Arcadia Burns
“D
ADDY
?” S
HE TUGGED AT
his sleeve. “There’s a dead cat outside the door.”
“Good. One less in the world.”
“When I’m grown up I want a cat of my own. Just for me.”
“Cats can’t be tamed.”
“I’ll tame mine.”
“It will hurt you.”
“No, it won’t. Never.”
Silence.
“Never. Never.”
O
UT ON THE RUNWAY
, a plane began its ascent into the sky, and the world around Rosa fell silent.
No sign of Alessandro anywhere.
As she walked through the departures hall and past the panoramic window, she blocked out the voices of her six-man escort. For an endless moment she saw only, in slow motion, the aircraft taking off, the midday sun sparkling on its white fuselage, and behind it the majestic cliffs of the Bay of Palermo.
Where is he?
She knew the six men weren’t going to take their eyes off her. They were trying to force her to listen to their advice and questions and warnings. Rosa heard nothing but the beating of her own heart, the blood pulsing in her temples.
Hair flying behind her, she raced ahead while her advisers followed close behind, talking, gesticulating, pestering her. Ticks in the thick protective coat she’d wrapped around herself these last few months.
Half a dozen men in expensive suits, handmade shoes, and silk ties, with their hair well cut and their hands manicured—conventional businessmen, and cleaner than clean to any stranger who happened to set eyes on them. But in reality just
six of the countless criminals who looked after the fortune of the Alcantara clan.
Rosa’s fortune.
She should have taken an interest in it. Instead she met her advisers’ questions and demands with indifference—as if she had nothing to do with her own money. Anyway, what the six of them cared about most was their own share. For reasons that irked them, they were now, for better or worse, at the mercy of an eighteen-year-old girl’s whims.
At least Rosa knew what to make of
that
. Refusing to talk was a little like stealing from them. She knew about stealing things—it was difficult to break a habit you’d come to enjoy. Silence equals stealing equals an adrenaline fix. That was about as much math as she could cope with in an overcrowded airport.
Her blond hair cascaded in wild confusion over her slender shoulders. It resisted brushing the same way her pale complexion resisted tanning. Nothing would take away the shadows around her eyes, and they’d become even darker in the last year. Some people thought it was makeup, kohl for a moderate Goth look, but Rosa had been born with them. They were part of her, like so many other things that she couldn’t shake off. From her nail biting to her neuroses. And her origins, along with the addictions that came with them.
Where the hell was Alessandro? He should have been here.
I’ll come see you off
, he’d said.
One of the men caught up and tried to block her way. Block him out; act deaf. His efforts to attract her attention
made him seem like a ridiculous mime. She dodged him and hurried on.
Damn you, Alessandro!
It was four months ago, last fall, that she’d come to Sicily to escape the past. And now, in mid-February, she was taking off again. This time to escape from the present, from this island.
By all appearances, she was the heiress to an empire of companies. Since her eighteenth birthday two weeks ago, she had also become legally responsible for what her business managers did. It made Rosa’s head spin to think what it meant to be head of a Cosa Nostra clan.
Security was coming up ahead of her. No Alessandro anywhere in sight. The bastard.
She quickened her pace, ignoring the piece of paper that one of the six men was holding in front of her. At the last moment she murmured something like “Back in a few days,” and breathed a sigh of relief when she had left the six men behind on the other side of the security gate.
Rosa looked around her. The six of them were retreating toward the exit, swearing. She was searching for one person in particular among the crowd in departures. A face that she had come to know better than her own.
Had she passed him and missed seeing him in her haste? Surely not. Had he hung back when he saw her escort? That was more likely. A Carnevare in a relationship with an Alcantara—many of the other clans still regarded that as a declaration of war. Rosa and Alessandro knew that plenty of members of their own families were saying, off the record,
that both their corpses should be sunk in the sea. For Rosa, this could have been an exciting game—exactly the element of risk that she needed for an adrenaline fix—if she hadn’t been keenly aware that, as the two of them walked their tightrope, they could fall to the depths below. In the end either they would have to break up, or she would have to risk everything for love.
The six men beyond the barrier put up with Rosa’s disinterest in them because they knew that, in the long run, they would derive greater authority from it. But her relationship with a Carnevare was a black mark against her. The Alcantaras and the Carnevares had been enemies forever, and only a mysterious pact between them, dating from ancient times, had kept them from wiping out each other’s families long ago. Out of necessity, the two clans managed to coexist. But most of them would never tolerate an alliance made by two teenagers in bed.
How long are the others going to stand by watching?
Rosa had once asked.
Until we can force them to close their eyes to it
, Alessandro had replied.
And then hope they never open them again
.
It was Alessandro who really understood what it meant to be
capo
of a Mafia clan. Rosa had become head of her family against her will. Alessandro, however, had fought for his position. He had killed his parents’ murderers, and over the past few weeks other enemies had fallen silent one way or another. He was keeping his options open through self-protection. While Rosa was on the run from responsibility, Alessandro
faced hostility, warnings, and threats with determination.
Shit. He really wasn’t here. She fought off her disappointment with a mixture of anger and anxiety. It made her stomach ache.
