by Camilla Monk
Aw, come on.. I rolled my eyes, mentally picturing the makeshift trap lying at my feet. A five-inch-deep hole barely covered by two twigs and a handful of leaves. I couldn’t help it, I giggled. You win this round, cat-guy . . .
I looked around at the shoppers hurrying past us, debating the stupidity of my next move. To hell with common sense. I was in a good mood, and, to be honest, it was just too weird to stand here and look down at him like that. It felt . . . wrong. I craned my neck to send a defeated sigh to the sky, before folding to sit cross-legged on the blanket, next to him and his cats. “Okay, Romeo, you’ve earned yourself a five-minute date. Sweep me off my feet.”
My date’s lean tabby immediately rolled closer to play with my laces while his master patted his abs. “I knew you couldn’t resist. They all want a piece of this body.”
I blew my bangs up and fanned myself. “God, stop . . . I can barely control myself right now.” Sobering up, I asked him, “So you work that corner often?”
“Once in a while. But I prefer San Pietro. Tourists tend to give more when Jesus is watching. I’m Faust, by the way.”
“Em,” I replied, while at our feet his other cat, a fat black and white gutter boy, licked his balls for the world to see.
A group of Americans cruised by. Faust raised his cup and shook it, rattling the coins inside. “Spare some change for a blind veteran, sir?”
I elbowed him as a grandpa dropped a few euros in the cup. “Really? A vet?” I whispered.
He gasped in mock outrage. “Why would you doubt me?”
“Because I bet you half of the bums shaking their cup out there are veterans like you.”
“It’s entirely possible that they are,” Faust countered.
“Okay, where were you stationed?”
“Here, in Rome, but I also went to Germany and Mauretania.”
I chuckled. “Mauretania doesn’t even sound like a real country. Is that your usual story, the washed-up vet?”
“I also lost my wife and son in the fire that left me blind,” he noted conversationally.
I pressed my lips tight not to laugh—you never know. You hear a lot of weird shit in the street, but there’s a truth hidden in each lie, like shards of glass in the asphalt. Faust didn’t sound too rattled by his tragic past though.
We watched Rome breathe, run, and laugh in comfortable silence for a while, longer than the five minutes I’d first intended to spend with him, for sure. Faust would shake his cup. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. A bunch of teens tried to toss him popcorn instead of change—classic! I sprang to my feet and yelled at them to fuck off. They scattered like rats, and we gave the popcorn to pigeons.
Eventually, I checked the time on my phone, and told him, “Look, I gotta go. I actually have stuff to do this afternoon. It’s been fun feeding pigeons with you.”
“The feeling is mutual,” Faust said, perhaps more quietly than before. As I shrugged on my backpack, I heard him ask, “Emma?”
I looked down at him, wondering one second too late if I’d ever given him my full name at any point during our time together. He was still smiling, but it was different. No longer goofy.
I fought a pang of unease. “Yeah?”
“How long are you staying at the Residenza?”
He might as well have hit me with a bag full of ice. Warnings lit up in my brain one after another, blinking a frantic red. “How the hell do you know that?” I hissed.
“My kitten told me,” he joked, stroking the tabby.
“Cut that shit. Did you follow me?” It wasn’t just the creep factor of it all; if I was being honest with myself, I also felt betrayed because he’d seemed like this cool, harmless guy to hang out with.
He shrugged. “Not exactly. But Rome is my city; she whispers things to me.”
I had standards. I would not kick a blind hobo’s cup, but my foot itched to send it flying all away across “his city.” I ground my molars in a vain effort to control my temper. “Okay, Faust, you know what? I’m done dealing with psychos, so, you keep bullshitting tourists with your cats, and I’m out of here.” I stabbed the air with a menacing forefinger—not that he cared, obviously. “If I see you stalking me again, I’m going straight to the cops.”
His mouth opened to reply, but I was quicker and spun on my heels, taking quick strides away from him. I was fumbling for my earbuds when he called my name. “Emma!”
