the tears began to fall again.
I looked at the ring heavy on my finger.
Surely, he had given it to me because it meant nothing.
It must have been something worthless, perhaps even just costume jewelry and nothing more.
Maybe his mother had never liked it, which is why he had gotten rid of it so easily.
Martino had said it. Those two days were the farewell.
But despite everything that was happening, despite those walls screaming at me to accept it, part of me wanted to believe it was all a charade. I couldn’t accept that Camillo was so cruel or a liar. Yet how could I deny it?
He had been the one to guide me to the car.
It had been his chauffeur who drove me there.
I had heard the skull-faced man warn him over the phone that they were already taking me on the way to that place, and his voice on the other end of the line.
What other proof did I need besides that? The evidence was undeniable.
I sobbed. Clutching my own body tightly, I felt the same spiral of emotions that had led to my hospitalization several years ago.
All my thoughts became muddled, my emotions suffocated me, and I reached a breaking point that made me feel a deep, desperate urge to escape my own body.
It was as if I wanted to tear the flesh from my bones.
I closed my eyes tightly, breathing in and out at a controlled pace. My nails dug into the skin of my arms, scratching it hard. I felt a burning sensation and continued to breathe steadily.
I couldn’t hurt myself. No. If I were to die, let it at least be with some honor.
The door swung wide open. The metal creaked, making me jump. I curled up in the corner, feeling tiny and my satin dress far too thin. Four hooded men entered that sort of cell, automatic weapons in hand, and a familiar face appeared behind them.
“Ready, Signorina Parker?” asked the skull-faced man. In that light, I realized he was blond and noticed he could be even uglier than in the darkness.
“What are you going to do to me?”
The man shrugged and ran a hand through his greasy hair, and I saw a diamond-encrusted watch glinting on his wrist. “What Don Vicari ordered, obviously.”
“So—so, am I going to die today?” Waves of cold and heat shook me. I wanted to be strong, to fight the terror, but it was hard when death was staring me in the face.
The skull-faced man laughed. “Not so soon, Signorina. You’ll be around here for a few more days. Today, we’re going to watch a little movie together.”
Days. He was going to torture me for days. “Where is Camillo?”
“Probably at his villa, comfortable, watching your last moments through the cameras.”
Before I could say anything else, the hooded men were pushing me out of the cell.
Barefoot, I forced myself to walk down a corridor also filled with pipes.
We walked for quite a while, and I noticed other adjacent corridors and realized that the one we were in seemed to have no end, which meant this wasn’t just a basement.
We must have been in some kind of underground facility. Far from eyes and ears that might witness my end.
Moments later, I tripped over my own feet and crashed to the floor of a large room.
The room was like the cell where I had been, like the corridors and everything else, yet in its center there was a chair and a small screen on a table. One of the hooded men walked toward me and yanked my hair, forcing me to lift my face.
“Say hello to Don Vicari, Signorina,” growled the skull-faced man behind me, and I spotted a camera in a corner of the room, near the ceiling.
The pain formed a knot right in the middle of my throat. How could he do something like that to me? And Luca… How could Luca be okay with all of that? Had I been that stupid? Was their humanity just a trick of my mind?
Tears rolled silently down my cheeks.
“Take a seat, Signorina Parker.” The skull-faced man’s voice sounded like an invitation, but the hooded man’s hands on my shoulders made it clear it was an order.
I was forced to sit down and watch the skull-faced man approach and move the mouse resting beside the monitor.
When light replaced the blackness of the screen, I saw the image of a paused video.
“What do you know about Don Vicari’s son, Signorina Parker? ”
I trembled and swallowed the urge to scream, letting the tears continue to stream from my eyes. I replayed what I had heard in my head. “I think… I think he died.”
“You’re right. But do you know how?”
“I-I…”
“Don’t worry. Don Vicari has decided to be kind and clear up all your doubts. He wants you to know the whole truth before you die. Consider it a gift.” He declared, and I watched him spin on his heels and wave, smiling, at the camera in the corner of the room. “Ready?”
A hooded figure placed his hands on my shoulders again, gripping me tightly, as if to ensure I didn’t get up, and another held my head, keeping it fixed on the screen. When the skull-faced man hit play, it didn’t take me long to understand why.
On the screen, I saw a hooded man, wearing an overcoat that camouflaged him in the darkness of a house, and holding a suppressed pistol.
I watched him move as only a predator would be capable of.
His long legs stalking across the floor, moving toward a certain destination.
The image shifted as the home camera that had captured it panned, and I shuddered when, suddenly, the view of a baby’s room appeared.
This camera was positioned at a perfect angle to the door, allowing a full view of the room and a very tiny baby in the crib.
Probably a newborn. Perhaps a little older.
I couldn’t tell. When the door to the room opened and the figure emerged like a menacing shadow, I could clearly see the eyes through the opening in the hood.
The images were from a night vision camera, in grayscale, but those eyes needed no color for me to know who their owner was.
Camillo.
He looked at the child for a few moments, his head tilting slightly to one side, and without hesitation raised the gun and fired.
I jumped in my seat, unable to take my eyes off it.
The way the bullet pierced the baby’s skull and the body twitched slightly, the way a dark pool spreading beneath the tiny, lifeless body, soaking the mattress.
The images that followed confirmed everything.
Camillo entered a room where a woman was sleeping and pistol-whipped her.
