Arcadia Awakens (30 page)

“The concordat is canceled,” he said, with some difficulty, as if his vocal cords had not yet fully returned to human form. “It has clearly been breached, and we may now strike back by every means available to us.”

A horrifying suspicion surfaced in Rosa’s mind. Had Cesare allowed Tano to provoke her and Lilia into breaking the peace treaty? Had Cesare even
told
him to do it? Their meeting with Tano and the other three this evening couldn’t possibly have been mere coincidence.

Alessandro gently pressed his fingers into her waist, sensing that she was about to say something. Maybe he was right, and she’d be better off keeping quiet.

Not that that was going to stop her.

“You planned this from the start!” she accused Cesare. “You
sacrificed
Tano to give yourself a reason to attack my family.”

The blow came quick as lightning, but Alessandro was quicker. He caught Cesare’s fist with one hand, still keeping a firm hold on Rosa, and at the same time pushed him away with all his might. Cesare swayed for a moment, took a step back to recover his balance, and opened his mouth in fury. It was the threatening roar of a beast not yet fully aware that he had returned to human form.

The men at Alessandro’s side drew closer together. But Rosa saw doubt in the faces of some of the
soldati
. There were a number who questioned Alessandro’s judgment, she suspected, however much they opposed Cesare’s claim to leadership. Alessandro might well be gambling away all his chances of ever being accepted as his father’s successor.

In that white bathrobe, Cesare was an incongruous sight among the men in dark suits toting guns. He had wiped his hands on the white towel, leaving bloodstains. For an endless moment, he looked at Alessandro and Rosa wordlessly, then turned slowly toward his son’s dead body. He kept his back to them as he crouched down and gently stroked fur that was only gradually turning back into human skin.

“Come on,” said Alessandro quietly to Rosa, “let’s get out of here.”

She was going to object, but then just pointed in the direction of Lilia’s body, and let him lead her gently away and over to the cars. Several of the men covered them. Rosa could tell from their footsteps, though she didn’t look back.

A cry of anguish broke from Cesare, echoing back from the stone tiers of the amphitheater and down the valley, following Alessandro and Rosa as they reached a black Mercedes. Alessandro helped Rosa into the passenger seat, hurried around the car, and got into the driver’s seat himself a minute before the chauffeur, who was about to get behind the wheel.

“I’ll do this,” he told the man briefly. “You go with one of the others. Tell them to give us two minutes’ start, okay?”

Now Rosa did look back through the window, and saw the two groups facing each other, increasingly baffled, while Cesare crouched over Tano’s body with his head bowed.

“What’s going to happen now?” she whispered as Alessandro started the engine.

“I won’t let anyone hurt you.”

“What will
he
do?”

“Stir the others up against me. This is his opportunity to swing it his own way.”

“Because you protected an Alcantara?”

He did not reply.

“I
would
have shot Tano,” she said quietly. “And if that meant breaking the damn concordat—well, too bad.”

Alessandro drove the car out of the amphitheater and onto the narrow mountain track. “Tano got what he deserved. He was a bastard, and Cesare knew it. It wasn’t a coincidence that we came here. Someone tipped Cesare off about Tano’s plans. But you were wrong to accuse Cesare of planning the whole thing. He followed Tano to stop him.”

“How about you?”

“I was afraid something like this would happen.”

“If they don’t accept you as their
capo
anymore, then what?”

“We’ll see when it gets to that point,” he said. She saw black fur on the back of his hand on the wheel, but this time he had it under control. He was staring grimly through the windshield and out into the darkness. “No one will hurt you. I swear it.”

Shaking, she reached over to touch his thigh. “How much time do we have?”

“What do you mean?”

“Cesare will take his chance. He’ll send men after me at home … and after Zoe and Florinda, too. If there was ever a good time for him to eliminate the Alcantara family, then this is it, right?”

He still wasn’t looking at her. “I can’t take you home.”

“What?”

“You’re not safe there.”

“I have to warn my sister!”

He took his cell phone out of his pocket. “Call her. Tell her whatever you like. But I’m not taking you there.”

She leaned forward to look him in the face. “
Of course
you are.”

“No.”

She struggled to find words, and then all the anger she had been damming up for the last few minutes broke out. It made no difference that none of what had happened was his fault. Nor did the fact that he’d saved her, or what he had sacrificed to do it. He was a Carnevare. He was one of them. And he was preventing her from going to her sister’s aid when Zoe needed her.

“The girl that Cesare killed … ,” she snapped, “her name was Lilia. She … she loved my sister. Do you understand that? Zoe has just lost the person who probably meant more to her than anything else. And Lilia sacrificed herself
for me
. How can you think that—”

“I’d have done the same thing,” he interrupted her calmly. “I’d have died for you up on that mountain.”

That took her breath away. For a moment it deprived her not only of her self-control, but of the ability to utter another syllable.

After endless seconds, she stammered, “That—that’s nonsense.”

“It’s the truth.” He turned his head and looked at her. “I’m in love with you, Rosa.”

She hesitated, fighting for composure.

“Oh, hell,” she whispered.

He smiled sadly.