I shoved the silicone caps brain-deep. Sorry, Em can’t answer you right now because you’re a creep. Please leave a message after the tone.
“They’re trying to keep an eye on you. You should get out of there.”
My legs stumbled. I caught myself and staggered around, wide-eyed. My heart drummed everywhere at once in my body. The pink blanket still lay discarded on the ground, but Faust and his cats were gone, swallowed back by Rome in a matter of seconds.
I kept walking, but I couldn’t focus on the music in my ears or whatever was going on around me, really. The worst part was not being sure. Maybe it was the same as when I felt time stop. How could I be sure that I hadn’t spent twenty minutes talking to myself in the street? The pink blanket and the cats had seemed real, but Faust, who knew my name, where I’d spent the night . . . Maybe my brain had coined him from the memory of last night’s hobo. I stopped in the middle of the Ponte Cavour and leaned against the white stone railing, watching boats glide silently down the Tiber.
The murky waters and reddening trees lining the shores—this, at least, was real. I buried my face in my hands, digging the heels of my palms in my eyeballs. I didn’t want to see yet another shrink and listen to them pick apart my sob story. I didn’t want meds, and I didn’t want the labels I could practically feel tattooed on my skin. Absent father. Oppositional Defiant Disorder. A tendency to lie and steal . . . Hallucinates douchey hobos and frozen people . . .
In my earbuds, Rena Lovelis’s sultry voice was brutally interrupted by the chime of an incoming call. I pulled out my phone. Lily. I almost didn’t pick up. I liked the idea of just staying there and simultaneously freak out and wallow in self-pity in the afternoon breeze. Lily won the battle of wills a split second before I let her go to voicemail. I tapped to take the call. “Hey—”
“It’s me. I’m not interrupting anything?”
“No,” I stated with a shrug she couldn’t see. “Everything going smoothly with your table?”
“Yes, it’s been transported to the lab, and it’s just . . . incredible. Not a single crack. Everything else collapsed in the shrine, but the stone is intact, even after all this time. Dante thinks that when mud rushed inside the temple during the landslide, it created a protective layer over it before the supporting columns broke.”
“Wow. That sounds . . . cool.”
I picked up some rustling and whispering over the line in response. She was talking to someone. When it was done, she asked me, “Do you want to see it?”
There was a beat of silence on my side as I pondered her offer. Did I? Kinda. Maybe I was unconsciously trying to find excuses to postpone meeting my father—he still hadn’t accepted my Facebook invite anyway. In any case, I heard myself reply, “Yeah, I guess.”
She made a little noise, like a muffled squeal, and this time, I distinctly heard her murmur, “She said yes!”
My face bunched. “Is that Dante with you?”
“Yes, he’s here with me.” Awesome. “So, listen,” she went on, “I don’t think they’ll let you inside the lab itself because Katharos has a very strict security protocol, but you can see it through a window, and there’s also a private museum inside the Foundation’s building.”
“Sounds great.”
“I’ll text you the address.”
“Got it.”
It was only after I’d hung up and my phone buzzed with her text that I asked myself out loud, “What the fuck am I doing?”
Answer: what I did was follow the little blue dot on Google Maps across the Ponte Cavour, to a bus stop, and all the w
ay to a park by the Tiber, full of centenary pines and enclosed in high brick walls. The increasing number of warning signs and the cameras atop the wall suggested the entrance to the foundation’s campus couldn’t be far. I eventually reached a long iron gate and a security booth inside which two guards in dark uniforms . . . didn’t guard shit, because they were busy watching a soccer game on one of the TVs.
I rapped at the window. “Scusa mi?” Excuse me?
A roar of agony answered my inquiry. Roma was losing against Lazio.
Okay . . . I banged against the Plexiglas with my fists. “Hey! I’m talking to you!”
Their heads turned at the same time, and the oldest one wheeled himself to me. —Apparently, it was too much to ask that he get up from his chair during a game. Dark eyes gauged me under bushy gray eyebrows. “What you want, miss?” he drawled in broken English. At least it made me feel good about my grasp of Italian.
