I breathed the way my mother had taught me, in through the nose and out through the mouth, slow and deliberate and one at a time, the breathing of a woman who had been taught by someone who knew what it was to need to breathe through something terrible and had passed the knowledge on like a gift.
I thought about the figure and the way they had moved and the grip on my wrist and the hesitation when I screamed, and I thought about the house in Italy on the wedding night and the twelve men and the hidden room and the device in the guest suite ventilation panel, and I thought about Matteo's face on the phone in the elevator and the way he had said there's something at the house in Italy with the specific quality of a man to whom something had just become considerably more serious.
I thought
