They Crossed My Name Out of the Family Bible Chapter 10
Chapter 10 The Reason
The old man cleared the room.
All of them. Except Cassio- and Dante, who didn’t move and wasn’t ordered to, which told me something about
Dante Ricci that I filed away to examine later.
“Sit down, Siena.”
“I’d rather stand.”
“Sit down anyway.”
1 sat.
“You’ve been on my property for over a year,” he said. “Your family reported you missing eleven days ago. Did you know they were looking?”
“They called sixty-one times on the morning I arrived. Zero times in the year before it.” My voice came out very level. “I lived in a chapel on their land for eight months, sir. Two hundred yards from my mother’s bedroom window. Nobody
knocked.”
Cassio Vittorio swore under his breath.
The old man leaned back and pressed his fingers to his mouth for a long moment.
“Rafael Marchetti,” he said finally, “asked me for a private audience nine days ago. He came into my house and he
begged me. Rafael has not asked me for anything in twenty-six years.”
“I don’t care.”
“You should,” the old man said. “Because he told me why.”
He nodded, and Cassio set a black lacquered box on the table and opened it.
Inside: a photograph in a cracked frame. A young woman, nineteen, in a high-collared dress. Dark hair. My chin. My
eyebrows. My grandmother’s eyes.
“Serafina Marchetti,” the old man said. “Born 1911. The last daughter born into that line before you.”
The floor went a long way away.
“She’s behind the door on Cross Street,” I said.
“Yes.” His face was grim. “You closed her case last week without knowing whose grave you were standing on.”
Then he told me the rest.
Every few generations, the Marchetti line produces a daughter who remembers. Not well. Completely. Every word, every number, every face, permanently, from the age of about five. The families called them libri. Books.
Seven in three hundred years. All women. All of them useless to their families as daughters and priceless as property.
“Serafina was the best of them,” the old man said. “She could recite a shipping manifest she’d glanced at nine years
earlier. Her family kept her secret until she was eighteen. Then they married her to a man who swore on his mother’s
grave to protect her, and within two years he’d worked out what she was worth.”
Cassio said, quietly, “He used her to strip eleven families. Debts. Affairs. Skimming. He’d bring men to dinner, sit her
at the table, and have her recite it back to him afterward.”
“When she refused, he broke her. Slowly. When she was pregnant with a girl – a girl who would have had it too – she opened her wrists in a bathtub rather than raise a daughter into that house.” The old man looked at me. “That family still exists, Siena. Their name is Ferraro. And they have spent ninety-four years waiting for another Marchetti girl to be
born.”
I sat there and listened to my own pulse.
“My father,” I said. “The morning after my seventeenth birthday. He shut his office door.”
“He called a meeting,” the old man said. “Your mother, your five brothers, and the two men he trusts. He told them
everything. He told them they had three hundred and sixty-five days to prepare, because the day you turned eighteen, the doors in your head would open – and the moment Ferraro could confirm a Marchetti daughter existed, you were already sold.”
“So they stopped speaking to me.”
“They stopped speaking about you,” the old man said. “In every room. On every phone. In every message. Nine months before your birthday your father found a listening device in his own study. He didn’t know how long it had been there or which man on his payroll had been bought. So they scrubbed you. Out of the conversation. Out of the records.
Out of the calendar. Out of the book.”
“He crossed my name out of the family Bible,” I said.
“Yes.”
“With a pen.”
“Yes.”
“He could have told me,” I said, and my voice cracked straight down the middle for the first time in a year. “One
sentence. Siena, we love you, we’re protecting you, be patient. One.”
“He could have,” the old man said. “He was wrong. It cost him his daughter, and he knows it.”
“And the party,” I said. “The fabric. The west field. The bookings.”
“Eleven months of planning for your eighteenth birthday,” Cassio said, almost kindly. “Every one of your brothers had
a job. Your mother had a list she started the week you were born. They invited my father as witness. That part they got
right – they were going to present you to the Table publicly, so that Ferraro could never take you quietly.”
I thought about five men arguing over fabric samples at a dinner table while their sister ate in silence.
I put my face in my hands, and for about four seconds I let it hurt.
Then I sat up.
“None of that matters right now,” I said. “Something’s wrong.”
“Explain.”
“Somebody’s been getting into my quarters. No forced entry, nothing taken, two weeks at most.” I looked at Dante.
“Twelve recruits were expelled from this campus last year. Blacklisted from every family on the coast. Nothing left to
sell but information. One of them screamed my name in a hallway.”
Dante’s face changed. “Tino Greco.”
“The Grecos,” I said. “Who do the Grecos bank with?”
The old man’s expression went to stone.
“Ferraro,” he said.
And then the door banged open and Falco was standing there white as paper with a phone in his hand.
“Sir. Commander. It’s the Marchettis.” He looked at me. “They were hit on the shore road forty minutes ago. Two of her brothers are in surgery.”
I stood up.
“And Camilla Marchetti is gone.”
