Chapter 17
Chapter Seventeen: Antonia
The door closes and it's just us.
Father and daughter.
Don and weapon..
Marco looks at me from the chair. His hands are tied.
His suit is ruined. His hair is displaced, and for the first time in my life, my father looks his age.
Fifty-seven years old, sitting in a chair in a compound that isn't his, surrounded by people who want him dead, and his dark brown eyes are watching me with the patience of a man who has been waiting for this conversation since the day he put karambits in a thirteen-year-old's hands.
"You're going to kill me," he says.
Not a question… an observation. The same tone he uses for everything, the detached assessment of a situation he can see the end of.
"I haven't decided yet."
"You decided when you asked for the room. The room means privacy. Privacy means no witnesses. No witnesses mean you've already made the choice, and you don't want Leone or the lawyer or even Carmelo watching you make it."
He's right. He's always been right about me because he programmed me and the programmer knows the code.
"I have questions first," I say.
"Ask."
I pull a chair from the table and sit across from him, just three feet between us. The position is deliberate. I want him to see the blades. I want him to look at the weapons he gave me and understand what they're about to do.
"My mother," I say. "Did you love her?"
The question catches him. I see it in the half-second pause before he answers, the micro-adjustment behind his eyes that says I wasn't expecting that to be the first question.
"Yes," he says.
"How?"
"The way men in our world love women. Badly, incompletely, and with conditions she didn't deserve."
"Did she know about the Silent?"
"She knew I worked with people above the organization.
She didn't know the details. She didn't want to know.
Your mother was a woman who understood that some doors should stay closed, and she kept them closed because opening them would have changed how she looked at me, and she wasn't ready for that. "
"She died when I was four."
"She died carrying the genetic deletion that killed her. The disease was progressive and untreatable and she knew before you were born that her time was limited. She chose to have you anyway because she wanted you more than she wanted the years she was giving up."
I sit with that, with a grief so heavy I want to scream. My mother, a woman I don't remember, chose to die so I could live. She made a decision, the same kind of decision Marco makes, except hers was made from love and his are made from interest.
"Did you ever love me?" I ask.
"Antonia."
"Answer the question."
"I don't know how to answer it in a way you'll accept."
"Try."
He's quiet for a long time.
"You looked so much like her that loving you was hard. It reminded me of every memory I’d never make with her.
So instead, I looked at you and saw potential," he says.
"I looked at you and saw capability. I looked at you and saw a version of myself that was faster and sharper and more dangerous than I ever was, and I wanted to build that version into something the world couldn't break.
I don't know if that's love. It's the closest thing to it that I have. "
"That's not love. That's investment."
"Then no." His voice doesn't change. "I don't think I loved you.
I think I valued you, and that is the thing you're angry about, and the thing I can't fix because I don't have the capacity to feel what you're asking me to feel.
Your mother had it. I didn't. She died and the capacity died with her and what was left was a man who could build a weapon but couldn't hold his daughter. "
The honesty of it breaks something in my chest. Not the words.
The delivery. Marco Castillo, for the first time in my life, is not performing.
He's not managing the conversation. He's not positioning himself.
He's sitting in a chair with his hands tied, telling me the truth about why he never loved me, and the truth is that he can't, and that it isn't a choice, it's an absence, and the absence has been the defining fact of my life since I was four years old.
"So you really sold your grandchildren to protect your empire."
"I sold a theoretical future to protect a present reality. The children don't exist yet, Antonia. The empire does. The soldiers do. The infrastructure does. I made the only rational choice available."
"Rational." I spin Morte once. "You keep using that word.
Rational. As if the absence of emotion is the same as the presence of reason.
It's not. It's just absence, Marco. It's just the hole where the love should be, and you've been governing from that hole for years, and every person you've touched has fallen into it. "
He doesn't respond. For the first time, he doesn't have a rebuttal.
"I'm going to kill you," I say.
"I know."
"Not because of the Protocol. Not because of the war. Not because you sent soldiers to attack my wedding."
"Then why?"
