by A. L. Knorr
“We’ll be back for you,” I said, my voice breaking as Campano closed Janet in. Neither Tomio nor I had the resolve to lock the door.
“I know.” She moved forward and put her hand on the glass.
I reached up to press my hand on the plexiglass over hers. When I removed it, Tomio cleaned the glass of prints with his sleeve.
As we left, I reminded Janet to give us two hours to get to the safe-house then test the Lifeline radio so we knew it worked. She nodded. The last thing I saw before the metal door swung shut was her large, haunted eyes.
Part Three
The Sting
Sixteen
Hot Pursuit
Tomio and I didn’t exchange a single word as we drove to the new safe-house and unloaded our luggage. Lost in our own thoughts and feeling weighed down by memories of leaving Janet in her cell, and Gage—wherever he was—pressed us into a morose kind of lethargy.
Pulling our luggage over the crooked stones and up to a large metal gate, I found the key on the ring Campano had given us that matched the huge keyhole and unlocked it. We entered a small rectangular courtyard with an orange tree and a small garden in the center. Two stories of stone balconies with thick curvy spindles ran around the perimeter.
Our flat turned out to be a quaint two-bedroom affair with high ceilings and a window overlooking the street below. Thick storm shutters painted bright red unlocked from the inside and latched to the outer walls. Tomio took the bedroom with the two single beds and left me the four-poster double.
Between the two bedrooms was a bathroom with a claw-foot tub and a line of rust leading into the drain. But the shower tiles were a bright cheery blue with a line of hand-painted lemons frolicking around the top edge, and there were a lot of clean towels in the cupboard. The fridge however was a disappointment of expired condiments and a half-eaten jar of pickles.
“We need to get groceries.” Tomio shut the fridge door and pulled a crumpled menu for a local restaurant from under a magnet which had been fastened to the fridge door. He perused the offerings. “How about some buffalo mozzarella with salad, and a calzone?”
After we’d eaten, still mostly in silence, I leaned against the arch between the kitchen and the living room, rubbing a hand across my brow where I felt the start of a headache.
Tomio considered me. “You okay?”
“Yes. Just...” I couldn’t finish, and it was obvious anyway. This whole situation sucked, except for the presence of Tomio himself. I just spread my palms out to indicate the circumstances in general.
The look on his face said, I know. He pulled me into a hug.
I lay my head against his chest and wrapped my arms around his waist. “How did everything get so messed up?”
Tomio’s heartbeat sounded strong and steady against my ear. He propped his chin on the top of my head. “At the risk of sounding like a moron who hasn’t been paying attention, which mess, exactly, are you referring to?”
“All of it. Ryan. Nero. Gage. Janet.” I paused and Tomio’s body grew still.
“You and me?” he murmured.
I nodded under his chin, then pulled back to look up at him.
His dark eyes roved my face, skimming across my lips in a way that made my heart beat faster.
“Where did you leave things with him?” I asked, knowing he would understand that I meant Gage.
He shoved his hands into his pockets. “You know Gage. He’s all class. He forgave me when I told him what happened. But something like that, it breaks trust. I don’t think we’ll ever be the same. I told him I was sorry and admitted that I’ve been attracted to you ever since I met you. Where did you leave things with him?”
I shivered at the horrible memory, turning away from Tomio so he didn’t see the stricken expression that took over my face like a cramp. “We broke up. He’s hurt and angry and says I don’t know what I want.”
“Do you?” Tomio pulled his hands out of his pockets and crossed his arms over his chest, maybe to keep himself from touching me, maybe to protect himself from my answer.
“I think I do.” I faced him, leaning against the archway dividing the kitchen from the living room. “I just don’t feel right prioritizing what I want until he’s safe.”
A stillness passed through Tomio at my words. I could feel him processing. “You said before that you didn’t think it was a mistake, what we did. I’ve replayed your words countless times since that day. Did you mean it?”
Tomio leaned against the arch opposite me. I slid down the wall to sit on the floor and he mimicked me, holding my gaze as we sank to the marble.
