First to Burn (17 page)

Veins popped in his forearms as they raised the iron circle an inch. He couldn’t break his promise to keep Theresa safe. His tongue pushed the back of his teeth, pushed with the rest of him, until he tasted blood.

With a noise like an armored vehicle scraping cement bollards, the lid popped free and skittered half off the hole, leaving him on his hands and knees next to a sickle-shaped opening.

“Hey!” a man shouted from the end of the alley. “I found them!” He spoke in English.

Uninvited guests had arrived for this shit barbecue.

Wulf jammed Theresa’s legs through the opening, trying to be more gentle than he was when he shoved a door ram home during an entry. But it was the same concept: Get in. Fast.

“Aiiyy—” She flailed, torso sliding after her legs, but he caught her arm and slowed her in time to keep her chin from bouncing on the edge of the hole. Her eyes, so wide with fear he could see the full circle of white, held on to him although the rest of her had sunk into the dark.

There was no bang, merely a thup, as a round hit and sent stone chips to shred his cheek and neck. These men also had suppressors.

“Now.” He loosened his grip and let her elbow, her wrist and finally her hand slip through his fingers, but he reminded himself that she wasn’t gone. She was safer.

Another round hit the cobblestones near his body, driving him headfirst into the sewer without time to be sure she’d stumbled clear.

“Are you okay?” She crouched between him and the crescent of light above, and one hand stroked his cheek. The illumination gilded her nose and cheeks with a halo as ethereal as a painted Madonna. “Wulf?”

“I’m...” The landing had knocked the wind out of him. Moving was a bitch, as if he’d dislocated his left shoulder, but he hadn’t crashed on top of her. “Good to go.” He couldn’t remember the last time a woman had cared about his injuries. Theresa’s fuss beat Cruz’s all to hell, and he wanted to let her coddle him, but they had to put distance between them and the men above. “I’ll take rear. Head downstream, left hand on the wall.”

He heard men above, indistinct but excited. “Don’t dawdle.”

“No chance of that.” Judging by the splashing, she was already moving.

“Cover your ears.” He reached under his jacket.

The face that popped into the opening above his head disintegrated with a direct round from his Mark 23. A hollow point at ten feet does that. After seeing their buddy pulped, it’d be a while before someone else dropped in, so he followed Theresa.

About seven feet high, the walls were close enough to touch without pulling his elbows off his sides and as solid as everything else the Roman Empire had built. While counting paces, he tried to recall subterranean diagrams of the neighborhood. Even though it was near his brother’s house, he hadn’t worked the tunnels in this area much after the fascists seized Ivar’s mansion. His brother had expected to lose their Italian properties once he committed to structuring sales of England’s war bonds, so the return of the house and castle in 1946 had been a bonus. Ivar had always possessed a knack for turning a profit while doing the right thing.

Wulf’s talent was fighting.

“Is it okay to talk?” Theresa’s question interrupted his memories.

“Sure. What’s the weather forecast up in front?”

“Partly damp with a chance of rats.”

Listening to her voice was like having a light even in the dark.

“So why doesn’t it stink down here?”

“This is a storm sewer, not a sanitary one.” The tunnel smelled no worse than a leaky basement—a fresh Christmas tree compared to Fort Bragg’s portable toilets in July.

“Then I’m glad it’s been dry.”

So was he. The puddles of water accumulated in the bottom were far better than the knee-deep torrents of the winter of 1942, when he’d lost two Allied agents to pneumonia.

Under another manhole, pencils of light poked through ventilation spots. Theresa paused, looking up. “How do we get out?”

Seeing her scan the dark for him, he moved into another thread of light, within arm’s reach. “With proper tools, it’s not hard to find a cover in a quiet alley or courtyard, hook into a rim hole and crank.”

“Tools?” Her voice rose.

“That’s our problem. Most lids are too high to exert sufficient force pushing from below with our bare hands, even if they weren’t rusted shut. There are places where street regrading has exposed the system.” Not that he knew if they’d been covered in the last seventy years. “Or we could revisit the Mouth of Truth. It might even bite you now.”

“What?” Her question echoed off the stones.

