“Uh, no,” he said.
She was alarmed. “What do you mean, no?”
“I just mean no,” he repeated. “You can’t leave yet.”
She yanked at her arm. “How dare you?” Her voice began to rise in pitch. “How dare you push me around? Let go of me, goddamnit!”
He easily managed her flailing and struggling. “I’m sorry.”
“Why?” she shrieked. “I have had enough of this shit!”
“Yes, you have, absolutely,” he said. “And I will let you go, I promise, as soon as Bruno gets out here.”
Her stomach went into freefall. She began to shake her head. “You can’t do that to me. You just can’t.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, helplessly. “I have to. I promised. I’m sorry.”
“You’ll be sorrier when I start screaming!”
He shook his head. “No, Lily. Every person here, every last damn person, will back me up. Go ahead and scream. You’ll see.”
“Then I’ll just tear your face off, if no one will help me,” she snarled. “Say good bye to your eyes right now!”
“I don’t care,” he said, grimly stoic. “I would rather die badly, right here and now, than let you disappear on him a second time.”
She realized how her abduction in the hospital must have felt from his viewpoint. The crowd was spilling out into the garden, curious people looking their way as the string ensemble started to play again.“You don’t understand,” she said, haltingly. “Things are different now. Between us.”
“I don’t care,” Aaro said. “That’s for you guys to thrash out.”
“That’s exactly it!” she wailed, jerking at her trapped arm. “I can’t deal with any thrashing right now!”
“Lily.”
Bruno’s voice wiped her mind clean. She forgot Aaro existed. The manacle on her arm disappeared. Along with all the available oxygen.
Close up, she could see the damage he’d sustained in their adventure. Shiny pink marks on his cheekbone, the thickened eyelid. A notch in his ear. Burn scars on his hands. But it was the pain in his eyes that made her feel like a fist was squeezing her heart.
Bruno released her eyes, flicked his gaze to Aaro. “Thank you.”
“Anytime, man.” Aaro slunk away.
She watched him go. “Anytime, my ass,” she muttered, sourly. “Does he take hostages for you on a regular basis?”
“No,” Bruno said quietly. “Just you, Lily. You’re special.”
“Not really,” she said. “I’m been enjoying my non-special status lately. My life is so normal now. Quiet.”
His jaw contracted. “I see,” he said. “Congratulations.”
They stared at each other. Now was the time to deliver her bombshell. The timing was terrible, but how could she see him again, on another occasion? Torture herself, over and over, with these feelings?
But it was absurd to pile another burden onto a man who had just single-handedly shouldered the responsibility for two toddlers.
Bruno, I’m pregnant. Uh, OK. So? What could he do about it?
This was not the moment. She’d miscalculated. She called on her minimal knowledge of wedding choreography for a distraction. “Um, aren’t you supposed to be in a receiving line, or something?”
“I bailed to come after you. Skipped out on the exit march, too. Like a rhino on stampede. Ronnie had to go out on Sean’s arm. Edie’s aunt is going to tear me to shreds and stomp on the pieces.”
“Oh. Well, then. That’s bad. You better get going,” she urged. “Can’t have any of that. Tearing and stomping, I mean.”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “I’m used to it. Being stomped on.”
She shrank away, sensing a trap. “Um. I think that’s my cue to—”
“Are you staying for the reception?” His scarred hand clamped her wrist. Her wrist went nuts at the contact. A ripple effect that shot bright sparks all through her system.
“I don’t think that would be a good idea,” she quavered.
“I have to talk to you,” he said. “Please. Come with me.”
She grabbed a wrought iron gate and hung on. “To where?”
“To the receiving line. I can’t risk letting you out of my sight.”
“No problem!” Liv McCloud popped up, Eamon in her arms, and leaned to give Lily a kiss. “Glad to see you, Lily. You’re wanted urgently in the receiving line, Bruno. Hurry. Edie’s aunt is twitching and frothing. Don’t worry, Eamon and I will babysit Lily for you.”
“I don’t need to be babysat!” Lily snapped, testily.