Then neither of them said anything, until finally she took his cell phone and called Zoe.

N
O ONE ANSWERED
.

Rosa left Zoe a message and tried not to think of Lilia. She couldn’t bring herself to tell her sister about her girlfriend’s death over voice mail. Instead, she left a confused, breathless warning about the Carnevares, who would try to avenge Tano. She didn’t say who had fired at him. After that she tried the landline in the palazzo several times, but there was no one there either.

Alessandro was looking straight ahead, biting his lower lip and driving the Mercedes through the night way too fast.

“No one’s answering,” she said at last. “We’ll have to go there. The guards down at the gate have to be warned—”

“They’ve been waiting for years for our men to make the first move,” said Alessandro. “They won’t need any warning. They’ll be prepared for something like this, that’s their job.” He sighed softly. “Aside from that, I hardly think Cesare will set out at once to—”

“But you saw him. Did it look to you like he was going to think the whole thing over calmly?”

“That’s exactly what he’ll do. For one thing, he’s satisfied his thirst for blood for now. And he’ll have to calm down—the men won’t follow a raving lunatic, not in the long term, and he knows it. The one advantage Tano’s death gives him is that he can lay part of the blame on me. That’s something he’ll exploit.”

She stared at him blankly. “But this isn’t about
you
. He’s killed Lilia, and he’ll do the same to my sister and my aunt.”

If her words hit a sore spot, he didn’t show it. “Only when he’s positive that the Carnevare clan is behind him. And when he feels sure the other dynasties also consider the concordat broken. Cesare will take care to get justification for his plans, or he could soon have
everyone
against him. So he’ll summon a tribunal to decide the question.”

“The question of my guilt, you mean,” she said coolly.

“He’ll make it seem as if you fired the shot.”

As she stared at his hands on the wheel, with the downy black hairs that were thinning out faster and faster now, finally disappearing, she remembered that those hands were the first thing she’d noticed about him. The way his fingers tensed while the plane was landing.

Alessandro raced across an isolated crossroads. In this nocturnal no-man’s-land there wasn’t another vehicle anywhere in sight. “If he can stir up the men against me—”

“Stop that!” she spat. “If your claim to leadership is all that matters to you—well, you might as well let me out of the car right now.”

This time she could see that she’d hurt him. “I’m not going to let Cesare take over as the new
capo
of the clan,” he said quietly, without looking at her, but in a tone of dogged determination.

“Lilia is
dead
!” she said furiously. She didn’t understand how that couldn’t affect him.

“Like my mother.”

She closed her eyes for a moment, but behind their lids she still saw the beam of the headlights probing the blackness ahead. When she opened them again, garbage from the roadside was blowing past. An animal’s dead body lay in the ditch, was lit up briefly by the car lights, and then faded like a specter.

She pressed both hands to her face, let her head lean against the back of the seat, and tried to breathe regularly. In her therapy sessions she had learned breathing techniques to use in stressful situations, but they were no good at all here. The regular breathing turned to a sob, and she felt moisture trickling through her fingers. It was a little while before she realized that she was crying.

“Hey,” said Alessandro gently. He took his foot off the gas for a moment and reached out his hand.

She flinched away. “I don’t want you feeling sorry for me.”

“Didn’t you hear what I said back there?”

What could she say to that? Her knees felt shaky, and she had an urge to go and steal something.

Taking her hands away from her face, she pressed them down on her legs to keep them still, and hated herself because she felt her lower lip quivering. She couldn’t come up with any answer, except a long look at him through her tears. In the icy blue of the dashboard lighting, he could have been a ghost.

“Where are you going?” she finally got out.

“Somewhere they won’t look for you.” He pointed ahead into the night. The peak of a mountain blotted out the stars. “I’m taking you to Iole.”

She had guessed even before the castle on the peak came into sight. Castello Carnevare.

“He’ll think you might be anywhere,” said Alessandro, “but not right here under his nose.”

At that moment she felt strangely indifferent to what might happen to her. As the Mercedes drove along the winding road up to the fortress, Alessandro looked down at the valley. “Here they come.”

She wiped her eyes, but still she saw flickering stars around the column of tiny pairs of lights far below on the plain.

Alessandro turned off the headlights and drove on with parking lights only. The darkness instantly moved to within a few feet of the front of the car. “Don’t worry, I can drive this road blind if I have to.”

She doubted that when he unexpectedly swung the wheel around and turned right off the road. But they drove halfway around the mountain on a bumpy gravel path, until they were at the back of the fortress. There he stopped and pointed to some narrow steps cut into the rock. “Can you make it up those in the dark?”

She nodded, bemused.

“It’s not far. The steps lead to a small wooden door. It’s one of the old escape routes from the castle. Wait there until I let you in from the inside, okay?”

She nodded again, but didn’t get out.

“I have to get the car back to the castle courtyard before the others arrive. They have to see me arriving on my own.”

She pulled herself together and pushed the car door open. Alessandro took her arm. “Rosa…”

She turned hesitantly.

“I mean it. This is the worst possible time, I know, but…” He ran out of words, just cursed quietly and looked down.