When I lay eyes on Violetta in her uncle’s hallway, it’s not a woman I see. She is a child clawing her way up the far side of the cliff to adulthood, like the sun just cresting the horizon line, casting a new glow on the world.


She is an unfinished transformation. I’m aware of the pressure of her adolescence pushing against the child hard enough to break it, but in that moment, the change setting upon her is not what moves me.


On that day, in the hallway, she is not a human with a body rushing through the stages of life, rising sun after rising sun, changing with the persistence of a ticking clock. She is something more.


I’m at that house to bind myself to a treasure I promised to secure and protect. Every black-veiled nonna and hot-barreled soldier will murder and die for it. It is our power, and it’s been left to me. I’ve come for what’s mine.


But when I see Violetta, the womanchild with more power and darkness in her eyes than I’ve seen in assassin or priest, I know she is eternal darkness and everlasting light.


Fate has sent me there to protect a treasure, and it is not hard stones or cold metal. 


It is Violetta Moretti.