Edge Of Oblivion

17

Bastard. Cold, arrogant bastard. If it weren’t for her promise to Jenna, she would put a bullet in his head and burn this place to the ground.

But she had work to do and couldn’t afford to spend any more time envisioning putting a gun against his temple or pushing him off the balcony or Suggesting to one of the hotel staff they poison his food. The sooner she found what she’d come for, the better.

And then to hell with him.

She dried her hair and dressed, then went out to the living room, expecting to find him skinning kittens or swallowing live goldfish, but there was only a pair of black kid-skin gloves—women’s gloves, supple and delicate—laid out beside a handwritten note on the glass-topped desk in the living room.

Dinner. Eight o’clock. Downstairs. Don’t be late.

A pair of gloves and seven words, all harmless in themselves. Yet nothing in as long as she could remember struck such a raw chord of bitter resentment deep in her heart. The collar, now this. Did he really expect her to humor him and wear the gloves, voluntarily giving up the final Gift at her disposal? Leaving her defenseless, completely at the mercy of fate?

No. Her hands would remain bare, and God help him if he tried to force them on. As for dinner...she’d rather have dinner with the devil than with him.

She ignored the gloves, balled up the note, tossed it to the floor, and went down to the lobby, where she hailed a taxi and disappeared into the purple-blue haze of the warm Roman dusk.

From his position behind the spreading branches of a potted raffia palm in the lobby bar, Xander watched her go and won a bet with himself. Then he took the next cab and instructed the driver to follow her.

Morgan had no idea where she was going until she saw, ethereal and enormous and uplit in a vivid wash of gold, the jagged stone outline of the Colosseum. It was the hugest thing she’d ever seen, an ellipsis of pale yellow blocks of travertine and tufa the length of a football field with a three-story façade of superimposed arcades, arched hollows where enormous statues of gods and emperors had once stood. The dark hollows stared out over the city like rows of empty eyes.

“There!” she said to the driver, excited, pointing through the open window.

He glanced at her in the rearview mirror. He was graying and paunchy and utterly nondescript, but his eyes were like dark chocolate, liquid and sweet, and she saw the echo of the younger man he’d once been.

“Dove?” he said around his cigarette, pulling the two syllables out in a languid, sensual tenor that also belied his age. And made her appreciate his ambition.

“The Colosseum,” she said, hopeful. Surely that translated to any language?

“È chiuso.” He made a gesture with his hand that sent pale gray whorls of smoke rising in ghostly circles from the cigarette now held between his fingers. “Tour fermano a cinque.”

She recognized only one word of this languidly delivered answer, which was chiuso—closed. “It’s okay.” She gave him the international sign for approval: a thumbs-up. “Please—per favore—take me to the Colosseum.”

He shrugged and kept on through the snarl of evening traffic, several times barely avoiding hitting one of the dozens of scooters that whizzed by the taxi at lightning speed. They turned onto Via dei Fori Imperiali, and Morgan watched it grow closer and closer, a hulking giant erected right in the heart of the city nearly two thousand years ago. The cab slowed to a stop at the curb. This garnered a chorus of irate honking and shouts of “Spostati!” from the line of cars behind them.

“Grazie,” she said, the only other Italian word she knew besides please. She leaned over the front seat, touched her hand to the driver’s shoulder, and met his eyes in the rear-view mirror. “Grazie,” she said again, softer. He nodded, slowly, and she left him with a smile and the impression he’d been paid for the ride. And handsomely tipped.

Though denied access by locked iron gates, three times the height of a man, that closed off every arched entrance, throngs of people still strolled around the grassy perimeter of the Colosseum, talking, laughing, smoking, taking pictures in front of it. She felt like a tourist herself, awed and amazed, craning her neck to gaze up in wonder. She’d only ever been allowed out of Sommerley once, on a trip with Leander to Los Angeles, and that city was so elementally different from this one that trying to compare them would be like comparing water to fire.

But Rome. Oh, Rome.

Even the air was different here, warm and soft and filled with life, ripe with birdsong and honking horns, nearby laughter and far-off singing, heady with the scent of fresh-baked bread and sun-warmed stone. A stocky, bespectacled man with a mouth like a dried prune approached and said something to her in Japanese, gesturing to his camera and his tiny, smiling wife standing a few feet away beside a low fence.

“Of course. Yes!” she said, without realizing she’d never held a camera in her life and had no idea how to operate one. Her confusion became quickly apparent, and the man, in broken English, gently showed her how to focus the lens and which button to push.

When it was done they were beaming and bowing and shaking her hand, and Morgan experienced a feeling so unfamiliar and strange it took her a moment to identify. Like optimism but stronger, a buoyant confidence and goodwill and sweet anticipation all rolled into one.

Hope. She felt hope.