“Your turn,” he said, holding out the burner.
Vivi took it and dialed Raines’s number from memory. Her spine straightened, her expression shifted, and suddenly she was someone else entirely—a woman used to getting her way, annoyed but not panicked, inconvenienced rather than desperate.
“It’s me,” she said when the call connected. Her voice had changed, taken on a harder edge. “We have a problem.”
Dom couldn’t hear Raines’s response, but whatever it was, it made Vivi’s mouth tighten.
“The vault security was more complex than your intel suggested,” she said, the perfect blend of accusation and professional annoyance. “We need more time to get in.”
She listened, then gave a short, cold laugh that didn’t sound like her. “Fine. Walk away. Good luck finding someone else to replace us on such short notice.”
Dom rose to his feet, prepared to take the phone if things went south, but Vivi held up a hand and listened intently to whatever Raines was saying.
“Yes, I’m aware you have my brother. I don’t want him with you any longer than he has to be, but we don’t have a choice here. We need more time to get this done.”
Another pause, and then she briefly shut her eyes in relief. “Yes, that’s reasonable.”
She ended the call without saying goodbye, and the mask dropped the moment the call disconnected. She slumped into the chair he’d abandoned, elbows on her knees, head bowed.
“He bought it,” she said. “Barely. We have forty-eight hours before he expects delivery. Unless he finds out what happened at Villa Pandora.”
“He won’t,” Dom said, with more confidence than he felt. He moved to the window to check the street below. No suspicious vehicles, no loitering figures. Just a couple of old men playing backgammon at a table outside the taverna, glasses of ouzo between them. “Raines doesn’t have men inside Pandora.” Of that, at least, he was positive. “And Stavros won’t tell him shit.”
She nodded, not looking up. The icon from her vault sat on the table beside her—the small Byzantine piece that had started everything three years ago. She reached out and touched it absently, tracing its worn edges.
“Hey.” Dom crossed the room and crouched in front of her chair.
She didn’t look up. Her hair had fallen forward, curtaining her face, and she was still touching the icon with two fingers like it was the only solid thing left. He could see the slight tremor in her hand.
“Vivi.” He said it quietly and cupped her face in his hands. “Look at me.”
She did, finally. Her eyes were dry, but only just. The careful neutrality she’d been carrying all day had cracked open somewhere between Raines’s voice and the moment she’d ended the call, and what was underneath it was exhaustion so complete it looked like grief.
He reached up and pushed her hair back from her face, tucking it behind her ear. She let him.
“When did you last eat?” he asked.
She blinked. Whatever she’d expected him to say, it wasn’t that. “I don’t—” She shook her head. “Breakfast. At the villa.”
He stood, glancing around the room. The taverna below was already filling with the sounds of the dinner service—the clatter of dishes, low music, the smell of garlic and olive oil drifting up through the floorboards. “Stay here.”
“Dom—”
“Stay here.” He said it gently and went to the door.
nineteen
The taverna’s proprietor,a stocky woman in her sixties with flour on her apron, looked at him with the mild suspicion reserved for tourists who wandered in after dark looking for something authentic. He ordered in halting Greek—lamb stew, bread, whatever cheese she had, two glasses of wine—and watched her expression soften slightly when he didn’t fumble the words too badly.
She brought it up herself twenty minutes later, balanced on a wooden tray she handed over at the bottom of the stairs without comment. He thanked her, and she waved him off and went back to her kitchen.
Vivi was sitting exactly where he’d left her when he pushed through the door, still touching the icon, still somewhere else entirely. She looked up when he set the tray on the table, and something crossed her face—surprise, maybe, or something softer that she didn’t quite manage to hide in time.
“Eat,” he said.
She looked at the food, then at him. “You went and got?—”
“Eat, Viv.”