“I did mean it.” I took a deep breath in an effort to calm my racing heart. “It was a mistake in the sense that we shouldn’t have kissed while Gage and I were dating. But it wasn’t a mistake in the sense that I learned something important from it.”
He waited, expression calm and patient.
“What a kiss is supposed to feel like,” I told him, “when a mage-bond isn’t ruining it.”
The corners of his mouth turned up as the softest of smiles stole across his face. His coal-black eyes took me in with the surprised pleasure of a man discovering one of life’s great precepts. He let his legs stretch out in front of him. “But you are hesitant to kiss me again because Gage is missing and you feel like it’s another betrayal. You can’t let yourself enjoy anything until he’s found safe and sound.”
“Would you?”
His brows arched. “What? Enjoy kissing you again, even while Gage is missing? Damn right I would, Saxony.”
Though his admission hurried my heartbeat in a pleasant way, I shot him a look of surprise.
He lifted his shoulders in an apologetic gesture. “Listen, I do feel bad about what happened. You know I do. I should have been straight with both of you about my feelings earlier, and I should have controlled myself better that day, but we all make mistakes. I’ve apologized and Gage knows I meant it. He took it like a grown man. Plus, it’s not our fault Gage is missing. Yes, I want to do everything possible to rescue him. We are doing everything possible to rescue him, more than anyone else is, including his parents, but this situation is not of our making.”
I hadn’t thought about Chad and Angelica since the day Gage had been kidnapped. I made a mental note to ask Basil what—how—they were doing, if he even knew. If I really wanted to push it, I could send a text to my mom and ask her if she could find Angelica’s number for me, but that would alert my mom and she’d ask a lot of questions I wasn’t prepared to answer, and Basil had specifically told me to leave Gage’s parents to him. Which led my thoughts to—
“Where the hell is Ryan?” I muttered, wrapping my arms around my knees and laying my forehead on my kneecaps.
Tomio didn’t say anything for a long time, not until I looked up and read the open measurement in his expression. His look was not incriminating, but it still made me uncomfortable.
“What?”
“You can change the subject so easily.” He sighed. “I’m tired. I should call my mom and let her know I’m okay.”
He got up and disappeared into his room, leaving me feeling strangely bereft.
A day passed. Then three.
We got Basil on a video call only once and it was short-lived. In the background someone was crying. And though Basil tried to reassure us that the Agency was getting under control, the harried look on his face said otherwise. Arcturus Agency was in a state of shambles.
Tomio and I watched the map daily: the number of snuffed fires continued to climb as reports rolled in without ceasing.
“What do the shapes mean?” Tomio asked when a new metric appeared on the morning of our fourth day in the new flat. A smattering of squares, triangles, and star-shaped dots had joined the white circles. But even as we watched, the white dots became shapes and a legend appeared in the bottom left corner. Some of the shapes also had a diagonal slash through them.
“Look,” I pointed to it. “The square ones are dated last Decem
ber. The triangles are from this March, the stars and circles are from the two in July.”
“Okay, but what are the slashes?” Tomio asked.
I sat back suddenly as the realization hit me like a bucket of ice-water. My hand covered my mouth. Tomio looked from me to the screen and back again, still not getting it.
And then he did.
“Suicides.”
For the first couple of days after we’d locked Janet in her cell, Tomio and I couldn’t stop talking about her. The outcome of these conversations meant we were too depressed to do much but sit by the radio and mope around the flat with the air conditioning on. When Tomio pointed out that there was nothing we could do but wait, and hammered into my mind that this situation was not of our making, we agreed to explore the areas of Naples we could, if anything just to pass the time more quickly. Waiting was killing us. Ms. Shepherd had told us to ‘behave normally’. When one had to think hard about what normal behavior was, it wasn’t normal anymore.
We got past our guilt-laden lethargy enough to venture out for a stroll and discovered that we both felt better. After that, we were gone from the villa for most of every day, spending hours under the sun walking miles around the historical centre, always keeping within range of the Miner’s Lifeline radio.
