The sound of it echoes against the hard walls.
Shit. I want her to defend herself, but I can’t protect her. She’s on her own with him.
Sergio has his hand to his cheek for a moment before thrusting it forward, taking the only woman I’ve ever loved by the neck and pushing her against the window.
“Shush,” he murmurs against her nose. Too close. Too violent.
Hurting her, this motherfucker—he’s hurting her. He cannot live. He cannot be near her. He’s crushing my heart in my chest and this glass fucking wall is squeezing my vision into a funnel with me at one end, too small to rip this building off its foundations, and her at the other, too big to get through to my side.
“I’m going to kill you.” I whisper it like a prayer, powerless, pressing my hands to the glass as if my rage can get them through it.
“Sure you are. Let’s go, princess. Visit’s over.”
When she obeys him, I scream loud enough to shake the foundation, but with every breath, a part of me dies.
CHAPTER 8
SARAH
Dario’s rage, banging around on the other side of the glass, is terrifying. The old stone church is going to shatter.
When I pause to listen, stuck like a deer in headlights, Sergio grabs my forearm and yanks me back down the hall the way we came, past more cells like my husband’s. All empty. He swings me in front of him and closes the heavy metal door, cutting me off from the man I need to protect and who needs to protect me. We’re in a guard room with a bank of screens. A man with a thick black goatee sits in the chair. His name is Sam. I used to see him in church sometimes, but he acts as if he doesn’t know me.
I have never felt so exposed and alone. In the car on the way here, Massimo told me to act as if I have no feelings for my husband, and he’s right. Whoever those cells were built for, I’m destined for one if I show my love. And if I’m trapped in there, I can’t help him.
“I told your grandma I’d bring you around.” Sergio shrugs and opens the far door as if totally unaffected by what just happened. “So, come on.”
Up a narrow flight of stairs, he uses his thumbprint to open the door at the top, leaving us in a little-used back hall of Precious Blood.
There have always been a handful of spaces my thumbprint wouldn’t grant access to. I never wondered why. How many horrors are hidden behind those doorways?
“Your gramma said they’d be on the rectory side.” He stands in the middle of a hallway intersection, looking totally lost. “In the workroom next to the big kitchen, which is like… okay, how many kitchens do you guys have?”
“Four.” I know where I’m going now. I turn and he follows.
“Hold up.” He gets slightly ahead, lost as he is, then snaps his fingers. “Sewing circle. That’s what she said. So, it’s like you make a quilt for poor people or something?”
“We make and repair clothes for anyone who needs it.”
“Any one of you? Like, it’s not for charity or nothing?”
“Like outsiders?”
“Yeah. ‘Sewing circle’ don’t mean you just do your sewing. Historically, it’s for a good cause.”
“It is for a cause. If someone’s husband has a tear in his trousers or a child needs a hem taken down, it’s more efficient if a few of us, who are good at it, do it all at once. Sometimes, we’re called to make clothes for the needy. You should know this if you’re going to be one of us.”
“I guess you can call it what you want—with or without the cause—but economic specialization’s a sound theory, like… at scale. So you should just buy new pants.”
“We’re a frugal people.”
“No shit.” Sergio runs his hands over the cracks in the plaster. “Hey, did you know there was a sewing circle on a rescue ship off the Titanic? And it hit the iceberg at night, so a lotta people wound up on the rescue boat in, like, underpants and nightshirts. So the ladies did a sewing circle where they cut up blankets and shit. They made clothes outta them so no one stepped onto the dock in their pajamas. That’s nice, right?”
“Off the titanic what?” I turn a corner without his direction. I won’t lose him, but I indulge a second of hope before he doubles back to catch up. “What’s so big?”
“It’s the name of a boat that sank.”
“Ah. And the people who were rescued started a sewing circle. That is nice.”
“You’re all right, Sarah,” he says. “You’re a good listener.”
I’m about to ask him if calling me by my actual name is his version of sweet talk when I cross into the Gallery—an older, domed chamber connected to the one where I was cut into marriage with Dario.
Sergio stands in the center, on bloodstains faded to invisibility, and circles his hand at the portraits with dates under them that line the walls. “Who the fuck are these guys?”
He thinks he’s going to take over here without knowing our history or what our children are taught?
“These men sat at the head of the table. Starting from Johann”—I point at the oldest painting of a man pulled out of time in a high lace collar and pointy beard—“to my father.” I indicate a space of newly painted wall with a brass plate at the bottom.
PETER ENZO COLONIA
His painting is being prepared. I know the one they’re going to use. It hung between our living room windows.
“This was our first ceremonial room. The real church. We outgrew it.” I find the portrait of a man with a darker beard and a nose as crooked as a lost fight. He isn’t handsome, but when I was a girl, I stared at his painting for hours, captivated by the bolt of cruelty in his black eyes and thick hands. “Vigo Colonia had the big dome dug out. One day, his wife went to market with their five children. It was crowded. One child got separated. She chased her into a basement. Neither wife nor child was ever seen again.”
“Huh. Guess that’s why he’s looking at me like he wants to fuck me up.”
I smirk and turn toward him so he can see it. “Vigo would put your head on a stick for trying to sit at the head of our table.”
“But he ain’t here.”
He ain’t. I turn back to the painting.
“Vigo realized too many children would expose us to people who meant us harm. We stopped having so many children and isolated ourselves for our safety. He and his son Cleto built the church on top of the domes with the rest of this part of Manhattan, and no one was the wiser.”
A man’s voice booms in the space. “That was when we became inside, and you, Sergio Agosti, became outside.”
“Dr. Palmeri.” I offer the customary bow in the presence of a man of rank.
“It’s good to see you alive and well, Sarah Colonia.”
“And you.”
“Hey, doc.” Sergio rocks on the balls of his feet and keeps his hands in his pockets. “I told her grandma I’d bring her to the sewing circle.”
“My office is this way.” The doctor ignores him and leads me out one of the doorways.
“Uh…”
Sergio’s objection is lost in the echoes of the chamber as the doctor brings me to his office. Aunt Clara’s there, putting a file away.