It was getting very dark, and the gray sky was fading to night on one side. It was also extremely cold, but they were having so much fun in the park playground, neither wanted to leave quite yet. After all, they could see the lit-up windows of Connor and Erin’s house right on the other side of the park, like a beacon of safety. After days of shrieking for Mamma, Rachel was finally calming down. She was not really eating yet and when she talked at all, she stuttered, but things were looking up. Right now she was laughing and smiling. Sveti was grateful to see it. Reluctant to let go of the moment.
The whole afternoon had gone relatively well so far. Rachel seemed to enjoy the story circle at the kids’ room in the local library, and the level of English had been perfect for Sveti’s comprehension level, too. In fact, she’d used Erin’s library card to check out a whole tote bag full of children’s books to study. She had to hurry up and learn.
Not just for Josh, either, she told herself sternly. Forget stupid Josh. She wasn’t thinking about his green eyes, his big grin.
This was for her. Just her. She wanted to study here, go to college here. Something to do with small children. Teaching, childhood development, psychology, and someday maybe even medical school and pediatrics.
It made her so happy to see how Rachel had grown, how much better she walked. To see that rosy red blush in her cheeks. She glowed like a Christmas light in her puffy red ski jacket and red sparkling cap. No one would ever call her chubby, but she looked so much better than back in the bad old days, when she’d seemed like a wizened little troll.
It all seemed so improbable to Sveti sometimes. The strange flip-flop of reality. Sometimes her life seemed like a dream of heaven. Being free, seeing the sky, the trees, the flowers. Seeing Rachel happy with someone who loved her. Having her own mother again.
But that stinking basement room haunted her. Piss-stained mattresses, hollow-eyed children. Doom hanging over them. Constant fear and dread. She wondered if that was the reality, and this was the dream. She could wake up at any time and find herself there again.
It was a nightmare that wouldn’t let her go. Knowing that there were places like that, cruelty like that. Monstrous selfishness like that. Once known, you couldn’t unknow it. And it was hard not to think about it.
All she could do was enjoy a little girl giggling on a playground swing in her puffy red coat and try to hold the dark at bay.
These sad, dark thoughts had sobered and chilled her enough to make her want to get herself and Rachel quickly back to the safety to the McCloud house. It was full of people, voices, and laughter tonight. Both of Connor’s brothers were there with their wives, for dinner. They were incredibly nice to her, but their loudness, their breezy American exuberance, their torrents of hard-to-understand English, oh. It made her intensely shy.
She would do what she always did. Retreat, make herself useful, play with the babies. She liked it and it made everyone so grateful.
Rachel put up a fuss about leaving, and Sveti compromised. She spun Rachel once more on the merry-go-round, a sedate spin that made the little girl shriek with delight. Then another clamber up the rope net, three more passes down the slide, and twilight had become dark.
Her neck started to prickle.
They set off through the trees. Suddenly Sveti had become anxious. So much that her quickening pace pulled Rachel right off her crooked little ankles. Rachel squawked and began to cry.
Sveti scooped her up into her arms and began to jog toward the far side of the park, keeping those lit-up windows in sight. Running was a mistake, though. It threw a panic switch inside her and she began to run faster and faster. Her feet flew, but they were wobbly with fear.
And when the black sedan pulled up right in front of her, she skidded to a stop with a shout and dropped to her knees, twisting to save Rachel from being squashed. She landed painfully on one wrist. Library books spilled out on the frosty grass.
Both doors opened, men boiled out. Big men in dark ski caps and black jackets, and oh God, they were coming for her—and this was not happening, not happening, this was not possible—not again.
One snatched the shrieking Rachel. Sveti grabbed his booted foot and hung on. He yelled something, stomped his weight onto the boot she was clutching, and kicked her in the ribs with the other.
The pain was huge, jolting her lungs, loosening her grip. The man wrenched his foot away, kicked her again in the leg for good measure. Rachel flailed under his arm, shrilling her high, thin wail of terror. The car doors thumped closed. Sveti stumbled up to her feet and flung herself at the shiny black car, screaming at it in Ukrainian, the ugliest words she knew, words she’d learned from Yuri and Martina, her jailors. Ugly, filthy, angry words she’d sworn she’d never say. The car took off, tires squealing, knocking her around to spin like a top and fall to her bloodied knees once again.