Tomio seemed to grow browner by the minute and liked to make fun of me for spreading gobs of sunscreen on my freckly skin.
“The woman can produce enough heat to melt steel but she can’t handle a thirty-six-degree day in Naples without a layer of zinc.”
I smiled as I rubbed the thick white cream into my cheeks and forehead, standing in front of the mirror in the entrance way of our safe-house flat. “It’s not the heat, it’s the UV rays.”
“But you tan eventually, right?” He leaned a shoulder against the door in a leisurely posture as he watched my ritual, coming close to rub it into my back where it was awkward for me to reach.
“If you want to call a darker shade of white, a tan”—I shrugged—“then sure.”
Tomio laughed, and I almost felt normal, like a proper tourist, someone here to enjoy the quaint sights of an ancient city and taste the specialties. Pizza was invented in Naples, or so we’d been told, so we’d agreed to find the most famous pizzeria within our radius and judge it for ourselves. It was something we would do if we were here for fun, something that felt normal.
Well, almost normal.
Every experience was painted with a thin layer of anxiety and guilt. Forty meters below our feet, Janet waited for a psychopath’s return.
Heat rippled off the paving stones as we entered Piazza Carità on day six after depositing Janet underground. Towering, well-manicured date palms heavy with yellow strings of fruit cast short fat shadows. A flock of pigeons coming in for a landing around a woman sitting on a stone bench made the familiar whistling sound that took me back to my summer in Venice. Specifically: hanging out in the Piazza san Marco. Crowds of people, some fanning themselves with tourist booklets and some carrying parasols to ward off the powerful summer sun, clustered around the entrances to the gelaterias and pizzerias. Sweat glistened on tanned brows and upper lips.
We walked the narrow stone streets, perusing the trinket shops, trying the famous rum-soaked Neapolitan pastry known as baba, drinking more than our fair share of cappuccinos (which always elicited a strange look if ordered in the afternoon), and taking photos of the picturesque bay.
“Let me take the bag.” Tomio held out a hand for the small fabric shopping bag we kept the radio in. I passed it over then consulted the ratty tourist map we’d found on a table in the flat, left behind by a former occupant.
“The Santa Chiara Monastery, tombs and museum is only a ten-minute walk. Should we go there after pizza? I’m not necessarily jonesing to see another church, but the cloister is full of pretty, hand-painted tiles. It’s supposed to be amazing.”
“I don’t feel like pizza anymore. Let’s get gelato first, then visit the cloister. I’m in love with that bacio flavor.” Tomio took off his sunglasses to clean them as he scoped out the ice cream shop options scattered throughout the piazza.
“Did you know that bacio means kiss?” I replied off-handedly as I tucked the map into the pocket of my shorts.
Tomio’s dark eyes snapped to mine with an inquisitive look that asked if I meant to bring up a certain memory with that comment, or if it was an accident. He hadn’t broached the subject of our kiss or our relationship since the first night in the flat when I’d changed the subject. Even sharing the flat over the last five nights, he’d been nothing but a gentleman. He’d averted his eyes when I came out of the bathroom dripping and in nothing but a towel. He’d moved back if I invaded his space in the kitchen while we were cooking together, and he’d taken the sofa opposite whichever one I was sitting on rather than sitting beside me, even if there was plenty of room. I’d gotten the message loud and clear. If we were going to talk about our kiss or our relationship again, he was going to leave it up to me to broach the subject.
“Just sharing my small Italian vocabulary.”
Tomio selected a gelateria and walked toward it. I fell in step beside him. We joined the back of a line of sweating tourists. Air conditioning licked at my cheeks and the skin of my chest as we shuffled forward in line, promising more of the same once we made it over the threshold.
Through the corner window of the shop, I caught a flash of broad shoulders and a low ponytail lying against a powder-blue shirt. He passed out of sight before I had a chance to focus on him but my body tensed. I turned, wanting to peek around the corner and make sure my eyes were just playing tricks on me and it wasn’t Dante.