“Of course not.” Liv took her arm. “Le’s go pay our respects to the bride and groom, shall we?”
It was a unique form of hell to have everyone hugging her, exchanging grins and winks, thumbs-up, when she was just going to let them down again, once they knew the truth. The receiving line itself was the worst. She was passed from one McCloud to the next, getting fierce hugs and significant glances from each one. Bruno grabbed her when she got to him and held her tight, in a hard, breathless clinch. The raw, burning look in his eyes just undid her.
Edie gave her a hug when Bruno finally released her. “Thanks for coming.”
Lily laughed, soggily. “I had to, right? To get the portrait of my mom. Holding it for ransom like that, that was a very dirty trick.”
“Whatever works, right? I kept my side of the bargain. It’s in the car, all ready for you,” Edie assured her. Her arms tightened around Lily again. “He needs you, you know?” she whispered.
Lily’s heart was squeezed. She extricated herself, greeted Edie’s sister, a dewy creature named Ronnie. Then Tam gripped her arm.
“Congratulations for Irina,” Lily offered. “I saw her during the ceremony. She’s beautiful. I’m so glad things turned out well.”
“Me, too,” Tam said. She leaned forward, breathing the words into Lily’s ear. “Far be it from me to criticize a sister for giving a man a hard time,” she murmured. “Just be sure you don’t make yourself pay too high a price for it. Satisfaction’s hollow when you’re all alone at night.”
Lily jerked herself loose. “It’s not that simple!”
“Right. Nothing ever is.” She shoved Lily right into Zia Rosa’s waiting arms. “Good luck.”
Zia’s smothering embrace was sharply perfumed with jungle gardenia. Zia cupped her hands, pinched her cheeks. “Ehi, you’re pale! Sciupata! Not eating?” Her eyes slitted. “How’s the tummy?”
“Just fine, just fine,” Lily assured her hastily. “The best.”
“You seen our little Tonio, and Lena? Ain’t they cute?” She jerked Lily’s chin around. “See? Look! Miles has Tonio, and Sveti’s got Lena.”
Lily looked. The kids really were beautiful. Tonio giggled madly, head and shoulders flung back over Miles’s arm as Miles yanked up the kid’s crisp white blouse and snuffled his belly. Lena was on her butt on the floor in her white dress, trying to take off her little white Mary Janes, while Sveti crouched next to her, imploring her to reconsider.
“They are beautiful,” she said, with utter sincerity.
“Ah, but they need a mamma, hmm?” Zia Rosa murmured, sentimentally. She pinched Lily’s cheek again.
A strong arm slid around her waist, pulling. “Zia, that’ll do.”
Lily didn’t know whether to be grateful or panicked when Bruno swept her away from them all, maneuvering her into the ballroom all decked out for dining and dancing. A band was setting up, and the glamorous string ensemble she’d noticed at the ceremony was tuning up, too. “What’s with the musicians?” she asked him.
“The Venus Ensemble?” he asked. “What about them?”
“Six gorgeous girls in low-cut sequined gowns, and they play really well, too? It just seems like a statistical abnormality to me.”
Bruno grinned. “Nah. Remember what happened to Kev and Edie? The mind control, and all that crazy shit?”
“Sure I remember,” she said.
“Those were the gir
ls that got imported to do the crowning jobs. Trafficked from Moldavia, Belarus, the Ukraine, with all the usual tricks. Promises of jobs, green cards. Since the best crown interfaces were with female artists, the traffickers recruited girls from conservatories. And obviously, they favored the pretty ones.”
“That’s so creepy.” Lily looked at the group of beauties busily tuning their instruments, chilled at the thought.
“It is, but it turned out OK. After Kev saved them, they got green cards and formed this string ensemble, and now they’re raking in the dough. Posh weddings, receptions, concerts. They’re famous, and hot, and they kick ass. Their agent can’t handle all the offers.” He waved. A dark-haired violinist smiled back. “But this gig they’re playing for free.”
The first violinist lifted her instrument to her chin. The others looked at her for a moment of expectant silence.
