Pavol sighed and leaned back, a smile playing around his lips. What the fuck had he done in the twenty minutes he’d been gone?
Kill the fucker. Make him bleed.I could cut his balls off and feed them to him before he passed... some alternative therapy for him to choke on.
But then Father Vargas would never schedule his visit, and I’d never leave this place. I had a job to do, and that had to come first. Always.
“She’s a special case,” he said again. “Honestly, she might have been released a long time ago if not for the incident with her friend.”
I thought for a moment and took a leap. “Mira?”
Pavol blinked at me. “She told you about Mira? She needs her medication adjusted, then. She’s not meant to remember anything about all that.”
“What happened?”
“Oh, nothing new. Mira was a street kid, some other poor Bulgarian rat who Katarina became friends with here. She was pregnant, at sixteen, no less. Just street trash. She ended up here instead of on the streets, a lucky break for a girl like that.”
I watched him speak, letting my anger curl around me like smoke, savoring it. I couldn’t act now. I would act later. This man wasn’t leaving here alive, I decided.
“And?”
“And she didn’t appreciate what she’d been given,” Pavol said, touching his cheek in a way I was certain was subconscious. He had a thin scar there. So Mira had gotten him somehow. Good.
“She was in solitary when the baby came. She had a rough birth; she and the baby both passed.”
I was watching Pavol’s eyes at the moment he lied. He was apiss-poor liar. His eyes glided to the side, gaze fixing somewhere in the distance.
“Katarina took it hard, I guess. She blamed the staff and the doctors here. She didn’t understand that accidents sometimes happen.”
“Of course, you seem to have a disproportionally high number of pregnant patients.” You could hardly ignore the number of young women, some little more than girls, who were clearly expecting.
Pavol shrugged. “A lot of fallen women come to the Church for aid when they have nowhere else to go.”
I nodded. “But this isn’t the Church. It’s a private enterprise, isn’t it?”
Pavol’s jovial expression dropped as my words sank in, but I plastered a smile on my face, trying to seem as nonthreatening as possible.
It worked somewhat, but I’d still made him nervous.
“Still, it must be such a comfort to the community to have a place people can go if they find themselves in trying times,” I added to smooth his ruffled feathers.
He nodded vigorously. “Exactly! It’s not like we’re encouraging them to have relations outside of wedlock. We just help clean up the consequences.”
Clean up the consequences. There was something utterly distasteful about that phrasing.
I nodded. “Bless you, Father, and everyone at Hallow Hall. May you reap all theconsequencesof your hard efforts.”
I stoodon the crumbling balcony outside the dining room and smoked. Pavol had disappeared again, and Benedict was still onthe john, probably. The night was sharp. Snow blanketed the trees and grounds. Spring should be coming soon, but this close to the mountains, you never really knew when it would arrive. Torino was a majestic city. The weather here was nothing like the weather where I’d grown up in Naples.
Thinking about the pregnant patients brought thoughts of my mother to the surface. A subject I rarely let myself dwell on. But here, in Hallow Hall, it struck too close to the bone.
My mother’s descent into madness started when she’d gotten a job at a steel plant in a town outside of Naples. For a while, things had been good. My mother had always been religious, pious, and God-fearing. She’d prayed every day, never missed church, and whenever she looked at me, for a bright and shining moment, I thought that maybe I could be good, too.
Then she’d gotten pregnant. My father was long gone, having died abroad in the military. My mother hadn’t dated; it just wasn’t even a possibility. She’d gone to church, worked, and cared for me. That had been her life, and she’d never once complained about it. Then the pregnancy. After that, people started to see her differently, and me by extension. I was no longer a war hero’s son but the son of a whore. They turned away from her at church and ignored her conversation in the street. Silently, as a whole, the entire community had turned their back on her. She soon had only me.
No matter how many times I’d asked her, she wouldn’t tell me who the father was. She’d only told me it was her shame and she’d bear it alone. Regardless, the pressure got to me. I’d started to get into fights and learned how to inflict damage quickly to even the score. I’d started to skip school to avoid those fights, and then got arrested.
Slowly, my life slid off-kilter.
The owner of the steel mill, that rotten prick Fabio, had her institutionalized when she’d tried to take her own life at work one day... Well, that was his story, anyway. I didn’t believe it. I hadn’t believed it at thirteen when it had happened and overnight I was shipped off to live with my aunt and uncle, and I didn’t believe it now, decades after her death.