“Where are you going?” Tomio asked.
“I’ll be right back, I just want to double check something.”
“What flavor do you want?”
“Stracciatella, please,” I said over my shoulder.
Trying not to shove people out of my way, I rounded the corner of the shop and scoped the crowd milling through the narrow street. The street went downhill for several blocks before butting up against Via Nuovo Marina, which ran parallel to the bay. Beyond that the Bay of Naples sparkled almost painfully in the bright sunlight.
Squinting and stepping into the shadow of the street my gaze snagged on the powder-blue shirt and long hair. He wove his way through the busy crowd, disappearing and reappearing, walking alone. Without a better look, I couldn’t be sure, but the way he moved suggested it was Dante. My legs moved of their own accord as my eyes gripped the back of his head and didn’t let go. Muttering an apology as I bumped against a shoulder, I barely noticed when the person turned and asked me something in Italian.
It was impossible to run, but he was walking fast so I picked up the pace enough to close the gap between us. My heart began to bump heavily against my ribs as visibility of the man in the blue shirt improved. As he reached the end of the block and looked to the right at oncoming traffic, his profile gave him away. He crossed the road at a jog, and I picked up speed. It was Dante. I was sure of it now. I thought fleetingly of calling Tomio, but he was holding my bag with my cell phone, and this was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up. If I turned back, I’d lose Dante.
My fire blazed to life, fueled by a sudden flare of rage. What would I see when I looked into Dante’s eyes. Would they have that telltale reflection? If they did, would I be able to stop myself from reacting?
Crossing the street, I followed him along a narrower block with less foot-traffic. He heard my flip-flops behind him before I reached him, and turned, lifting his eyes to mine. Recoiling, he staggered back a few steps as we both halted, glaring. Relief sent my anger into retreat when I saw that Dante was still only human. His eyes had not changed.
The initial look of startled shock at finding me behind him flickered away like he’d changed a channel inside his mind. His familiar and annoying self-assured smugness took its place. “Saxony. Fancy running into you—”
“Where is he?” I spat.
> He froze for a fraction of a second before widening his eyes in a parody of confusion. “Who?”
His bad acting was enough to confirm what we’d suspected. I jammed a finger into the soft spot just under his collarbone, putting enough power behind it to bruise him. “My friend, Gage. What have you done with him?”
He swiped at my hand but missed, taking a step back as my blazing eyes and hard poke told him I meant business.
“You’re insane,” he sneered. “You’ve always been a little crazy, but now I know you’re loco. Why would I know where your pretty boyfriend is? Maybe he finally realized his girlfriend was mentally ill and took off.”
His words were harsh but he was backpedaling through the street as I strode forward, teeth clenched. I poked him under the other shoulder, harder this time.
He hissed, baring his teeth and snarling in Italian.
“Yes. It hurts, doesn’t it? It will tickle compared to what I’ll do if you don’t tell me where you’re keeping Gage. Right. Now.” I poked him in the same place, sending fire into my finger to make it rock-hard and firing into my shoulder and elbow.
Dante yelled in pain and grabbed at his shoulder, his eyes filling with fear. “Cazzo fai?”
“I know you have him, you spineless, obscene little boy.” I poked him again on the other side, using fire to make it hurt. “If you don’t let him go, no number of rent-a-cops and no amount of money will save you. I know where you live. There will be nowhere to hide.”
Even as the threats dripped from my lips I knew it was the wrong approach. I should be using my feminine wiles to get Dante to trust me before I resorted to threats of violence. But it felt too good to intimidate him, instead of being intimidated by him. I jabbed him again.
“Sei pazzo,” Dante cried out, his voice breaking. Then he bolted toward the Bay of Naples.
Kicking off my flip-flops, I shot after him, firing down my legs and through my feet to put on speed and soften the blows of my tender soles against the hard pavement. Reaching out, I snagged the back of Dante’s polo. He jerked away but I held the fabric fast.