A nod, and they launched into Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons.”
Bruno gasped as the music slammed into him like an eighteenwheeler. He hung on to reality by a thread. The music dragged him back to that hour in Julian’s car, lying in the backseat with a smothering black mask over his head, wondering what was happening to Lily.
His blood pressure dipped, his stomach flopped. He gasped for breath. Everything swirled and spun.
“. . . the matter? Bruno? Are you OK? Bruno!”
He was against a column, Lily’s shoulder bracing him. He dragged her anxious face into focus.
“Are you OK?” she asked. “Should I call someone? Are you sick?”
“Just get me away from this fucking music. Please. Fast.”
He kept his arm around her as she steered him away from the music. It almost disappeared when she pushed through a door into a dark, quiet corridor. She opened the first door she found, which proved to be some sort of library. She positioned him in front of a wingback chair. He thudded into it, still gasping for breath.
Lily put her hands on her hips. “So. What’s this all about?” she asked. “You don’t like baroque violin suites?”
“Nah, they’re OK.” He swallowed, his mouth trembling. “That particular piece was playing on the car radio while Julian was driving me to King’s headquarters. It’s just . . . it’s a bad memory.”
“Ah. I see.” She squeezed his shoulder. “Wait here. Be right back.”
“Lily! Don’t—” Don’t go. He was saying it to empty air.
He lurched to his feet, but his knees wobbled, and he flopped back down again, despair opening inside him like a sinkhole.
He’d scared her off. Too needy. She didn’t want any part of his cracked-up, stressed-out bullshit, and he didn’t blame her.
He could chase her through the ballroom, bleating for her love, but how pathetic, how useless, how undignified would that be? How painful for everyone to watch. All he could do now was try not to lose his shit at Kev’s wedding. That would be selfish, and childish.
“Hey.” The door opened. His heart sprang up into the air.
Lily held a steaming cup in her hand. “I saw them setting up the coffee station. Thought you could use a shot of caffeine.” His eyes drank her in and overflowed. He covered them with his hand. “Thanks,” he said thickly.
Her shoes clicked toward him. She held the cup out. He drained it in a couple deep swallows. It helped. He grabbed her hand. “Don’t go.”
“Um.” She stared down to where her wrist was swallowed by his hand. She was looking at his scars. He wasn’t sure at what point in their adventure he’d gotten them. That whole last day was a blur of pain and fire, with a few highlights pointing out, like spikes.
Like the part where he’d let King convince him that Lily was one of the guy’s operatives.
She wasn’t pulling away, though.
“So you’ve got the kids,” she said. “You’ve adopted them?”
“I’m in the process. They’ve been with me for a few weeks now.”
“Are they, um . . . OK?” she asked, delicately.
He shrugged. “They seem to be OK. They’re great kids. Holy terrors, particularly Tonio. Zia Rosa tells me he’s exactly like me.”
“How did you find out their names?”
“We didn’t. We named them, Zia and I. For Tony and Mamma. Antonio and Magdalena. They didn’t have names. Evidently King didn’t assign names until the third year, when the programming began.”
She shivered. “How awful.”
“It’s better,” he said. “It was appropriate to name them for Tony and Mamma. Tonio’s a big boss. He runs the show, or thinks he does. And Lena’s a diva, pulling all of Tonio’s strings. They’re awesome.”
“And you?” She tugged his hand gently. “How is it for you?”
He smiled and shook his head. “It’s good,” he said. “Difficult. Crazy. I don’t sleep much, but I never really did. I love those kids. And I’m glad to be doing something hard, and important. I’m lucky I have something to give a shit about.” He paused. “Under the circumstances.”
A tremor went through her. “So,” she said, with forced brightness. “What do they call you, then? Bruno? Uncle Bruno? Zio Bruno?”
“No,” he said. “They call me Daddy.”
She blinked. “They don’t need a brother or an uncle,” he went on. “They need a father. I never had one, but they’re damn well going to.”
“Ah.” There was an awkward silence. “Well. It’s amazing. And so lucky that you got them before King started, um, messing with them.”
