Angelo is a highly skilled assassin for The Family, an American crime syndicate which consolidated the last remnants of the Italian mafia, the Irish mob, and various smaller groups. His career was not chosen but destined: the Don Venatori adopted Angelo as an orphan, raising him as his own son. Years later, as the allure of glory fades, as the bodies start to come back at night, only one thing keeps Angelo in the game: his loyalty. To abandon the Family would be to abandon his own. Therefore he purges his guilt in confession, seeking in the next life a redemption unthinkable in this one.

Someday, he says, he will finally leave this city, to forget and to be forgotten. That fateful day which is always ahead of us: someday.

Comfort is the mother of boredom, and it was Mariana's stifling upper-middle-class existence, confined within the walls of the gated neighborhoods and the fleets of armored cars between them, which gave her the craving for action: first as a shoplifter, then as a pickpocket. It was simply fate that one afternoon she would steal the young Angelo's gun, that he would chase her down, and that, after returning the weapon, she would accept his offer of a date.

She later took the oath of The Family, changing her last name to an Italian one as was required from outside inductees: to Vitti. It was a long journey from petty thief to consummate killer, but Mariana is now a local celebrity, feared by even the hardened criminals of the underworld.