“Baudelaire told a little white lie,” Vitucci said after turning his chair so he faced them, lacing his hands on the desk as though to put them at greater ease. It worked. “He doesn’t enjoy lying, but he’s loyal. He raised me after I barely survived the massacre that happened in the house of horrors I grew up in, otherwise known as the Van Daele manor. My mother was the woman I told you about, little rabbit, whose throat was slit on the ballroom floor. She was hired help there, without family, no real skills to speak of. A throwaway. A nobody. Van Daele and his friends debased her at their parties. They captured her if she tried to run. They broke her eventually, so that she begged them for the drugs they provided. She anticipated her cage for the reward of escape. An appalling paradox, no?” His lips tilted, but the upper half of his face remained stoic.
“I worked there, too,” he went on. “In the kitchen. In the garden, wherever I was needed. I stole their jewels and their books. I learned to read, and I learned to plot.”
Their jewels. House of horrors I grew up in. So it had been his story. And the massacre wasn’t merely rumor, the way Baudelaire had framed it. She remembered how the man sitting in front of her had whispered, murmuring soft and low against her ear, moving subtly through different accents she hadn’t been able to quite identify. He was using a very slight one now, practically imperceptible, but she thought she recognized the cadence as purely Italian. That would make sense, with a name like Vitucci. Then again, nothing about this man seemed to make sense. Who are you really?
Her mind pulled forth the other things he’d said in that room so many years ago. They had only each other. They. The twins. A boy and a girl. His sister? Her gaze moved to his pinkie finger, where a flash of red glinted in the light. A red diamond. One of two. Just like the children themselves, who wore matching gems to signify their ownership by gluttons. “You. You were one of the twins in the story you told me in that room,” Noelle said. She felt Evan go more rigid beside her.
“Correct, little rabbit. But it was not a story. It was my life. She was my life. Her name was Celesse.” A note of something she’d almost call longing had come into his voice, but with his next words, it was gone. “I protected her when I could. I offered myself in exchange for her if there was interest. Sometimes there was. Sometimes there was not.” He paused, his pinkie tapping lightly against the desk very momentarily. “As a boy, living in that house, I had survived—and helped my mother and sister survive—by reading not only books but people. By collecting. Personality clues. Habits. Fears and motivations. That’s what being a good therapist or profiler is about too. You put all those collected clues together, like a puzzle. If you’ve collected enough pieces, it forms a picture.”
“You could have used those qualities for good,” Evan gritted.
“I did use them for good. Perhaps someday you’ll come to agree.”
“No, you became one of the monsters you claim to hate.”
“Yes, but it’s the only way to take such monsters down.”
“How?”
Vitucci didn’t answer him; he only smiled and went on with his story. “That night . . . they thought I’d died along with the rest, but a kind man who worked at the mortuary noticed I was in fact not quite dead after all. He understood who the men who ruled that city were. His own family had been victimized by their power. His betters, or so they thought themselves, were covering up the scene of the crime, and it gave him the opportunity to secret me away to a doctor in Italy. Vitucci. He healed me, and he gave me his name, as he had an in with the medical clerks in his village. He was a very old man, however, and so he sent me to his cousin in France to be raised. Baudelaire took me under his wing. He educated me. He raised me as a son. He helped me trace the bastards who thought they’d killed me, along with my mother and sister, here to Reno, Nevada, in the United States of America.”
He paused and looked between them. “They’d hidden themselves behind false names and new companies. It took years before I recognized one of them on the news, a man named Fontane, who was being sued for wrongful death. He’d changed his name to Leonard Sinclair. But I’d known him as the son of a judge who had guaranteed court cases were always ruled in his friends’ favor. That judge was one of the originals. Although who knows if that’s the correct term. It’s hard to say where anything begins. All I know is that their games have evolved over the decades in both numbers and depravity. What may have begun as a little nonconsensual fun with the hired help has grown into a multibillion-dollar, highly technical organization focused on perverse blood sport. It’s stunning what can happen when certain appetites are insatiable and money is no object.”