Only then did it occur to her to look at the license plate as the car sped away, but it was thickly spattered with mud and her eyes swam with tears. She dashed them away, peered desperately, but could make out only the first A and the form of Mt. Rainier. Washington plates.
The taillights became two malevolent red eyes, glancing back at her. Mocking, leering at her. Then the car turned the corner, and was gone.
V
al opened his eyes and made his peace with the fact that the erotic grace of yesterday’s amazing dawn lovemaking was a fluke. Not a thing to plan for, or even hope for.
Tamara had been up for a while. Quiet as a ghost, if she had managed not to wake him. She was washed, dressed, hair braided back at the nape of her neck. She sat crosslegged on a ragged plaid blanket with her Deadly Beauty paraphernalia laid out before her in the opened briefcase, contemplating vials, powders and potions.
Her beautiful face was calm, in a state of total focused concentration. A lethal alchemist. His dangerous sorceress.
She felt the weight of his eyes upon her and looked up. Amazingly, he got a fleeting, almost shy smile, before the mantle of sarcastic distance settled back over her.
He sighed. Fool that he was, strung out on the wild, potent magic hidden deep inside the most complicated emotional defense mechanism he had ever encountered—outside of madness, that is. Or drugs.
His life would never be simple again. But hey. Fuck simplicity. His had never been simple. Not since his birth.
Evviva le complicazioni.
There was a heavy knock on the door. “
Ehi, ragazzi.
Your breakfast is outside the door,” said Signora Concetta. “The caffé is
bella calda calda
, eh? Don’t let it get cold.”
“
Grazie mille
,” he called back to her. “I’ll get it right away.”
Tam gave him a mocking grin. “Oh, go on. Get it now. You know you want it. She’s lingering out there hoping to get another peek at that manly apparatus of yours, and who can blame her?”
He threw the covers off and stood, letting his manly apparatus wave like a banner before him. “I do not want to scare anyone.”
Her lips curved into a quick, appreciative smile before she could stop herself. “Mmm,” she murmured coolly. “I’m not scared, big boy. Unfortunately, though, I am busy. Don’t bug me with that thing of yours. And the signora’s made of stern stuff. Go on, get your breakfast. Make her day. She deserves a treat. She works hard.”
He plucked the towel off the bedpost where it hung, making the handcuff rattle, and wrapped it around his waist. It tented comically over his cock like a flagpole. Tam snickered. “Coward.”
He ignored her and threw the bolt on the door. He had to crouch to get through the frame without giving himself a concussion.
A blaze of pale winter sunshine and sweet, rainwashed, herb-scented morning air assaulted his eyes and nose. Birds twittered madly in the trees.
The signora had taken away the wheelbarrow with last night’s dishes. She was industriously sweeping dead leaves off the patio. She stopped to give him a once-over, and crossed herself as her eyes lit on his crotch. “
Madonna santissima,
” she murmured.
He crouched for the tray, and gave her a brass-faced grin. “
Buon giorno,
Signora. Dinner was magnificent.
Grazie di nuovo
.”
“You’ll like my
pastiera,
” the good lady informed him. “I make the best
pastiera
in Campania.”
“I love pastiera,” he assured her. “
A dopo,
Signora.” He ducked back into the privacy of their room with his prize.
The smell of espresso steaming out of the blackened pot on the tray dragged even Tamara to her feet and to the table. A thick, chipped red crockery plate held several big, moist wedges of
pastiera
, an egg and ricotta pie made with candied fruit, boiled wheat and orange-flower water. The sight filled his heart with joy after the sexual energy put forth the night before. He lost no time devouring a wedge.
Tam sipped unsweetened coffee and watched him with her wide, fascinated golden eyes. “You probably just took in a thousand calories with that one piece alone,” she informed him, her voice wondering.
He grabbed another piece. “Oh,
sì
,” he sighed.
The tray held a tall glass bottle of milk. Tam popped the cork and sniffed. Her eyes lit up, and to his astonishment, she poured some out into a glass and drank it.
“Fresh, real milk,” she said. “They have a cow here.”
He laughed around a mouthful of pastry. “Unpasteurized milk? You? You’re taking your life in your hands.”
