“Rossi. I’m so sorry I haven’t returned your calls. Things have been, well, kind of crazy.” Who was she kidding? How about balls out, so insane, you wouldn’t believe it if I told you?
“Si. Montgomery filled me in on some of it yesterday when he came by.”
Rom had gone to see Rossi? And he hadn’t told her? Why didn’t that surprise her? And why did the news hurt like ever-living hell? “Oh, right. Well, we’re headed back into the city today, so I’d planned to come by and see you myself.”
She covered as best she could.
“Good. Good. I have news you’ve been waiting for.”
“Tell me!”
“The museum group has contacted me and granted you and Montgomery access to the palazzo. That’s good news, si?” he asked when she didn’t immediately get excited.
Yeah, it’d be good news if they hadn’t already risked their neck to get inside.
“That’s great, Rossi.”
“Hmmm. You don’t sound as excited as I imagined you would be. How about if I told you, they’ve also granted you permission to their records and possibly some information on the whereabouts of the missing paintings?”
“Now you’re talking!” she said.
“Yes. I thought that bit might get your attention.”
“So when can we get in?” Jule knew it would take her and Rom two hours to get back into Verona. “In a few hours?”
“The new owners have requested a night visit. It shouldn’t interfere with the workmen they have there during the day.”
Workmen? Rom had some major explaining to do.
“So, this evening, then?”
“Yes. Seven o’clock.”
Jule felt the bubbles of excitement start to swell in her stomach. They were close.
“Oh, Rossi, I could kiss you. You’ve been such a help. I owe you,” Jule said.
Rossi cleared his throat. “Forgive me for asking, but is everything okay?”
Jeez. Was it that obvious that her life had gone to hell?
“I’m living in the moment, Rossi. Not a state I’m used to. But I think everything will work out eventually. Thanks for asking.”
Man was she ever a bad liar. Fortunately, he didn’t know her well enough to know Jule Casale just didn’t lie.
…
Orti answered on the third ring.
“Found anything out for me, yet?” Rom asked.
“Montecchi, my old friend, good to hear from you again. And yes, I have some information I think you’ll be interested in.”
“Good. Can you meet?” Rom heard him flipping pages and murmuring to himself.
“Today? Three o’clock?”
“Fine. Your office?”
“No. I take coffee at that hour. I’ll meet you in Piazza Erbe.”
Rom disconnected and turned to find Jule in the doorway. “Who’s Orti?”
“A contact,” Rom said moving through the kitchen.
“And you’re meeting him today?”
“Seems that way.”
“I want to go with you.”
His plan had been for her to stay put, but after her concerns from yesterday with an unidentified something in the woods, coming with him might actually be better.
“Fine.”
Jule sputtered to a complete stop. The look on her face was priceless.
“Expecting something else?” He asked casually.
She recovered quickly. “No. I’m ready when you are.” And she was. Her bag was already packed and slung across her shoulder.
She dropped to one knee when Max nudged her leg. “Oh, Max, buddy, I’m going to miss you something terrible. We’ve been a good partnership these last two days. Thanks for watching my back.”
Jule hugged the dog who, amazingly, stayed put.
“Is there someone to take care of him now that we’re leaving?”
“The other tenants will come and retrieve him. He’ll be well taken care of.”
Jule nodded and stood, sailing out the door without another glance, unshed tears glistening in her eyes.
They made it into Verona with little to no conversation. Rom guessed something troubled her, but Jule kept her own council and he didn’t force the admittance, knowing she would have to make the leap to trust him completely and share in her own time.
He parked and turned to Jule, who looked out the side window. “You’ve never been back in all this time?”
Rom nodded.
“But you remember everything here like it was yesterday.”
He raised his eyebrows, not sure if she wanted confirmation, or if she was just thinking out loud.
She shook her head. “What now?”
“I need to meet someone in an hour.”
His plan started at three o’clock and if Orti came through with the information he needed, Rom planned to have Mascaro neutralized by this evening. Once that threat was out of the way, they could return to the paintings. And figuring out what the hell Lawrence was trying to tell him.
“All right. While you do that, I’m going to have a look around.”
“Whoa. Whoa. What? We’re not separating.”
“So you plan to babysit me every second of the day?”
He scowled. Hard. “As a matter of fact, I do.”
She opened the passenger door, slammed it, and started marching away.
Rom slammed his own door, locked it, and hurried, catching Jule as she rounded the corner to the Piazza.
“I didn’t mean for it to come out like that. You don’t need a babysitter, but I feel better when I’m with you. And I know exactly what is going on. There’s a son-of-bitch out there, in this city, who wants you in a very bad way. Remember?”
“I’m just going to talk to Rossi. Find out if he’s turned up anything.”
He didn’t like it, but perhaps it would be better if she went on her way, at least until after his meeting with Orti. She’d be safe enough with Rossi.
Rom nodded. “I’ll walk you to his office. But you’ll stay there until I return?”
She looked at her watch. “How long?”
He didn’t know, but hopefully a couple of hours should do it. “I’ll be back at five to pick you up.”
Jule smiled tightly and nodded.