“Wouldn’t have mattered if he had messed with them. King messed with me, and my mamma still thought I was worth saving.”
“Of course you were,” she soothed. “I wasn’t questioning that.”
Her eyes were big, wary. He was making her nervous. Cool it.
“What happened to those other kids we found?” she asked timidly. “The teenagers who were in the white room? Are they OK?”
He shook his head. “They’re struggling,” he said. “The fewer years of programming they’ve gone through, the better off they are. There were thirty younger ones, and they’re hanging in there. But don’t you know all this? I figured Liv or Edie would keep you up to date.”
Since you refused to take my calls or respond to my e-mails.
“I’ve been incommunicado,” she said. “Trying to figure out what to do withmyself. Everything is different, now that Howard’s gone. I don’t have to write term papers for pay anymore, thank God. After what happened, I couldn’t stomach any more of that. Whatever I do from now on, it has to be real. Even if I make only a quarter of the money.”
“I hear you,” Bruno said, with feeling. “So you’re going to write papers for yourself, then?”
“I was considering it. I think I’d like academia. Maybe teaching English, or writing, at the high school or college level. We’ll see.”
“You’d be good. Your students will love you and fear you.”
“We’ll see,” she hedged. “Who knows.”
“I know,” he said. “Believe me. I know.”
She flapped her hand at him. “And the adult operatives? Did they ever find the ones who were running around loose?”
Bruno shook his head. “The older kids identified some of them for us, but they’d committed suicide by the time we tracked them down. Probably all of the operatives out in the field did, when they heard about King dying. There’s no way to know for sure.”
She winced. “That’s terrible.”
“Yeah. They were monsters, but they never had a choice.”
Her lips tightened. She waited for a moment before asking the next soft question. “How about your biological brothers and sisters?”
“We found them,” Bruno said quietly. “At least, I assume we have. We can’t be sure until they do genetic testing, and that’ll take time. King told me there were sixteen embryos brought to term, and that Tonio and Lena were the last ones, besides Julian, after all the cullings. If there had been more alive, he would have taunted me with their existence, rather than
lying about it. And there were mass graves on the property. Some of the older kids talked about the cullings. They found the graves using infrared aerial photography.”
She winced. “Oh, God, Bruno. I’m so sorry. How awful.”
“Some were more recent. Some were older, corresponding to the info my mother left on those disks that she hid in the jewelry box.”
“I’m so sorry,” she whispered again. “It’s so horrible for you.”
“Yeah, it messes with my head that there were sixteen of my mother’s children alive, and now they’re all murdered. Some by me.”
“Bullshit!” she burst out. “You never murdered any of those people! They were trying to rip you to pieces! And me, too!”
He was taken aback. “What, defending me now? I thought you hated my guts.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” Lily jerked her hand away. “I just know a self-pitying, masturbatory load of shit when I hear one!” She wound her arms across her chest, which did awesome things to her lush cleavage.
He dragged his eyes from her tits. “That’s intense.”
“Oh, you have no idea,” she told him.
He contemplated the hot buzz in the air between them. The glow of heat. Of hope. It took a long time to work up the nerve to risk it.
“Then you still have feelings for me,” he ventured, quietly.
Lily’s face contracted. She took a step back. “I’m sorry,” she said, her voice choked. “It was a mistake to come here.”
He headed her off at the door. “No. Please, Lily. Let me talk.”
“It’s not going to work.” Her voice shook. “It doesn’t matter what my feelings are. It doesn’t matter.”
He reached behind to the knob and clicked the lock shut. Maneuvered her back into the room, setting her into the chair.
“There’s no point in going over this.” The words burst out of her. “You didn’t trust me when things got bad. And in my experience, things get bad a lot. If we don’t have trust, we don’t have anything.”
He sank down in front of her. “I know. But listen to me.”
“I can’t face that again. I couldn’t survive another—”
“Listen!” he broke in. “I’m begging, Lily. On my knees. For you to just listen to me for a second. OK?”
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