They Crossed My Name Out of the Family Bible Chapter 02
Chapter 2 — Eight Months in a Chapel
Let me tell you how a girl vanishes inside a compound with thirty-four people on the payroll.
Slowly. Then all at once.
Month one, I still fought.
I ambushed my mother outside her study and made my voice bright, the way she likes it. “Mama. Sunday? Just us. The bad movies. That disgusting diner on Route 9 you pretend to hate.”
Since I was nine years old, one day a week belonged to me. She used to write down everything I said in a little leather book. Every color, every song, every stupid opinion. That’s how she knew about the oxblood.
“I’m busy,” she said, already walking.
I asked her every week for three months. Twelve times. I have the count in my phone, because I’m the specific kind of broken that keeps receipts.
I’m busy. Not today. Siena, please.
Then she stopped answering at all.
Month two, I gave up on my brothers.
Dominic: not now. Luca: swamped, kid. Matteo didn’t lift his eyes off his laptop. Gabriel — Gabriel, who taught me to fight dirty, who let me sleep on his floor after nightmares — Gabriel put two hands on my shoulders and physically moved me out of a doorway like I was a chair, and kept walking.
Month three, my training stopped, because Sal — head of my father’s detail, the man who taught me to shoot at eight years old — stopped showing up to the range. When I asked him why, he looked at the floor and said, “Orders, Miss Marchetti.”
Miss Marchetti.
He’d called me Peanut since I was six.
Month four, I found the chapel.
It sits at the northern edge of our land, half-eaten by ivy, unused since my grandmother died. One room, a woodstove, a saint with her face worn smooth. I swept it out. I dragged a mattress in. I stole a kettle from a pantry nobody inventories.
“Let’s see how long it takes them to notice,” I said to the empty room.
Spoiler: I lived there for eight months.
Eight months, and nobody knocked on my bedroom door in the main house. Nobody wondered why my closet emptied one hanger at a time. I’d sneak up to my own bathroom at 5 a.m. to shower, wipe every surface down, and leave like a burglar in the house I was born in.
I got very good at being invisible. Nobody warns you it’s also a wound.
The night I broke was the Commission dinner.
I put on the green dress my mother bought me. I sat in my chair. My father stood up with his glass and said, “To my children—”
And then he named five.
Dominic. Luca. Matteo. Gabriel. Nico.
The sixth chair was occupied. The sixth child was holding a fork.
I got up, walked outside, and threw up in a hedge in a two-thousand-dollar dress.
That was the night I went into my father’s study.
Every old family has a book. Ours is a Bible from Palermo, three hundred years old, and every Marchetti born goes into the back of it in ink — name, date, godparents. My great-grandfather is in there. So is the uncle who died in Sicily at nineteen.
So was I.
Page eleven, last line.
Siena Vittoria Marchetti.
Struck through. One clean stroke of black ink. My father’s pen, my father’s pressure, my father’s hand, the same hand that signed my school forms and taught me to hold a knife.
You don’t think anything, in a moment like that. You just hold a book and you feel yourself becoming a rumor.
“Do I really mean that little to you?” I whispered.
Nobody answered. Nobody had in months.
Back in the chapel I opened my laptop at 2 a.m. and typed the name people in our world only ever say quietly.
The Requiem.
Every family on this coast bows to one man — Don Aurelio Vittorio, capo dei capi — and the Vittorios keep a thing that isn’t an army. Arbiters. Fixers. The people who walk into a war between families and walk out with a signature instead of a body count.
They take forty recruits a year. They take them at eighteen. They have never taken a woman, and they have certainly never taken a Marchetti, because Marchettis have never needed anyone.
I didn’t send them an application.
I sent them a sealed envelope with three names in it — three men inside their own organization who were being paid by somebody else. I knew because I’d heard it in my father’s study when I was thirteen and nobody remembered I was in the room.
Then I waited to be laughed at.
Eleven days later, the black card came.
S. Marchetti: accepted.
Report on your eighteenth birthday.
Tell no one.
I laughed out loud in an empty chapel until the sound scared me.
Tell no one.
Who exactly did they think I had left?
