I chuckled. “Me, old.”
She gasped. “Mommy.”
“Fine, we will negotiate when I get back.”
“Okay, but do I get a present?”
“Of course,” I said, rising from the bed. “As if your papa wouldn’t get you lots of presents.”
“That’s Papa. I want something from you, Mommy.”
It was sweet, but it was also very tricky for her. I glared down, and she grinned up at me. “Mommy and Papa are one. His presents are my presents.”
She pouted again. “Stay here for a little bit. We're talking about presents, and if I catch you sneaking to listen, I’ll tell Papa to hide all of them until your birthday.”
“I won’t sneak!” she said seriously.
“Good. I’m watching. Love you,” I said, moving to the door
“Love you, too,” she said before sitting back with her tablet. Outside, I leaned on the door for a moment.
There was that feeling right before an assignment. The worry that I wouldn’t be able to keep my promises to her. That I wouldn’t make it back. But I pushed them down.
I wasn’t dying.
I wasn’t letting her die.
Neither was her father.
I was escaping all my past horrors. They were going to be the last chapter of Calliope Orsini. I’d learned a lot, and changed a lot since the first chapter. My daughter was part of that story, and so was Ethan. Bright ports in a sea of pain. I was only taking them into the new me…the free me.
The faster I got this done, the faster I could finally feel that freedom.
Straightening my shoulders, I walked into the kitchen to find all of them—Ethan and his parents—reading over the files I had left on the table.
I turned on the television and put my phone to the side still able to watch Gigi in her room. The last thing I wanted her to do was to come out and hear me planning Siena’s death. She still considered the woman her family, too.
“Let’s get started,” I said to them.
15
“If I know what love is, it is because of you.”
~Hermann Hesse
ETHAN
“In i Libitinarii, there is what is called the four horsemen,” Calliope explained, pulling the picture of two males and two females….one of them being her. “No association to the biblical text, just Fiorello thought it was the perfect nickname than simply calling us the four.”
“And what is it that makes you all so much more special from the rest of the ones we killed?” my father asked.
“Our death counts,” she said, putting the numbers on the screen. She had the second highest in comparison to the man with no picture.
“I’ve never met the first; no one has. He’s one of the reasons why it has taking me so long to declare my side. I wanted to know all of their faces. In the end, all I could find out was that he is definitely a male, and he’s much older than me, maybe even closer to Siena’s age. I’m not sure. And he’s been dead loyal to Siena. He was there even before I was. Every time she sent him a name, he completed it within twenty-four hours. I just called him Mr. One.”
“I truly hate this assassin shit,” my mother chided. “The dumbass nicknames, and the secrets…what happened to the good ol’ days when people faced each other one on one.”
“You killed them,” I replied, lifting the next picture. “You kept winning, so they moved to the nicknames and the secrets.”