They Crossed My Name Out of the Family Bible Chapter 11
Chapter 11 – Midnight
They came to the gates at four in the afternoon.
I watched them from a fourth-floor window, because apparently I’m still enough of a coward to want a wall between me and my own blood.
Two cars. Four men out of them. My father in a suit he had obviously slept in, and three of my brothers-Dominic, Luca, Nico, Gabriel and Matteo were in a hospital forty miles east with a collapsed lung and a shattered femur
between them.
My father hadn’t shaved. Rafael Marchetti has shaved every day since 1989.
“Commander,” Ines said behind me. “You don’t have to see them. I’ll tell them you’re deployed.”
“Go down,” Nonna said. “Not for them. For your mother.”
I went down.
They were standing in the courtyard with their hands empty and their spines straight, the way our family teaches you to stand when you’re being judged.
Dominic saw me first.
I watched my oldest brother – thirty-one years old, six-four, the man who taught me to ride a bike and who once broke a boy’s nose at a wedding for calling me flat-chested – look directly at my face and not recognize me for one full second, because of the hair and the black and the eight inches of distance in my eyes.
Then he did recognize me.
And Dominic Marchetti made a sound I will hear on my deathbed, and went down on one knee on the gravel.
“Get up,” I said.
“Si-”
“Get up.” My voice came out like an ice pick. “You don’t kneel in this courtyard. It doesn’t belong to you. It belongs to the Table.”
He got up.
My father hadn’t moved at all. He was looking at the crown on my collar. At the bar on my sleeve.
“You’re a Commander of the Requiem,” he said.
“Yes.”
“You’re eighteen.”
“Yes.”
“Siena-”
“Don’t,” I said. “Don’t say my name yet.”
It was so quiet in that courtyard you could hear the flags.
“Thirteen months,” I said. “I lived in Nonna’s chapel for eight of them. I ate breakfast alone at your table two hundred
times. I asked my mother for one afternoon, twelve separate times, and twelve separate times she said I’m busy. At the
Commission dinner you stood up and toasted your children and you named five.”
Luca made a small, broken noise.
“I found the Bible,” I said. “I know what you did with a pen.”
“I know what I did,” my father said. His voice was gone, sanded down to a rasp.
“Don Vittorio told me why.”
“Then you know-”
“I know you had a reason,” I said. “I know it was a good reason. And I need you to understand that it doesn’t undo one single day, because I lived those days not knowing. I lived them believing I was worth so little that six people with my
blood could look through me like glass.”
I let that sit.
“You didn’t protect me,” I said. “You protected the secret. And you decided a terrified girl was an acceptable cost.”
My father’s face broke apart.
Rafael Marchetti, who has stared down federal prosecutors and Sicilian cousins and a bad winter in 2003, stood in a
courtyard and cried in front of his sons.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes. That is exactly what I did.”
Something in my chest, some old locked thing, twisted at the sound. I hated it. I hated that after everything, part of me
is still eleven years old at a little desk in his study, waiting to be looked at.
“Where’s Mama?”
Dominic stepped forward with a phone.
“This came ninety minutes ago.”
A video. My mother, in a chair, in a room with no windows. Her hair down. A cut on her cheekbone.
And behind her, a man in his sixties with silver hair and a ring on his little finger. Salvatore Ferraro. Grandson of the
man who broke Serafina.
“Rafael. Old friend. I have been patient for a very long time.”
“Your wife tells me you have no daughter. Your records say the same. Your priest says the same. Your own family Bible says the same – and let me tell you, that was excellent work. I very nearly believed it.”
“But girls talk, Rafael. Especially girls you throw away.” He smiled. “It’s come to my attention that a Siena Marchetti closed the Cross Street file in ninety-one minutes by reciting a conversation she overheard when she was eleven years old.”
“Eleven, Rafael. Word for word. In a street full of armed men.”
“You know what she is. So do I.”
“You have until midnight to hand her to me, or I’ll send Camilla back in pieces and take the girl anyway.”
The video ended.
My entire unit had come down behind me. Nobody spoke.
“Siena,” my father said. “You are not going to that meet. I came here to tell you we’re handling it. I came here to make
sure you were behind these walls.”
I laughed. God help me, I actually laughed.
“You still don’t understand,” I said. “You spent a year hiding a weapon. You should have spent it training one.”
I turned to my Captains.
“Ines, Tomas – vehicles. Fabi, drones and thermal. Renata, pull every property Ferraro touches within four hours of
the shore road. Filter for no windows, no cell coverage, and a generator account.”
“Yes, Commander.”
“Ricci.” I didn’t even have to look. He was already at my shoulder. “I need six of yours.”
“You’ve got twelve and me.”
I turned back to my father and my brothers, standing in that courtyard with nothing left to offer.
“Get in the car,” I said. “You’re not in command. You’re not consulted. You’ll do exactly what I tell you, or you’ll sit in a
van and listen.”
“Si,” Dominic whispered. “Why are you helping us?”
“I’m not,” I said. “I’m helping her.”.