“The side sewers eventually connect to the main sewer, the Cloaca Maxima, which empties into the Tiber River near Ponte Palatino and the Mouth.”

“Wonderful.” Her laugh rose and fractured as it bounced off the walls and doubled to echo in his ears. “Exactly what I was hoping for. A do-over.”

“A do-over?” He wrapped his arms around her and realized her thin shirt was useless in the damp. Like shivering, laughter was one of the body’s ways to generate heat. She needed more, so he shrugged out of his leather jacket and maneuvered her into the sleeves. “You’re not having fun?”

She snuggled into his coat with a sound that reminded him of guys breathing steam off coffee post-night patrol, and her laughter subsided into full-body hiccups. That type hurt like hell.

“I must not be a very good guide.” He buried his face in her hair and inhaled the lingering echo of her citrus shampoo, a hint of normal.

“Don’t expect—” another hiccup, but weaker this time, “—a tip.”

“I’ll make it up to you with the best dinner of your life tonight.” He remembered his last meal at Cesare’s, the tiny restaurant that guarded an entrance to his secret apartment. “You, me and
pappardelle al cinghiale.
Pasta and simmered wild boar sauce.” Maybe she’d have a drop on her chin he could rub with his thumb. In the dark he recalled how, when she drank the last sip from a wineglass, she tilted her head until the line of her throat invited him to taste her. Hell yes, he’d take her to Cesare’s, and then to his concealed rooms. The thought of her naked and wet in his private pool threatened to weaken his knees; he couldn’t allow himself to imagine more until they made it out of this. “Ready to drive on?”

“Army ready.”

She could handle anything. Maybe even the truth about who and what he was.

* * *

“My stay was most pleasant.” Deep in his English persona, Draycott spoke to the clerk like an old chum while he signed the charge slip for his room at the Hotel D’Inghilterra. “I regret that an emergency with my elderly aunt—a broken hip, and she’s my late mum’s sister—calls me to Lancashire.” He sighed. The emergency requiring that he vacate the hotel was more dire than a broken hip. “There was one place I intended to see...”

“Yes, sir?”

“I’ve visited the Paris sewers and intended to poke around for a similar tour here in Rome but didn’t have time. By chance, do you know of one?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t.”

“I must have been mistaken that Rome had historic sewers. Perhaps I’m thinking of Vienna.” He folded his reading glasses into his tweed jacket. Someone on this amateur team he’d been forced to use had countermanded his directive to observe at a distance, with ugly results. One man was missing, one required arm surgery and one had been rendered faceless when Wardsen and the doctor disappeared like alligators down a sewer.

“We also have such sewers, but in Rome tourists may only view the exit.”

“Where might that be?” Ten minutes ago, the Director had clarified that the men should be removed from the worsening situation. Not pulled out. Not relocated. With the pending arrival of a better team, they’d become loose ends.

“The Cloaca Maxima is opposite the island in the river near the Bocca della Verità.”

“Ahh.” Draycott beamed and nodded like a satisfied elderly tourist. “Quite near.” Close enough for Wardsen to handle the unpleasant parts of Draycott’s next task, if he pointed the remaining men that way.

* * *

Theresa’s leather boots had soaked through, and her feet had passed cold en route to dead numb as they trudged the sewers. She’d stopped counting paces, ceased trying to measure time or distance, and now she merely worked to keep her feet moving on the slightly sloped stones.

Her face registered a breeze and she lifted a hand, but Wulf snatched her backward.

“Our tunnel’s reached the main one. Let’s not fall in.” He gripped her tightly. “The Cloaca Maxima’s deeper and faster, but the catwalk’s on our side, so we don’t have to cross.”

The jacket he’d given her didn’t cover below her hips, but pressing close to his body warmed her butt and thighs as efficiently as leaning against a radiator.

“We’re going downstream,” he continued. “We’ll use noise discipline. If I squeeze your shoulder, it means halt. Two taps means move out.”

Downstream.
Closer to the main exit that everyone in Rome knows.
“Isn’t that where these men could enter the sewers to find us? Why not the other direction?” She pushed out of his arms, one of her hands on the wall to orient herself away from the open drop. “We could bang on a courtyard entrance until someone lets us out.”

“Not my way.”

