Forty-nine“Beautiful, isn’t she? Remind you of anyone?”
A man’s voice, his breath hot on her neck, as he bowed low and whispered into her ear from behind.
Elizabeth Wenderhoven flinched at the intrusion, lost as she was in the proceedings in the front of the church.
She didn’t need to turn to see who it was so rudely interrupting her reverie.
She knew the voice, and the smell. No one else she knew carried with them the same aura of wealth, refined leather, and fine tobacco.
Hector de Vile leaned into her private space in a back pew in the Cathedral of St. Mary of the Immaculate Conception, the Roman Catholic cathedral on California Street in Chinatown, and the twenty years since she’d seen him last dissolved like mist under a hot Bay sun.
Down the nave at the high altar, a Requiem Ma
