Dominus by Tom Fox

Author:Tom Fox
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FICTION / Thrillers / Crime
Publisher: Quercus
Published: 2016-05-03T04:00:00+00:00

37

Headquarters of Global Capital Italia: 10:38 a.m.

“The Pope intends to speak to the media?” Caterina Amato couldn’t hide her surprise. “Do we have any idea what he’s going to say?”

“Our men inside the Vatican have only been able to determine that he’s set on speaking, and that the press event will take place soon. The Pope’s not told anyone what he intends to say.”

Caterina’s mind churned through the potential outcomes of this news, annoyed that the Fraternity hadn’t provided more concrete information. She was constantly exasperated by the group, furtive and secretive as they were, and utterly consumed with a project that was of the least possible interest to her. A fraternity of the Roman Catholic Church’s old guard, dedicated to rooting out the influences of modernity and reform on their beloved magisterium. Christ, could there be a more loathsome, pointless undertaking? Or one that less convincingly masked these men’s real character? They were individuals driven by their lusts and desires, just like everyone else.

Lusts and desires. Old memories flashed back. Caterina was eleven, her brother Davide was fifteen and her mother had only recently sent them both off to the Sisters of Perpetual Mercy boarding school near San Vittorino. Caterina could still smell the stench of that place: stone and wood and pine cleaner lingering in the air of dark, seemingly endless corridors. But what she truly remembered was what had taken place there—not to her, but to her brother.

Caterina had been treated like every other young girl in the school: harshly, lovelessly, indiscriminately. But the boys experienced the place very differently. She remembered Davide being taken off to see the school’s ecclesiastical supervisor, a twenty-eight-year-old priest who would come to the institution intermittently to make his inspections. Those invariably included special meetings with hand-selected students, always boys.

She remembered how Davide trembled each time he was called to those encounters. How he came back from the distant inspector’s office pale, unable to speak, faltering in his walk. She never asked, but she knew what happened to him there, and to others like him, at the hands of “our reverend father.”

And she never forgot the abusive priest’s name: Father Donato Viteri. It burned its way into her mind as she watched her brother grow wearier and wearier, his love of life stolen from him. When, three months after Davide had graduated from the school and departed into the world, news reached her that he had committed suicide, her world changed permanently. Davide had bled out, alone in an alley, his wrists slashed by the fragments of a beer bottle that was found still clutched in his grip. Caterina had been fourteen.

She had run away from school within a week, making her way to the capital. She found work in Rome at a bare wage until she’d earned enough to buy a cheap camera and a few rolls of film, then she’d put the first career plan of her life into action. She’d returned to the Sisters of Perpetual Mercy. She’d

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