“None of this, absolutely none, is my way.” Frustration expanded her chest until her bra started to bind. “It’s not my way to kidnap people, steal cars, fire guns on busy streets.” Maybe that wasn’t fair, because he hadn’t done that, the bad guys had, but the point was basically the same. “I want this to end. If that means running away, then let’s do it!”

“Listen,
Captain
, you outrank me but you don’t know close-quarters battle.” His face was so near his breath seared her skin, hot like the sun at Ostia. “The sewers are my turf. Up there, explanations are a total bitch. Down here, I have nothing to hide, nothing to clean up, got it? We have the advantage, so I say we take it.”

“
You
say—”

“Stop telling me how to do my job!”

“You’re right. This isn’t
my
job.” Stuffing her hands in the jacket pockets was the only way to stop herself from jabbing randomly in the dark until she poked something, preferably
him.
“My job is saving people. I’ve been too flexible on that today, but I took an oath to do no harm.”

“Count on it, these guys want to put the harm on us.”

“I’ve gathered that. So why are we headed right for them?” She paused for a breath, but this time he didn’t interrupt. “If you want me to go that direction, you’ll have to knock me out and carry me like the guy at Ostia.”

“Fine.” The gritty clack of his teeth gnashing, amplified by the dark and her imagination, sounded as loud as grinding gears. “You stay here, I’ll head downstream and make sure it’s clear, then come back for you. Waste of time, but will that make you happy?”

“I’m not a suitcase. I won’t be here. I’m going upstream.” She hoped he couldn’t tell that the thought of striking out alone almost paralyzed her.

“You are the most frustrating...” He sucked air through his teeth. “Exasperating...”

“Keep digging, Roget,” she said.

“Irritating...woman!”

“Then you shouldn’t have followed me to Rome!” The tension emanating from him was so palpable she could nearly taste it. It drove her darkness-enhanced senses into a matching frenzy and vanquished the cold and fear, replacing them with heat that pulsed through her veins and required deep breaths to slake her need for air.

“I couldn’t help it.” Given his growl, he had to be speaking through a clenched jaw.

“I’m some mythical siren you can’t resist? Forgive me if I don’t buy that.”

“You should.”

The air between them changed as if lightning had struck, shocking her into silence when he found her shoulders and drew her so close that their legs entangled.

“Sometimes you’re so clinical.” His voice, lowered in tone and volume, wrapped around her as deftly as his hands. “You act arrow straight, all by the book with your questions.”

When he brushed her hair from her forehead, her body no longer felt stiff. The heat of his thighs relaxed her frozen muscles. On their own, her hands sought his body and wrapped around his back. He was definitely a weakness of hers.

“When you get fired up about postpartum depression, or the wasteland of women’s health care in Afghanistan, or the symbolism in a Renaissance fresco, or I piss you off—”

His quiet laughter sent riffles of air across her neck and made her smile in the dark. He liked to bait her, but she supposed she made it easy.

“That, my good doctor, is when you speak very fast and your eyes turn the color of exotic spices. Like treasures from the Silk Road, worth a ransom of gold and pearls.”

When he talked about her with the voice of temptation, the one she thought of as his prelude-to-a-kiss voice, and he showed that he listened to everything she said and cared enough to remember...he had her.

“That’s what I can’t resist.”

Even without light she knew his lips were only inches from hers, so she did what she’d wanted to for so long that she marveled at the self-control it had taken to wait until this moment, and
she
kissed
him.
Her lips found his, and they shared the hunger and intensity of two people who wanted to become part of each other as much as they wanted to live. Her mouth, her heart, her whole being seemed to melt into him as he crushed her body to his.

He must’ve leaned against the wall, because he easily slid her up and down the hard planes of his chest and abs. It wasn’t enough. With her hands locked around his neck, she stretched, her toes barely on the ground, until he squeezed her buttocks and lifted her, raising and lowering her body again and again past the length of his need. Nearly dizzy with greed for his touch, she tried to fit herself against his thrusts, and still they kissed.

And then his mouth was gone and his hands left her standing on her own, between his spread legs, but without his support.

“Ahh.” He shuddered and she thought she heard his head thunk into the stone tunnel wall. “This is...this is the worst possible...”