“Il mio nome è Emma Nielsen. Sono qui per vedere Lily McKeanney e Dante Alessandri,” I replied, skipping the pleasantries like he had. My name is Emma Nielsen. I’m here to see Lily McKeanney and Dante Alessandri.
His lips became a thin line—probably because the game was still going strong on the TV behind him and he must have been missing some hot action. He reached for a phone on his desk and called someone to tell them that “Emma Nelson” wanted to see “Lily Bikini” and Mr. Alessandri. I tried to keep a straight face until he gave a curt nod and the gate whirred open. By the time I walked in, he had already wheeled himself back to the TV next to his buddy. I didn’t bother coming back to ask for instructions on how to find Lily’s lab.
I just let my feet guide me across the park under the mottled shade of pines and cypresses. There was only one building anyway, a u-shaped renaissance palazzo—don’t trust my expertise. Let’s just say that it looked like Ancient Roman stuff but not the real thing, with arched windows and columns lining the façade and tiled roofs. I looked left and right, saw no one around, so I took the stone stairs leading up to a terrace overlooking the park. A set of modern glass doors stood encased in one of the arches; I made a beeline for it.
Cool air hit me the moment I entered—powerful aircon. I found myself standing in a long lobby with marble and frescoes everywhere. I looked at the vaulted ceiling some fifty feet above, where naked gods were partying around tables covered with fruits and wine. I couldn’t spot a single square that hadn’t been painted, sculpted, or gilded, and the whole thing was so magnificent it made me feel small.
“Miss Nielsen?”
I turned around to find a twenty-something guy in a suit standing near another security booth. “Yeah, that’s me.”
“Welcome to the Villa Malespina,” he cooed, handing me a booklet with a pic of a marble bust on the cover and Katharos’s logo atop of it. “Here you’ll find all the information you need on our collections.”
I considered the thick, glossy paper with an appreciative pout. “Thanks.”
“Follow me, please.”
“Sure.”
He led me through a couple of rooms where people worked in silence at their glass desks, surrounded by that same crazy décor where marble statues watched them from every corner and the coffered ceilings contained . . . more coffers. Meanwhile, I flipped through the guide, my fingers pausing with a slight start when I noticed a pic of Lily’s grandpa. It must have been taken during a party. He wore a tux and stood next to an eighty-something-year-old guy whose arm snaked around the waist of a beautiful young woman in a shimmering black cocktail dress.
The text on the opposite page was basically Katharos’s history, how it’d been founded back in the late nineties by baron Giancarlo Montecito, an old and rich Italian industrial. Apparently, his wife had taken over presiding over Katharos after he died a few years later—the young gold digger in the pic, I presumed.
Lady Montecito will visit the laboratory tomorrow.
Remembering Lucius’s frosty remark, I side-eyed the rows of antique statues lining the hallway around me. Okay, maybe I was being a little harsh; clearly, Lady Montecito had a genuine interest in history, and she’d dug out a lot more than just gold.
We reached a flight of stairs and an elevator whose steel door seemed at odds with the sculpted garland of leaves and flowers encasing it.
“The laboratory is this way,” the guy said, before reaching inside his jacket to retrieve a transparent plastic pass, which he handed me. “Miss McKeanney told me that you would visit the private collection as well. Please keep your pass on you at all times,” he warned, pointing to his own badge.
“Okay, thank you.” I fumbled to fasten it to my hoodie collar as the car lowered to sublevel two within seconds.
No marble and frescoes here. The walls of the hallway still showcased the ancient stones the palazzo rested on, but a sober gray carpet covered the floor, and here, too, the doors were made of glass, through which I could glimpse a few people coming and going among cluttered desks and shelves stacked with ancient books.
A petite silhouette in a white lab coat waved at me from across the room. Lily’s ponytail was as bouncy as ever as she came to open the doors with a badge of her own. The dark circles under her eyes told another story, though . . . She ushered me into the open space I’d seen through the windows.