The light came on and the filters switched to daytime mode, bringing color to the scene.
He ripped off the hood and I saw the woman’s pleading gaze, before he dragged her into the room where the child lay dead.
The woman screamed upon finding her lifeless son, but Camillo wasted no time in throwing her to the floor.
He showed her something—a video—that made her writhe in agony, before planting a foot on her chest and stomping her to death.
Once, twice, three times, and again. Camillo crushed the woman with his feet, reducing her to a bloody pulp.
The skull-faced man replayed the images, and I felt them searing into my brain.
“Now that you know how terrible Don Vicari can be, do you still doubt your fate, Signorina Parker?”
The tears hadn’t stopped streaming from my eyes.
‘Papa never wanted to do that, Daisy-Bear. I would have given anything to avoid making that decision, but we can’t always do what’s right, and sometimes, to get to what’s right, you have to do what’s wrong. Maybe papa is a monster, but he’ll never love you any less.’
The words from so many years ago came back to me. The guilt that had weighed on my father whenever he had to do something terrible.
I focused on the image where the skull-faced man had made a point of pausing the video.
Camillo standing at the door of the child’s room, the baby soaking the crib in blood, and the woman's mangled form at his feet.
And I remembered the pictures of the villa.
Of his family. The parents, the grandparents, the uncles, the brother, and the cousin.
‘Their car fell off a bridge.’ Fabiano Mancuso’s words reverberated inside my brain. ‘Signor Camillo’s wife was to blame.’
I thought of my family and my best friend, and the tears dried on my face as I realized how rotten I was inside. Because now, as I stared at the screen, I understood him.
What would I do if I stood before my Papa’s murderers?
If I had the chance to discover their identity and whereabouts?
No. I wouldn’t forgive them. No matter how much I believed in God, no matter how much I knew He wanted anything but that—anything but death, violence, suffering—I wouldn’t show any forgiveness to those responsible for the loss of my Papa.
In Camillo’s place? If I had married a man and he ended up destroying my entire family?
I would have done the same thing he did to his wife, or worse.
If I got pregnant? I would get rid of the child, because it was better than bringing into the world someone I couldn’t love.
But he didn't have a say in it. That child had been born, and Camillo hadn’t been able to stop it.
Death, perhaps, was a mercy in that situation. Camillo, on the other hand, would have to carry forever the burden of having taken the life of an innocent, and, one way or another, he would end up paying the price for the blood he’d shed. Just as my Papa paid.
I saw that very thing the other night.
His remorse. His night terror. ‘I am a monster, Daisy.’ His cry echoed in my mind and vibrated through every fiber of my being.
‘If you knew what I did, you’d run far away.
’ No. Now that I knew who Marcello was, I knew I wouldn't run from Camillo. Worse. I realized that I didn’t care about what he did.
It wasn't because I knew he regretted it.
Or because I could put myself in his shoes.
Or because I had my father’s example.
No.
I was indifferent to that crime because that child—Marcello—was another woman’s son. The son of a traitor.
Maybe I wasn’t a good person. No. In fact, I wasn’t. Because the only thing that video made me feel was relief. Relief that I didn’t have to share Camillo with anyone else.
I blinked very slowly. A thought crystallizing in my mind and overshadowing everything else.
Camillo Vicari wouldn’t leave proof of his crimes.
He left no evidence and spared no witnesses, and that was why I was in Italy.
He was meticulous. Senator Jones’s death had revealed this to me, the way he staged it all to look like a simple suicide, how he waited for and seized the opportunity that presented itself.
However, that skull-faced man was showing me all-too-concrete evidence of a horrific crime that, if uncovered, would bring down the remnants of the Vicari family and could even send Camillo to death row.
The man who left no evidence had allowed one of his henchmen to keep recordings of that crime and expose them to me and the other men present. The same man who had guaranteed that no one, besides me and Luca, knew about Senator Jones’s true end.
I raised my gaze very slowly, fixing it on the skull-faced man.
“What is your name?” I asked in a whisper, as the pieces fell into place in my mind.
He flashed a smile that seemed to drip with venom. “Cissio Accorinti, Signorina.”
“Very well, Cissio.” If that was even the real name of that abomination. I raised my hand carefully and pointed at the camera. “Does the camera have sound? I’d like to send a message to Don Vicari.”
The skull-faced man puffed out his chest, the pits where his nose should have been twitched in a manner that reeked of victory.
“Of course it has sound, Signorina. Don Vicari insists on hearing your screams.” A shiver ran down my spine, but I forced myself not to show the slightest fear.
Cissio Accorinti stepped back a little and motioned to me.
“Come closer to the camera, Signorina, and tell Don Vicari what you think. Tell him what you thought when you saw those images.”
I stood up very slowly and obeyed, walking toward the camera, my eyes fixed on its lens.
I didn’t know who this Cissio Accorinti was, why he was lying to me, or what he intended with all of this, but of one thing I had no doubt. He was an enemy of Camillo’s. Most likely, the reason why security had been tight in recent days, which meant that Martino Accuri had betrayed the Vicari.
The motherfucker...
I stopped right in front of the camera, watching its little red light blinking.
I would never be afraid again.
Then, with my fists clenched at my sides and my voice loud enough that none of my words could be misheard, I said, “Make sure you’re the first to pull the trigger, sugar.”