She gulped some more milk and licked her lips. “We had a cow when I was a child,” she confided. “I have never tasted milk like that since then until now. Sweet. With that aroma of flowers.”
“So is this,” he said. “Sweet, with an aroma of flowers.” He broke off a lump of the cake and held it up to her lips.
She regarded it dubiously. “I’m not the flowery type,” she warned.
“Eat some of it,” he pleaded. “Please, Tamar. If you care for me at all. I love to see you eat.”
She was gearing up to refuse, and then she stopped. She processed something in private, deep inside the impenetrable fortress of her mind. She smiled at him, opened her lush lips, and accepted it.
She chewed. “Pretty good,” she said cautiously. “Maybe I’ll have a very small piece, and then I need to get back to work. So stop flogging me with your manly apparatus. That tactic won’t work.”
The towel that covered his tentpole erection had fallen off, leaving his penis hopefully brushing against her hip. He sighed. “I will compensate with food,” he said wistfully.
“You do that. I’m busy planning my approach with Ana.” She ate her small chunk of
pastiera
in a few dainty bites and folded her legs up on the blanket.
“We’ll go to her as soon as I get back,” he said. “I have to go and rent a car.”
She didn’t look up from her contemplation of her poisons. “No, we won’t,” she said quietly. “You aren’t going with me, Val. This is something I do on my own.”
Something flinty and cold clicked into place inside him.
“Absolutely not,” he said. “We are in this together now.”
“When it comes to Georg and Novak, certainly,” she said. “But not with Stengl or Ana. That’s my business, my past, my nightmare. You stay out of it. It makes more sense.”
“Not anymore,” he said. “And you can’t go until I get back with a decent vehicle anyway. You can’t ride up to the Santarinis’ door on a Vespino. Even Ana has enough of a brain to smell something strange.”
“Hmm.” She broke eye contact, fussed with her vials.
It made him nervous. She seemed most dangerous in this state of quiet passive retreat, somehow out of his reach. Plotting whatever the fuck she pleased, no matter what he said or thought to the contrary.
It made him frantic.
He clamped down on the urge to drag her with him to San Vito. He could not. There was still that fucking video footage to send off.
“Do not go anywhere without me,” he reiterated more sharply. “I still have not figured out how they found us yesterday. Or at the airport in Seattle, either, for that matter. Until I do—”
“Yeah. Do you actually think it’s best I sit here on my ass alone and wait for them? A sitting duck?”
“Do you want the car, or not?” he snarled.
“Of course I do.” Her voice was cool and remote.
They carefully left it at that, but he was still uneasy when he took off on the Vespino some twenty minutes later. The thing buzzed along, whining like a mosquito at a maddening fifty kilometers an hour, sixty on the downhill slopes. His first stop would be the car rental place in San Vito. He was fast running through available identities, having compromised two of them in the past three days already. It galled him that they had caught them in San Vito. Not even Henry had known the hotel.
He took some time to approach the car rental place, studying the hillside above for parked cars or loiterers. No one seemed to be watching. After a half hour, he gritted his teeth and risked it.
He chose a sleek, low-slung silver Opel Tigra sportscar. Not quite worthy of a femme fatale like Tamara Steele, but more appropriate than the Vespino.
The next project was to send that three-times-cursed footage to Novak. Today was the second deadline day—this evening, to be precise, but since God alone knew what would be happening by this evening, he would do well to get it over with. He found a place to park down on the deserted beach on the north side of La Roccia, the enormous rock formation that divided San Vito into halves, San Vito Nord and San Vito Sud. The rock that housed the smuggler’s caves.
It was close enough to the cluster of tourist hotels that clung to the slopes over the beach to have wi-fi. He booted up and established the connection.
He ignored the heaviness in his chest, sent it, and sat there, leaden and cold. Might as well wait for those filthy pigs to have their grunting, snorting fun before he connected to Skype.
He didn’t want to listen to them watching it this time.
Imre dangled between the grasping hands of the two men who dragged him down the corridors. He’d learned to his cost that there was no point trying to stay on his feet. The effort seemed to irritate them even more. His toes bumped over the carpet runner, painfully.
They had told him nothing, but he assumed it was time for another videoconference with Vajda, who must have provided more erotic footage to fuel Novak’s evil machine. What bizarre coin the poor boy paid, for the meager comfort of seeing his foster father alive. Barely alive. But soon Vajda would be free. To save his soul.