So they set out for Rossi’s.
…
Castelvecchio towered in the distance, blocking out the rest of the city and the Adige beyond. Rossi’s office was in an outbuilding inside the ten-foot thick fortress walls, walls that had seen numerous sieges, wars, and uprisings. And still they stood, testament to the power of the noble families of the Verona.
A chill crept up her spine, pricking the hairs on her neck.
Jule looked around, making eye contact with the people of the street. She glanced at parked cars, looking for any sign of Pio.
Nothing.
The crisp air had a way of making her feel alive and connected to the world in a way she hadn’t felt back home in Chicago. It soothed and calmed her escalating fears.
“So we saw four paintings still in the altar.” Rom counted them off his fingers. “Five are missing, but we know the content of two of those.”
Jule nodded as she wrote, thinking of Rom’s and the Institute’s paintings back home.
“There’s no telling where the last three are. They could still be in Italy or halfway around the world for all we know.”
“More reason to get back in touch with Rossi,” Jule said. Not knowing he already had.
“The second painting depicted the wedding in Lawrence’s cell at the monastery. Nothing new there.”
Jule disagreed. It was all new to her. But she wrote it down anyway. “Tell me about it.”
“What, the wedding?” He looked uncomfortable.
“Yeah.”
“What do you want to know?”
Was he serious? “What was it like? You said Shakespeare got some stuff wrong, but hello, I don’t know what that would be. You’re the closet source to the truth.”
“It was quic
k and quiet, tempered by the fact that the ceremony had to remain a secret. Lawrence was more than happy to perform the union. He was looking to move up and figured the shortest route was through noble families.”
She noticed he didn’t say we or us when describing the ceremony. Out of respect for her?
“Were you happy?”
His expression was inscrutable as he met her stare.
“But come what sorrow can, it cannot countervail the exchange of joy that one short minute gives me in her sight.”
Jule couldn’t move. She couldn’t look away. For the briefest of moments, she caught a glimpse of the poet, the dreamer, the lover.
But in a blink of an eye, he was gone. Replaced by the hardened man sitting across from her.
“I was excited to marry because it meant I could sleep with her. You know, the priorities of youth.” He laughed, but it wasn’t happy.
Okay. Moving on.
Jule recalled the image of Rom in the fourth painting housed in the former museum. Dressed for battle, dressed for war.
She had a feeling she knew what it meant, especially after their conversation last night, but Jule wanted to hear it from him.
“After I left Verona, I fought. I hired myself out to whoever paid and waged war. I guess I wanted to test fate and see if it was true.”
His hands lay flat against his legs, but Jule saw the tension there. The effort not to curl his fingers into fists and pound something.
“That what? You couldn’t die?”
He glanced at her. “Seems logical doesn’t it? If I couldn’t have death, I would bring it to others.”
“You lived like that? How long?”
“A long time,” he told her quietly.
Maybe if they kept talking, Rom might be able to talk out some of the burden he’d carried so long. Jule couldn’t even begin to imagine the horrors he’d seen, the grief he carried.
No one should have to go through that.
Rom stroked her cheek, the calluses on his fingers causing her to lean into the gesture with greedy enjoyment.
“Forbidden or not, it’s a love worthy of waiting six hundred years until I found you.”
“And what do you intend to do with me now that you have me?” she asked.
“Never let you go.”
She wanted nothing more than to be loved so completely. So utterly.
She spoke with her eyes, letting the emotion shine through.
Rom cleared his throat. “Right. I suppose Lawrence was trying to tell me I would wander far and wide, to be cliché, before I found you. The modern you.
“If I’d stuck around, listened to the man for Christ’s sake, I might have figured this out so much sooner. Found you a long time ago.”
“But it wouldn’t have been me. Not this me. Not Jule Casale.” Jule sat up straight in her chair, an idea occurring to her. “Maybe what Lawrence meant was that Juliet had to go through all of these transformations before you found her. That I had to be born as me before this whole thing would work out.”
He let a long breath loose. “Possibly.”
“Okay. So let’s talk about the last one.”
“The dagger and the chalice.” Rom nodded.
She wondered if he knew the significance of those two objects in Renaissance art. The masculine and the feminine? Procreation? Rebirth? Life.
She hoped it meant their rebirth and not the birth of an unexpected child. As in they’d had unprotected sex. And Jule was at the perfect place in her cycle.
“The dagger I know. Obviously. But what’s the chalice?”
“The cup from which I drank the elixir,” he said.
“Ohhhh.”
And the dagger Juliet used to kill herself. Jule subconsciously rubbed the scar under her breast. She looked up to find Rom watching her and immediately lowered her hand.
“We have the dagger. What about the cup?”
Rom was quiet for a while. “I don’t know. I don’t have it.”
“But you think we need it?”
“If he went to the trouble to paint us with the dagger and the cup, I’d say it’s a sure bet.”
“Any idea where to look?”
“I have an idea.”
Jule would do some searching on her own. Go back to the palazzo museum and see if they’d overlooked anything. Which wouldn’t be surprising considering they had been looking during the dead of night – and had been shot at before they finished.