Calm down. It’s not like you’re addicted to him.
She adjusted the strap of her shoulder bag. As she did so, her black turtleneck stretched taut over her breasts—which, goodness knew, wasn’t an everyday event.
They’ll get bigger
, her sister, Zoe, had said once, and Rosa used to pray that they would. Now Zoe was in her grave, and Rosa’s chest was still nothing to brag about.
Whenever Alessandro was late, or didn’t call to say he’d be late, she feared for him. What they were doing was crazy. They had discussed going away together, leaving Sicily and everything else behind them. But Rosa didn’t want him to give up anything for her sake. She would never make demands. If she really did want to go someday, she certainly wouldn’t make him go with her. That wasn’t her way. She’d rather be miserably unhappy without him than see him regretful. There were some risks even she wasn’t willing to take.
There was still a good hour left before her flight. She showed her ticket and went into the business-class lounge. It had armchairs and sofas arranged in groups, a lavish buffet with options for vegetarians like Rosa herself, and rows of computer terminals with online access. Loudspeakers in the ceiling played classical music. And there was coffee, of course.
Several businessmen sized her up. Her turtleneck came down to her thighs, and she wore it with black jeans. She must
look as if she’d rattle if anyone shook her, she thought, with her hip bones sticking out and her legs so thin—far too thin. But obviously some of the management guys in the armchairs didn’t share her opinion. Rosa’s lips formed a heartfelt, silent
Pedophile!
and then gave a sweet smile.
A young man’s head appeared above one of the partitions dividing the groups of seating. It turned in another direction, disappeared, came up again. He was looking straight into her eyes. His own were green and bright. If she hadn’t known him already, she could have invented a whole life for him at the sight of those eyes.
His dimples deepened, his wide smile as infectious as the day they first met. His face made the world a better place.
“I don’t believe it!” She flung her arms around his neck; her bag jammed between them, so she wrenched it free and pressed close to him again. In fact, a little closer than before. Might as well give the others in the lounge something worth seeing.
He kissed her, looked at her, beaming, and kissed her again. He often did that. A short kiss, a smile, a long kiss. Like a secret Morse code.
“What are you doing here?” She sounded more breathless than she would have liked.
He waved a ticket in the air. “I bought this.”
“But you said you weren’t coming with me!”
“I’m not. But I wanted to see you. Without those hangers-on out there.”
She stared at him. “You mean you paid
four thousand
euros
for a ticket just so they’d let you into the business-class lounge?”
“My father paid three times that for a set of golf clubs. This is a brilliant investment by comparison.”
She pressed her lips to his and felt for his tongue until they were both out of breath. A woman on the sofa near them got up and made her husband move to a seat farther away.
Rosa felt a cool tingling inside her, glanced at her hand, and saw reptilian scales forming on her fingers. Her skin looked translucent as the transformation began under it. Startled, she pulled back, saw concern in his gaze, and knew what he had just seen in her blue eyes. Her pupils would have narrowed to slits.
Not now, she thought in alarm.
Damn hormones.
“H
EY,” WHISPERED
A
LESSANDRO SOOTHINGLY
, pulling Rosa down on the sofa. The partitions between the groups of seats more or less shielded them from view.
She rubbed her palms on her jeans, as if she could wipe away the metamorphosis that was just beginning. She forced herself to take a couple of deep breaths. Gradually the chill shrank to a tiny point in her heart.
His hair wasn’t dark brown anymore, but black. She was sure that if she put her hands under his shirt she could have stroked the fine down of the panther fur as it grew on his back.
“Not a good place,” she said, suppressing a nervous laugh.
His eyes flashed with mockery. “For the price we’ve paid, we ought to get more than a sandwich from the cooler.”
She took his hand and gently massaged it between her fingers. When he tried to lean forward to kiss her again, she smiled and fended him off. “You see what happens. Until we can control it—”
“Until then, no sex,” he promised, grinning.
Their attempts to sleep together would have looked odd to other people. They generally ended in chaotic transformations, sometimes funny, sometimes annoying, usually just embarrassing. The worst of it was that they seldom reacted in
the same way to them. When it made him laugh, she felt like dying on the spot. As soon as she teased him about his panther coat, he began to sulk.
Strong emotions brought out something in both of them that would have inspired more than just indignation in the other passengers in the lounge. Rosa felt that she was under close observation, watched by informers from other clans and undercover police officers, and by the eyes of predators lurking beneath the mask of normality. There must certainly be other Arcadians in this room.
“Change the subject?” she suggested—it was one alternative to a cold shower.
“State of the financial markets? The weather?”
“Responsibility.” In her mouth, it sounded foreign.
His hair went back to brown at once.
“You saw those six guys back there,” she said. “They were waiting outside the airport to hand me a whole bunch of papers to sign. Construction contracts for new wind turbines. Stock options. Applications for subsidies.” Who said she couldn’t be romantic when she wanted to?
“Maybe you should go see them in the city now and then. Or ask them to come to the palazzo.”
“I’m signing
something
every day,” she said ruefully. “I spend hours on the phone in the mornings with obscure second and third female cousins in Milan and Rome, just because they manage companies that happen to belong to me. I don’t even know them. I’m lucky if I can remember their names.”