Not that Imre even wanted to think about souls, or the saving or the losing of them. He was not ready to do this desperate thing, in spite of having spent all his dark, quiet hours working himself into a state of readiness, over and over. Only to have doubt assail him afresh every time.
He had picked open the inner seam of his shabby trousers, and pinpointed the exact location of his femoral artery, contemplating the sudden puncture wound that he had to inflict upon himself in order to bleed out fast enough. Fortunately, he was so emaciated, his veins and arteries were easy to find. His skeletal body could function as an anatomy poster for bones and blood vessels, if not for muscle tissue.
He would have one chance to get it right. The femoral artery was the fastest way. Opening it could kill a man in less than two minutes. He was not sure where he had learned this fact—no doubt some foolish detective novel read in a moment of weakness, but his brain had seized on the fact. He hoped to God it was true.
A wave of faintness came over him, making him sag lower in the grip of the two gorillas dragging him. Faint with pain and with fear that this was a sin that might lose him his chance to join Ilona and Tina where they waited with the angels.
Of course, in the bitter darkness of the night in his stinking cell, even the possibility of joining Ilona and Tina had seemed naive and stupid. Heaven could not be so easily reached after death.
But still, in his loneliness, he hoped.
His blood pressure was too low. Not good, for bleeding out quickly. He barely felt like he had anything inside to bleed. He felt like a pithy, dry orange, a desiccated lemon. All stringy pulp, no juice.
Forgive me, Ilona, Tina,
he repeated, eyes closed. The shard of glass from the lens of his eyeglasses was tucked inside his cheek. He fiddled at it with his tongue, feeling the sharp edge, tasting blood.
I am not doing this for myself, but for Vajda,
he pleaded, to the demons of doubt, swarming around him like buzzing insects. And after all, he was only anticipating his own inevitable death, no?
Was it really for Vajda? Was it just fear of pain? Could any man be blamed for a mortal sin in such circumstances? In their rambling, one-sided conversations, Novak had detailed his favorite techniques for inflicting maximum agony to Imre. Death was preferable. Nausea gripped him. He could not faint. Must not. One chance. Only one.
They dragged him into Novak’s library, over lurid colors cast by the stained glass, through the warm glow of wood paneling. They flung him into a seat in front of the computer with a force that jarred his degenerating bones and made him drag in dry gasps of pain.
Novak was there, waiting for him. He sat down next to Imre, grinning. “We have another juicy treat from your little friend. You would enjoy seeing him in action once again? For old times’ sake? So talented, our Vajda. Watch this, my friend, watch this. Gregor, play it for him.”
Gregor clicked with the mouse until the video image filled the large screen.
Imre watched, his jaw set, having learned the futility of trying not to look the last time. He still had hematomas in his arm, from Novak’s hideously strong fingers, his thick, yellowed nails.
A bedroom, dimly lit with pale morning light. A man and a woman, moving slowly together on the bed in the classic rhythm of love, her astride. The camera clearly showed the woman’s lovely profile, her graceful back, the gentleness in her hands as she cupped Vajda’s face.
Vajda’s face had a look upon it that Imre had never imagined seeing. He clasped the woman’s hands in his, lifted them to his lips.
Imre watched, in growing amazement. This was not pornography.
In truth, the other one had not been either, but this one was still less so. It was imbued with tenderness. Imre saw it in every gesture. A concert pianist, he had trained intensively all his life in the art of imparting real emotion, true tenderness with every gesture, every phrase. He knew the real thing when he saw it. He felt it in his chest, his gut. This was real intimacy. Intimacy that had been kidnapped and held for ransom.
He felt an urge to weep at the awful irony of it. His Vajda loved this woman, of all women. This was Vajda’s chance at having what Imre had had, for those few short, wonderful years with Ilona. Seven years of grace, and then a lifetime of gratitude for even that much, despite the loneliness, the silence. The waiting.
He would not let this be taken from his poor boy. Vajda had been robbed of too much already.
Imre’s doubts were gone. This thing would be done out of love, not fear.
Tough, tender Vajda. Son of his heart. Tears started from his eyes, crept down his cheeks. He was such a pathetic ruin, his captors might notice. He did not bother to wipe them away.