Arcadia Burns

WITHOUT YOU


“HEY,” WHISPERED ALESSANDRO SOOTHINGLY, pulling Rosa down on the sofa. The partitions between the groups of seats more or less shielded them from view.

She rubbed her palms on her jeans, as if she could wipe away the metamorphosis that was just beginning. She forced herself to take a couple of deep breaths. Gradually the chill shrank to a tiny point in her heart.

His hair wasn’t dark brown anymore, but black. She was sure that if she put her hands under his shirt she could have stroked the fine down of the panther fur as it grew on his back.

“Not a good place,” she said, suppressing a nervous laugh.

His eyes flashed with mockery. “For the price we’ve paid, we ought to get more than a sandwich from the cooler.”

She took his hand and gently massaged it between her fingers. When he tried to lean forward to kiss her again, she smiled and fended him off. “You see what happens. Until we can control it—”

“Until then, no sex,” he promised, grinning.

Their attempts to sleep together would have looked odd to other people. They generally ended in chaotic transformations, sometimes funny, sometimes annoying, usually just embarrassing. The worst of it was that they seldom reacted in the same way to them. When it made him laugh, she felt like dying on the spot. As soon as she teased him about his panther coat, he began to sulk.

Strong emotions brought out something in both of them that would have inspired more than just indignation in the other passengers in the lounge. Rosa felt that she was under close observation, watched by informers from other clans and undercover police officers, and by the eyes of predators lurking beneath the mask of normality. There must certainly be other Arcadians in this room.

“Change the subject?” she suggested—it was one alternative to a cold shower.

“State of the financial markets? The weather?”

“Responsibility.” In her mouth, it sounded foreign.

His hair went back to brown at once.

“You saw those six guys back there,” she said. “They were waiting outside the airport to hand me a whole bunch of papers to sign. Construction contracts for new wind turbines. Stock options. Applications for subsidies.” Who said she couldn’t be romantic when she wanted to?

“Maybe you should go see them in the city now and then. Or ask them to come to the palazzo.”

“I’m signing something every day,” she said ruefully. “I spend hours on the phone in the mornings with obscure second and third female cousins in Milan and Rome, just because they manage companies that happen to belong to me. I don’t even know them. I’m lucky if I can remember their names.”

“Just as long as you realize that they’re lying with every word they say to you.”

In October, the body of her aunt Florinda Alcantara had been fished out of the Tyrrhenian Sea. What had upset Rosa more than the bullet wound in Florinda’s skull was the fact that she herself was next in line to be head of the clan. None of its members had wanted her, and no one had seriously expected her to accept the challenge. That was probably why she did. When the first of the new “good friends and confidential advisers,” who now came thronging to the Palazzo Alcantara, suggested that she might voluntarily decline her inheritance, she made her decision. They’d just have to learn how to get along with her.

“I’m doing my best to remember they’re lying”—it was one way of describing her lack of interest in them—“but I’m not Florinda. Or Zoe. I feel like a pilot who takes a plane thousands of feet up in the sky and then realizes he’s scared out of his wits.”

“Kind of limits your career options.”

“But I don’t want this career. I never asked to inherit everything. It’s not the same for me as it is for you.”

That was the difference between them. Alessandro had achieved what he’d always wanted. But she had never wanted anything, least of all this. Only him. Very, very, very much.

For all their disagreement on that one point, however, something else bound them together. Neither wanted to change the other. Perhaps that was the very reason she felt so at ease with him.

There was a thoughtful expression on his face. Difficult subject number one, business. Difficult subject number two, his family. Their discussions suffered from the same kind of ups and downs as their sex life—except that their conversations at least actually happened, while their sex life wasn’t much more than speculation. They both had their ideas of what it would feel like—if and when it came to anything. Not having snake scales or panther hairs in your mouth would be a plus.

“I’ve begun cleaning up,” he said quietly. “Clearing away some of the mess left by Cesare and my father.” For decades, the Carnevares had dealt with the bodies of other clans’ victims for them, burying them under the asphalt of highways or embedding them in the concrete of ruinous gray buildings. It was a profitable business. Alessandro was no saint, but he wanted nothing to do with the money his clan earned that way. Not all the other members of the family and its capodecini agreed.

She took his hand again, hesitated for a moment, and dropped a quick kiss on his cheek. “I guess that hasn’t made you any friends, huh?”

“It’s getting worse. Even the few who did accept me as capo are beginning to turn away. Not openly, but most of them are too stupid to be subtle about it.” He seldom complained, and even now his eyes were clear as glass and his voice determined. “Sometimes I don’t know if this is really what I wanted.”

Rosa often wondered whether his wish to succeed his father as capo might just have been because he needed to avenge his mother. Now that his father’s cousin Cesare was dead, Alessandro wasn’t really sure what to do with the Carnevare inheritance. He had known he wanted it, but now that he had it, it was much larger and more complicated than he had expected.

“Cesare got what he deserved,” she said.

“Yes, but did we get what we deserve?” He raised one hand and caressed her cheek. “Maybe I ought to come with you. Just to be somewhere else for a few days, and maybe after that—”

“Go away forever?” Smiling, she shook her head. “I know you better than that.”

“At this moment, the idea that you’ll be on the other side of the world while I’m still here is driving me crazy.”

She put her finger to his lips and moved it gently down to his chin. “How many times a week do we see each other? Three? And not always even that much. I’ll only be gone a few days. You won’t even notice it.”

“That’s not fair.”

Of course it wasn’t fair. But much as she, too, longed to be near him when he wasn’t in the same room—and even more so when he was—she didn’t want him on this flight with her today. Not on her way to New York. On her way to see her mother.

“I could cancel a few meetings,” he added. “I’m still their capo, whether they like it or not.”

“That’s nonsense; you know it is. They’d like to be rid of you yesterday.” Rosa held his glance, marveling at the intense, bright green of his eyes. “What would they say if you flew off on vacation with an Alcantara, with things here the way they are?”

When Zoe was dying in her sister’s arms, she had made Rosa promise something: to find out what linked their dead father to TABULA, the mysterious organization secretly at war with the Arcadian dynasties. It was Rosa’s bad luck that she could think of only one place to begin, only one person who could tell her more about their father, and that was their mother.

There was no one in the world Rosa wanted to see less. Not after all that had happened. Not after Gemma had refused to come to Sicily even for Zoe’s funeral. Bitch.

Alessandro sighed. “I wanted to be in charge of my family, and now it’s in charge of me.”

“Well,” she said with a glance of wide-eyed innocence—she’d worked hard on perfecting that—“you should have thought of that before, right?”

A voice over a loudspeaker announced that her flight was now boarding.

“I’ll probably dream of you every night,” he said. “And when I wake up, I’ll know that the best part of the day is already over.”

“You read that somewhere.”

“Did not.”

She kissed him again, a long kiss, and very tender. He still tasted of another world. The snake began to stir once more as he put his arms around her.

“Hey!” she said, laughing. “My flight. The gate. I have to—”

“What we have won’t ever end,” he whispered.

She ran her fingers through his unruly hair. “Never.”

Then she freed herself from his embrace, picked up her bag, and hurried to the exit.