My gaze fell on her plastic gloves. “You work in an actual science lab?”
“Yes and no, the gloves are just to avoid contamination while we’re working on the table. The foundation had lab technicians run some tests on the granite, but I’m not in charge of that.”
“Okay.”
Lily used her badge to take us through a couple of steel doors leading to a dim circular hallway. Floor-to-ceiling windows all along showcased the closest thing I’d ever seen to an operating room—I hoped it’d be a while before I saw a real one. The table rested on a metal platform supported by thick steel cables hanging from the high ceiling. Now that it had been cleaned, the smooth granite surface reflected the glare of a surgical lamp positioned above it.
Dante was inside, bent over a section of the table, his fingers slowly tracing the characters engraved in the stone. For a second, I saw him again, back at the digging site; he wore the same expression, his gaze oddly vacant despite the lines of concentration on his brow. I averted my eyes to the wall behind him instead. His zombie act was making my skin crawl a little, for some reason.
Lily clasped her hands. “I really can’t take you inside the room. But Dante and I were about to take a break, so I’ll just finish reviewing my notes with him, and we can join you afterward.”
“Cool,” I said absently, my eyes following her as she joined him in the room.
I watched them shuttle back and forth between their laptops and the table for a while in the chilly hallway. I didn’t hear the doors open, but the trail of goose bumps along my spine alerted me to Lucius’s presence before my brain was even done scanning the two figures who’d just come in. There was a woman standing behind him. My brow jerked when I recognized the girl in the cocktail dress—Lady Montecito—but holy shit! The pic in my booklet must have been taken twenty years ago, so she must be in her forties, at least, but she looked barely older than Lily. Pale and smooth skin, not a wrinkle, no asperity whatsoever on her perfectly symmetrical features, and just the right amount of makeup to bring out her aquamarine eyes even in the dark. All the plastic money could buy, and then some.
I waved at Lucius. “Hey. I came to visit Lily.”
He raised an eyebrow but didn’t return my greeting. Montecito nudged him aside delicately and came out of the shadows. Her hand lingered on his arm a little longer than I expected, and I wondered if maybe they were together. We gauged each other, her gaze trailing over my torn jeans and messy turquoise bun, while mine scanned her black suit, high heels, and the gold-embroidered shawl thrown over her shoulder.
“Emma, I presume?” she asked with a soft Italian accent.
I tried to smile, hoping to make a better impression than I had l
ast night at dinner. “That’s me, and you’re Lady Montecito, right?”
She inclined her head elegantly and returned my smile, but I felt no trace of warmth in the gesture. “Please call me Leonora. I’m delighted to meet you, Emma. I understand you’ll be spending the week with us?”
I couldn’t stop my grimace. “Um, no. There was a problem with my booking last night, but I’m gonna find another room.”
She frowned, a subtle twitch of her eyebrows that didn’t crease any wrinkles in her skin—Botox for sure. “Is that so? I was told you enjoyed our hospitality, despite a minor incident in your bedroom. Is your forehead all right, by the way?”
In other words, she knew about last night. I clenched my jaw, nostrils flaring. Had Lily told her everything? But why would she do that? Camera in my bedroom, then? The memory of Faust’s warning raised a trail of goose bumps on my nape. They’re trying to keep an eye on you . . . Okay, no. Slippery slope. I should not start trusting my hallucinations—even if they had accurately predicted that those Katharos people were a bunch of privacy creeps. “I’m fine now,” I mumbled, eyeing Montecito warily.
Her prune lips curved, gleaming like a saber blade under the hallway lights. “And we wouldn’t want it any other way.”
She sounded like me when I used to look counselors in the eye and tell them I was done with recreational drugs once and for all. I responded with a smile that was just as sincere as hers. “Thanks for your concern.”
“Lucius,” she said, flicking her wrist at him like he was her servant.
He gave an obedient nod and used his transparent badge to unlock a door leading into the room where Lily and Dante were still operating on their table. As they were about to enter, she paused in the doorway and turned to me. “Aren’t you coming, Emma?”