"Because you can't love me, and you'll never be able to, and as long as you're alive, I'm going to keep reaching for something that doesn't exist. I'm going to keep looking at your face and hoping to see something that isn't there, and the hoping is going to eat me alive the way my mother's disease ate her alive, slowly and helplessly.
I'm not going to spend the rest of my life dying from hope. "
"Your mother would be proud of you," he says. "She would hate what I made you, but she would be proud of who you became despite it."
"You don't get to speak for her."
"I'm the only one who can. She's gone and I'm the only one who knew her well enough to say what she would think. And I'm telling you, Antonia, your mother would look at you right now, standing in a war room in a blood-stained dress with blades in your hands and a husband who loves you and a family that chose you, and she would be proud. She would be proud that you didn’t become who I wanted you to become.”
My throat closes. My eyes burn. I haven't cried in eleven years.
Not since I was fourteen and decided that tears were a weapon Marco would use against me.
Eleven years of dry eyes and clenched jaws and fury converted to violence because the alternative was vulnerability and vulnerability in his house was a death sentence.
I don't cry now either, but I come closer than I have in eleven years.
I stand and walk to the chair, taking up a spot behind my father.
"Close your eyes," I say.
"I'd rather watch."
"There's nothing to watch. It'll be fast."
"I know. You were always fast." He pauses. "The karambits. Vita first?"
"Vita first. Always." I pull it from my sheath, both knives locked on my fingers.
He nods. "For what it's worth," he says, "the potential I saw in you was real. The capability was real. The thing I built you into is extraordinary, and the fact that you're standing here about to kill me with the weapons I gave you is the most fitting end I could imagine."
"I have nothing left to say except that I hope your transition to the afterlife isn’t as painful as the life I will live knowing you hated me enough to sell me for power."
"Goodbye, piccola arma."
Vita goes across his throat in one motion, Morte sliding upwards to complete the cycle.
The corrected X-slash, ball of the foot, hip rotation, the full power that Carmelo rebuilt from the ground up.
The blade is so fine that the cut is clean, and the blood comes fast and he doesn't make a sound because the cut is deep enough that sound requires air and the air is gone.
He slumps forward in the chair. The blood runs down his chest and pools on the floor, and the flat brown eyes are open and empty, and the absence that was always in them has finally become total.
I stand behind the chair and watch the blood spread and I feel nothing. Not satisfaction. Not grief. Not the cathartic release that I expected, the emotional payoff of killing the man who never loved me.
Nothing.
The feeling will come later. It always does. The body processes violence faster than the mind, and the mind will catch up in hours or days or weeks. When it does, the grief will be enormous, and the fury will be gone and what's left will be a woman with two bloody karambits and no father.
I wipe Vita and Morte on Marco's sleeve. The blades are clean. The man is dead. The era is over.
I walk to the door and open it. The corridor is full. Leone, Carmelo, Emilio, soldiers. They see my face and they see the blood on my hands and they know.
"It's done," I say before heading back in and sitting across from my fathers body.
Leone nods. He doesn't ask for details. He doesn't ask if I'm okay. He looks past me into the room, at the body in the chair. "Carmelo, clean the room."
Carmelo walks in. "Clean kill. Good technique.”
Matteo tries to come in, but I hold up my hand. “After Carmelo is done… I just need a minute.” His face falls, but he steps back and I can hear him talking to Leone in soft whispers in the hall.
I slump in the chair and close my eyes while Carmelo gets to work.
Twenty minutes later, Matteo finds me in Marco's blood.
Carmelo took the body, but the blood is still on the floor, a dark pool spreading.
I'm sitting on the floor beside it with Vita and Morte in my hands and my dress soaked at the hem where it touched the pool when I sat down. It felt right. Sitting here with what’s left of him.
Not in remorse, but as one last way I can be near him, minus the anger and bitterness between us.
Matteo closes the door and crosses the room in two long strides, steps through the blood, and sits down on the floor beside me.
We sit in silence for a long time. The blood is warm near the chair and cold at the edges where it's starting to dry. The room smells like iron and sweat, and the rotten stink of knowing I just killed the man who should have loved and protected me, and failed to do either.