Death Bliss
“And I would have been a different kind of captor.”
I look back at the ledger. His hand is still on the cover, the scar across his knuckles pale in the candlelight. I think about the authorization code on the page beneath his palm, the careful bureaucratic Italian, the surname that matches his own. I think about the blood oath he swore at Lorenzo’s grave in Palermo, and about the fact that the man who ordered his brother’s death is someone inside the Armenise hierarchy. Someone whose name is probably written somewhere in the pages I have not yet turned.
“You suspected,” I say. “Before you came back. Before you found me in the archive. You suspected it was internal.”