Page 22 of The Last Vendetta

Maybe she dropped it? Or it fell out of her pocket? I didn’t care. I just wanted quiet to sleep a little longer.

I held the device and looked both ways up and down the hall. Marianna, Beatrice, and Lucia stayed in rooms further down the corridor, but Father’s “room” was nearer.

How am I the only one who heard this? It hadn’t stopped in all those five or ten minutes when I tried to lie in and go back to sleep.

Heading toward their rooms, I yawned and bemoaned how terribly I’d slept. Thinking about Renzo threw me off. Missing his touch and yearning for his kisses kept me antsy, and wondering about who killed his brother intrigued me.

I knocked and opened the door to their master bedroom, surprised that Father was actually in the bed for once. Mother wasn’t there, though, but I figured she couldn’t have been up for long.

“Father?” I called out as I entered. Although he liked to drink—a lot, and often—he was often one of the first ones awake in the household. When I was younger, when Lucia and Beatrice were still toddlers, I realized that he rose from bed early so he could have an hour or two of silence to himself in the house. My sisters were no longer that young, but it seemed that the habit stuck.

Until today.

“Father?” I asked again, furrowing my brow as I approached the bed.

He didn’t stir.

At all.

I stopped and stared at him as another, bigger realization hit me.

He’s not snoring. He always did.

But he wasn’t now.

“Father?” I hurried to his side of the bed and studied him closer. A scream built in my throat. It remained trapped there, lodged without any escape. My heart raced as I tried to comprehend what my eyes were suggesting. That my father, so still and unmoving—not breathing—might be…

“Father.” I shook him, feeling the lifelessness of his weight being pushed. “Oh, fuck.” I shoved at him harder, moving one hand to hover over his face. No air huffed up. His chest didn’t rise and fall. With shaking fingers, I laid my hand over him, waiting for a telltale thump-thump of a heartbeat to reach my skin.

Nothing. He wasn’t breathing. His heart had stopped.

I choked on air, stuttering to breathe through this shock. “Dead?” I whispered, shaking him harder one last time. His hand fell off his stomach, flopping to the mattress with a weight that couldn’t be denied.

“Oh, fuck.” I staggered backward, staring at him as horror and dread consumed me. Dizzy and scared, I almost tripped on my own feet. But I managed to turn and run.

“Francis!” I shouted, hoping he was the patroller on duty near this wing of the mansion. He usually was, but I couldn’t bank on normalcy. Nothing about finding my father dead this morning was “usual”.

“Francis!” I tried once more, louder, no longer worried about waking anyone else up. With this eerie feeling of being so alone up here, I needed to see another person. “Mother! Francis!” I called out for them, frantic for someone to reply.

When Beatrice stepped out of her room, I held my hand up and told her to go back to bed. “No. Just stay in your room until I come to you.”

Lucia opened her door and poked her head out too. “Giulia? What’s happening?”

Marianna showed too, snapping to attention. I could only imagine how tense I looked, but whatever expression she saw on my face, it prompted her to listen. “Come on. Let’s wait in my room.” She tossed a worried glance over her shoulder at me as she ushered Beatrice and Lucia into her room.

“Mother!” I ran down to her room as the sound of guards and soldiers rushed through the house.

“Mother—” I stopped short after flinging her door open. She lay on the floor, face-down. The pale-pink carpet cut a sharp contrast to the blue of her nightgown, but I saw at once that she lived. Lying on her arm, with it trapped under her stomach, she reclined in an awkward position that emphasized how her chest still rose and fell.

She was breathing. She was alive.

“Mother!” I dropped to my knees and rolled her over quickly, seeing that she was out of it, but breathing.

“Miss Giulia,” a guard said, announcing his arrival as he rushed into the room. As soon as he noticed my mother on the floor, I backed up.

“She’s asleep.” I shook my head as I slapped her face. Then I shook her. As the guards filed in, I let them try to rouse her too. “She was asleep on the floor. I found her like this. But?—”

Shouts sounded from across the hall. They’d found him. “Father’s dead,” I told the guard still trying to revive my mother.

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