“Just as long as you realize that they’re lying with every word they say to you.”
In October, the body of her aunt Florinda Alcantara had been fished out of the Tyrrhenian Sea. What had upset Rosa more than the bullet wound in Florinda’s skull was the fact that she herself was next in line to be head of the clan. None of its members had wanted her, and no one had seriously expected her to accept the challenge. That was probably why she did. When the first of the new “good friends and confidential advisers,” who now came thronging to the Palazzo Alcantara, suggested that she might voluntarily decline her inheritance, she made her decision. They’d just have to learn how to get along with her.
“I’m doing my best to remember they’re lying”—it was one way of describing her lack of interest in them—“but I’m not Florinda. Or Zoe. I feel like a pilot who takes a plane thousands of feet up in the sky and then realizes he’s scared out of his wits.”
“Kind of limits your career options.”
“But I don’t want this career. I never asked to inherit everything. It’s not the same for me as it is for you.”
That was the difference between them. Alessandro had achieved what he’d always wanted. But she had never wanted anything, least of all this. Only him. Very, very, very much.
For all their disagreement on that one point, however, something else bound them together. Neither wanted to change the other. Perhaps that was the very reason she felt so at ease with him.
There was a thoughtful expression on his face. Difficult subject number one, business. Difficult subject number two, his family. Their discussions suffered from the same kind of ups and downs as their sex life—except that their conversations at
least actually happened, while their sex life wasn’t much more than speculation. They both had their ideas of what it would feel like—if and when it came to anything. Not having snake scales or panther hairs in your mouth would be a plus.
“I’ve begun cleaning up,” he said quietly. “Clearing away some of the mess left by Cesare and my father.” For decades, the Carnevares had dealt with the bodies of other clans’ victims for them, burying them under the asphalt of highways or embedding them in the concrete of ruinous gray buildings. It was a profitable business. Alessandro was no saint, but he wanted nothing to do with the money his clan earned that way. Not all the other members of the family and its
capodecini
agreed.
She took his hand again, hesitated for a moment, and dropped a quick kiss on his cheek. “I guess that hasn’t made you any friends, huh?”
“It’s getting worse. Even the few who did accept me as
capo
are beginning to turn away. Not openly, but most of them are too stupid to be subtle about it.” He seldom complained, and even now his eyes were clear as glass and his voice determined. “Sometimes I don’t know if this is really what I wanted.”
Rosa often wondered whether his wish to succeed his father as
capo
might just have been because he needed to avenge his mother. Now that his father’s cousin Cesare was dead, Alessandro wasn’t really sure what to do with the Carnevare inheritance. He had known he wanted it, but now that he had it, it was much larger and more complicated than he had expected.
“Cesare got what he deserved,” she said.
“Yes, but did
we
get what we deserve?” He raised one hand and caressed her cheek. “Maybe I ought to come with you. Just to be somewhere else for a few days, and maybe after that—”
“Go away forever?” Smiling, she shook her head. “I know you better than that.”
“At this moment, the idea that you’ll be on the other side of the world while I’m still here is driving me crazy.”
She put her finger to his lips and moved it gently down to his chin. “How many times a week do we see each other? Three? And not always even that much. I’ll only be gone a few days. You won’t even notice it.”
“That’s not fair.”
Of course it wasn’t fair. But much as she, too, longed to be near him when he wasn’t in the same room—and even more so when he
was
—she didn’t want him on this flight with her today. Not on her way to New York. On her way to see her mother.
“I could cancel a few meetings,” he added. “I’m still their
capo
, whether they like it or not.”
“That’s nonsense; you know it is. They’d like to be rid of you yesterday.” Rosa held his glance, marveling at the intense, bright green of his eyes. “What would they say if you flew off on vacation with an Alcantara, with things here the way they are?”
When Zoe was dying in her sister’s arms, she had made Rosa promise something: to find out what linked their dead father to TABULA, the mysterious organization secretly at war with the
Arcadian dynasties. It was Rosa’s bad luck that she could think of only one place to begin, only one person who could tell her more about their father, and that was their mother.
There was no one in the world Rosa wanted to see less. Not after all that had happened. Not after Gemma had refused to come to Sicily even for Zoe’s funeral. Bitch.
Alessandro sighed. “I wanted to be in charge of my family, and now it’s in charge of me.”
“Well,” she said with a glance of wide-eyed innocence—she’d worked hard on perfecting that—“you should have thought of that before, right?”
A voice over a loudspeaker announced that her flight was now boarding.
“I’ll probably dream of you every night,” he said. “And when I wake up, I’ll know that the best part of the day is already over.”
“You read that somewhere.”
“Did not.”
She kissed him again, a long kiss, and very tender. He still tasted of another world. The snake began to stir once more as he put his arms around her.
“Hey!” she said, laughing. “My flight. The gate. I have to—”
“What we have won’t ever end,” he whispered.
She ran her fingers through his unruly hair. “Never.”
Then she freed herself from his embrace, picked up her bag, and hurried to the exit.