#clangiovanni

Nicky’s people had cleaned the grave well enough, now that the original mission, both true and false, was over.  Nicky had the manners to police his own.  Now it was left to her to gather what dust had fallen out of her cousin’s reach and how she could make it pay.  It would be more satisfying to have someone else pay the costs now resting in her ledger.  

“Any reason you chose…”  Angelina turned back a page to see the list of operatives that Nicky had sent. “Diana Rosselini, alias Anna Betancourt?”  

“I felt she was the best of the four.”

“What made her stand out?”  At first glance, all four seemed to be of similar quality.  Military training of one flavor or another.  Specific skills earned in vague unnamed places.  Confirmed kill lists.  All from distant branches of breeder families, probably only accidentally aware of the family business, if aware of it at all.  No one with any strong ties to any Kindred family that she could recall at this moment.  Perfect operatives for those hopefuls with nothing left to lose and willing to work for a family pariah.

Family pariahs.  

Angelina frowned slightly, perturbed at the unnecessary self-reminder, tucking that thought away for later contemplation.  Now was not the time for meditating on old injustices. 

“I feel that a Rosselini was more suitable,” Pietro gave an easy shrug, as if such an important choice was merely an afterthought.  Normally a temperate guide, she found his lack of care or worry to be irritating this evening. 

“More suitable than what, Pietro?  Do not dissemble.”

He capitulated immediately.  “The Rosselini was the only choice, donna.  I wouldn’t dare Proxy Jara without approval of the Pisnob.  I didn’t feel that you’d want the della Passaglia here, all things considered, so Durant was also not an option.”

“Your consideration of my feelings is commendable, but if he was the better candidate, I would have accepted him.  Chances are he wasn’t involved with the…current politics.”  Angelina clicked her teeth shut on the words, biting them where she couldn’t bite those that had risen against her.

Again that nonchalant shrug and easy grin, tacitly ignoring the tempest she held under thin glass  “I would not risk it and besides, the Rosselini was equally qualified and the fourth did not survive the mission.”

“Karl Koeing, alias of Gerhart Auer,” Angelina mused, putting the papers back in order and finding the small work of neatness to be soothing.  There would be very little this evening that would be considered soothing.  “Nicky removed him from the operation himself?”

“Compromised,” Pietro agreed.  “At least that was what my Rosselini has told me, though I find it all a little extreme.  The Butcher didn’t like the fact he was passing information.  I understand his reasoning, but it wasn’t as if the Koeing was speaking out of house.”

Lillian looked at the hair in her hands. Four days after the incident and her body had stopped withering. Not quite a walking corpse, but certainly nothing that would walk in public and not cause notice. Her hair, her beautiful dark auburn hair, had continued to wither away until it became brittle and thin. Now it was the hair of an old woman standing on the edge of her grave. The nuns at school had alternately praised her for her luck and admonished her not to give into the vanity that was the sin of all women. If they could see her now, holding handfuls of faded dried up weeds.  

A knock at the door made her cry out in alarm, "No! Don't come in!" She didn't want to see anyone until she could come to terms with what she was. But someone entered anyway.

"Mother," Lillia whispered, suddenly wishing to cry. Instead, she covered her drawn and sunken face behind knobby hands. "Don't look at me!"

Catherine Rosselini came to her daughter with soothing sounds of comfort. "Oh sweetheart, don't hide from me. You're as beautiful now as you were when you were born."

Lillian choked on her mother’s good humor and obvious lie. "Newborns are ugly."

"Not to their mothers." Catherine laughed, not hesitating to put her arms around her daughter, holding the cold and stiff body tight. Desperately needing the comfort, Lillian returned the embrace still feeling tears that wouldn't fall.  Could she still cry in this state, or would she always feel stuck not being able to purge what was in her heart?

"What do I do now?" she whispered into her mother’s shoulder, only just now realizing she was dressed for a formal evening. Count Rossellini was hosting his own descendants tonight at the family gathering, an invitation that Catherine had coveted more than anything, finally getting to mingle with the greatest of her relations.  Lillian backed away hastily, less her changed countenance somehow stain the dress.  She felt filthy in this condition, still smelling the canal water that had flooded that pit and wondered if, like her missing tears, if she’d ever feel clean again.

"You put on the dress I brought you and you hold your head up high and you remind everyone that you have been triply blessed this year. And when that poor excuse of a father of yours hosts the Milliners at the end of the week as the youngest family, you'll attend that one too and remind every one of those ignorant Yankees exactly what you bring to the table."

"Why'd you do it?"

"Do what, honey?"

"Sleep with dad if you hate him so much?"

Catherine looked thoughtful, smoothing back the thin scant wisps of hair that still graced Lillian’s head. "Because it was the price of my independence, darling. And besides, it brought me you and your little brothers and I didn't have to chain myself to some fat lugard of a man for the rest of my life. You," she kissed Lillian's cheek. "Were entirely worth putting up with that dithering ass. And this," she kissed Lillian's other cheek. "Has made every insult worth it. My precious daughter given the Kiss just hours after the Milliners were formally included in the family. By one of the elders no less. It is very possible you are closer in blood to Uncle Ambrogino than you are to your father!"

The way her mother laughed, it was clearly the crow of triumph.  It was apparently a mark of status to have a close family be….whatever she was now.  Whatever status Catherine had gained by having Old Man Milliner’s bastards had somehow increased by her literal falling in with Mathias. 

"How...how did you know to send me there? To the well? How did you know there'd be family there?"  Lillian tried to forget the screams of the people they pushed in - Frances’ wife and all his descendants, by blood or by marriage, that had refused to bend a knee to the horror that was the Giovanni.  It was Frances’ proof of loyalty, that everyone walking would be bound, one way or another, to the family business.  She had already heard the servants gossiping on the haggling being done over the newly widowed and who would take them of Frances’ hands.

Again that thoughtful look as if Catherine was considering the events and if the story could be told. "My uncle married outside of the family. She was an only child, an heiress to use the old fashion term, so it was permitted.  There wouldn't be anyone to challenge the inheritance or any of her own family she could run to if she....discovered any of the family business. It was eventually discovered she had been having an affair. He couldn't divorce her and risk losing any of the estate, or her taking the one child he knew for sure was his, so he demanded that Count Rossellini do something. And so he did. My uncle's wife, her lover, and their children were all pushed into the well. We were all brought to watch as a reminder that one doesn't betray the family."

It was said so casually that Lillian felt colder than she had been, staring at her mother in something akin to shock.  “And…and no one thought her death suspicious?”

“It's easy to fake a drowning death in Venice, my dear.  What was left of the bodies showed up in the lagoon eventually.  A boat accident was to blame.”

"Did you...expect this to happen to me?"  Lillian pressed withered hands to her sunken cheeks.

It can’t be easy, being a two-hundred-year-old Ventrue. You’ve got neonates underneath with itchy fingers and elders underneath with twitchy feet. No wonder he came out to the USA - all the way to the Free State! - to stake a domain. He’s already gambling just by being there, so why not go double or quits?