“I should kiss you!”
“It would be—” I had to clear my throat to clear the roughness from my vocal cords. My voice came out hoarse. “It would be your last. What about Sylvie? Would she be okay with that? Revenge is not worth the pain at her expense. Or mine.”
He glared at me, not sure where else to distribute his rage.
“You owe me,” he said, his voice cold.
“I owe you nothing!”
“Romeo was not the only man on the other side of the door, ah?” He nodded to Vanni, still spilling blood. It pooled around him like a blossoming rose. “Your husband opens the door.” He touched my chest. “Knife in the heart.”
Slapping his touch off, I hissed, “Liar!” I would have felt it. On second thought—I’d been preoccupied, and when I was lost to Brando, I was lost to the world. Could I have missed it?
“He saw me and left,” he said, explaining, perhaps at the unsure look on my face.
“Wait a minute!” I said, just realizing. “You’ve been following me this entire time!”
“Sì.”
“You set Nino up!”
“Nino is a tit.”
“He’s not. He had a lemon drop thrown in his eyes. It wasn’t his fault!”
“Vanni would have eaten him for dinner.”
“I don’t agree.”
Vincenzo sighed, releasing me from the wall, and I almost went down. I didn’t realize my knees were knocking together.
Keeping a firm grip on me, he led me around the dead man, then around Nino, whom he didn’t even bother helping.
“We need to help him,” I protested, trying to dig my heels in. But the floor was marble, and as unsteady as I was, I was no help even to myself. “If one of our men finds him next to Vanni, how will that look?”
“Like a corpse.”
He studied my face for a moment, and then giving in with another long sigh, kept me upright with one arm while he grabbed one of Nino’s slack ones, dragging him along.
“I am only doing this so that you will tell your husband.”
“Tell him what?” So focused on feeling for the room, I had begun to ignore all else.
Including the fact that in a matter of an hour, I had been accused of being a witch, threatened with a knife, along with my husband, and then came close to being strangled to death by a man I’d spoken to only once.
“That I pinned you against the wall.”
We became quiet after, both lost to our own thoughts. Nino moaned a time or two but never came around. I got the feeling he was playing possum but decided not to mention it.
We were getting closer to the room, and I could feel my blood getting hotter, that amazing swoosh almost bubbling in my veins. He was close.
It was a bit like playing hot and cold, without the voices, I thought abstractly.
Around another turn, and we ran into two people hustling to get somewhere else. We literally ran into each other, and I pushed away from the woman as Vincenzo dropped Nino and put a hand between him and the man, then he yanked me to the side so that I wasn’t standing close to either one.
“Diogini,” I breathed.
He was with a woman clad in a sparkling gold dress. She was a tall, redheaded woman—not much shorter than Brando, with long legs and a slim physique.