From the corner of her eye she caught movement through a side street. A flash of black as someone stood behind a parked car. The city was full of these tiny streets where nobody could see anything until you stood in the middle and looked down the shadowy row of buildings.
Rom saw it before she did, because he was already turning to confront the threat.
Just as his back was turned, Jule spotted two more guys emerging from behind a city bus heading straight for them.
“Rom,” she started to yell, but was yanked back off her feet, hard into someone’s chest.
Jule saw Rom turn and take in her attacker in one swift movement before meeting the guy in the alley head on. He slammed the guy against the parked car, sounds of crunching metal echoing between the buildings.
She was being dragged away. Jule intensified her struggle, but the guy holding her applied more pressure to her windpipe, cutting off any hope of air.
She watched Rom slam the man’s back onto the hood of the car. The guy’s legs went limp and he slid to the street where he lay half hidden behind the car.
Rom spun, searching for her. She tried to call out, but couldn’t.
Rom crossed the street toward them at a dead run, but the other two men met him halfway, brandishing guns. It didn’t slow Rom. He kept advancing. A fifth man appeared and Jule saw him force a stun gun to Rom’s unprotected back.
Next thing she knew, she was being dragged into darkness and cuffed to some sort of bar welded inside a van.
Castelvecchio disappeared out the front windshield as the driver squealed the van’s tires and fled.
Leaving Rom.
Chapter Nineteen
The stun gun took him down, but it didn’t put him out. “Pray that you’re gone by the time I get up, because I will kill you,” he told the men loading him into the back of a windowless van. A van just like the one that had sped away with his Jule.
The grim faced Italian carrying his feet smiled and dropped Rom to the bare metal floor inside. Then he climbed in and kicked Rom, hard, in the stomach.
“Go ahead,” Rom ground between clenched teeth. “I’m still going to beat the shit out of you until you tell me where Mascaro is and then, after that, I’m going to rip your head from your shoulders.”
The guy laughed again, but this time it wasn’t as convincing as before. Although the kick to his ribs delivered the same message.
He rode in silence for several minutes as the four men in the van, two up front in the only seats and two in back, one sitting on his back, the other pointing a gun at his head, talked about the drop off.
The overriding physical urge to go after Jule had his body pulsing with pent up energy. He couldn’t afford to dwell on her safety, the helplessness of his situation building anger and fear by the moment. An explosion was eminent.
The stupid bastards either didn’t know he spoke fluent Italian or they didn’t give a shit. Either way, Rom was regaining some feeling in his arms, which hurt like a son of a bitch in his current position with sluggo crushing them with his ass.
They were taking him to an estate outside of town, near the airport. Someplace quiet and far removed from Jule. That fact seemed to be of supreme importance to the man who’d hired them to do the job.
Where had he heard those words before?
Mascaro. The evil bastard had her.
…
Jule woke to unfamiliar surroundings. High lavender walls met a colorful frescoed ceiling where nymphs, cherubs, and nearly nude women with plump faces frolicked.
; She sooo wasn’t in the mood for it.
She sat up and a velvety comforter slid down her stomach. To rest on a king sized canopied bed with matching hangings. In a room furnished like the height of the Renaissance.
Now she was really creeped out. She climbed out of the bed and padded across the room to the shuttered windows stretching from floor to ceiling.
Throwing them open to gaze out at the view beyond told her diddly. It was night, but she recognized the Erbe tower in the distance and the duomo dome, but it didn’t tell her where she was. Or more specifically at who’s pleasure she now served.
“Ah, you’re awake.”
Pio. Jule kept gazing out the window, pretending she really was on vacation and not trapped in some horrific nightmare.
“I trust you rested?”
Nope. Wasn’t going to work.
“How could I not since your goons drugged me?” she said, turning to find Pio setting a tray with two teacups on an exquisite sixteenth century writing desk.
“Come now,” he said, smiling. “It’s all behind us.”
He moved further into the room, opening the other three shuttered windows to let the moon’s light spill in.
“What do you think of your room?” Pio seemed happier than she’d seem him, well, ever. And he looked good. Damn it, she hated admitting that, but he somehow seemed made over. Maybe it was the clothes. They were new and Italian.
“Where am I?” she said by way of an answer.
He threw a log on the red coals in the marble fireplace, humming to himself while he played domestic.
“Our house. I bought it this week as a gift for you. It’s the museum palazzo, but of course no longer a museum. A private, very private, residence now.”
Pio grinned, waiting for her to smile, too. When she didn’t, he advanced on her. “While it hasn’t seen family for years, we’ll change all that, Jule. I know it’s a little sudden, but I can’t see waiting around. Just as soon as the contractors finish the renovations, we can start our nursery.”
What? “We’re not having any children.”
Pio stopped in his tracks, jerked out of his planning either by her tone or her words, Jule didn’t know which.
“No children, Pio. No marriage. And no playing house.”
“But Jule, darling. I’m not playing. You’re here, in our new house. Where we will live together as husband and wife in every sense of the obligation. We’re not going back to Chicago. Ever.”
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