Not a flicker—gone. The sudden dark makes the last rim of sun look like a mistake. The AC hum dies. The villa exhales.
“Generator’ll catch,” I say, too loud to no one, because an empty house and a darkness that fast wakes old instincts. “Cayce?”
“On it,” he says from the bathroom. The water cuts off. His steps are already moving. “Stay put. Flashlight’s right?—”
The patio doors whisper.
I turn on instinct, heart going sharp. A figure is inside the frame before my eyes finish adjusting. Clean, quick, silent. Not one of ours. He’s tall and he moves like he owns rooms hedoesn’t. A second shape shadows him, broader, head tilted like he’s catching instructions from the first.
“Nico,” I say, my mouth finding the name before my brain gives permission.
He smiles in a way that belongs in a different decade. “Caterina.”
Behind him, a third man steps in, and I can’t see past him to the path because he is the path. His hands are loose. His face is open. It’s the calm that hides a leash.
My throat goes cold. “You can’t be here.”
“I can be anywhere…even if I’m not invited,” Nico says, soft.
Somewhere in the villa, a door slams. The hairs on my arms stand up.
“Cayce,” I say, loud now.
“Here,” he answers, closer than I thought, and then there’s a sound I don’t recognize and he doesn’t make often—a hitch smothered into silence, the noise a man makes when he turns to meet something that should not be possible and finds it already touching him.
I move. Nico moves faster. He catches my wrist, not rough, like we’re dancing. “Don’t shout,” he murmurs. “We’re leaving. No damage if you’re good.”
“My husband?—”
“Is indisposed,” he says neatly. “Temporary. He won’t bleed. Your uncle insisted.”
The world narrows to two words. “My uncle.”
Nico’s eyes are very pleased. “He wants to talk. Man-to-man with your husband, eventually. But you and I will go first. You’ve always been persuasive.”
“I will fight you,” I say, and I mean it, even in bare feet with salt in my hair.
“I know,” he says, almost fond. “You’re the only girl who ever told me no and meant it. I’m offering a second chance at good manners.”
A cloth appears in a hand to my left, clean and white and wrong. I jerk away, twist, kick—catch a shin, buy a second. I shout Cayce’s name and the shout gets swallowed by a palm over my mouth. I bite. He curses. The cloth lands anyway, sweet chemical, heavy as a nap.
Not like this, I think furiously, and shove backward into a body that doesn’t give. Arms like a bar around my shoulders. A voice at my ear—Nico’s—saying, “Easy, easy,” like I’m a skittish horse he means to steal.
I fight the way girls fight when they didn’t think they’d ever have to. It’s not pretty. It’s not strategic. It’s all heat and refusal. It’s not enough.
The room tilts. The last of the light from the sea slides off the floor. The cloth lifts and air should help, but it doesn’t; the world feels far. Sound stretches: men’s voices, a thud, someone invoking the Virgin in a dialect I don’t know.
“Boat,” someone says. “Now.”
They’re careful with me—my uncle’s condition, I realize through the blur—no marks he’d have to explain to a room that demands piety even while it buys sin. They carry me, careful not to drag. We pass the plunge pool, the flame of the sky, the hedge line, the security post that is empty because someone bought the right moment. We slip through a gate I didn’t know existed and down a narrow path that smells like wet limestone and bougainvillea. At the end is a dock, a slip, a black boat.
“Cayce,” I try again, voice wet, and the man holding me says, “Shh,” like a lullaby, and I hate him.
Nico steps in ahead and offers a hand like a gentleman boarding a girl on a gondola. “You’ll forgive me eventually,” he says. “Or you won’t. I can live with either.”
“Why,” I manage, fighting for one clean breath. “Why now?”
“Because you’re mine,” he says, like a child, and then with adult malice, “and because your uncle wants to see how quickly your husband relearns those lessons he was taught…how fast he learns to kneel once more.”
