AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I pulled the necklace out of my shirt collar and held the diamond ring between my fingers. “This is what you told the prison clerks not to steal from my belongings. Do you remember that?”
“How could I forget?” He smiled quizzically. “You wear it around your neck?”
“Every day. As a reminder.”
“Of Rachel?”
“No. Of something else.”
I paused… then finally started speaking.
“Before I went to Lake Como, I was going to propose to her. I had the shot all lined up – but I didn’t take it. I told myself, ‘It’s not the right time. It’s not perfect. I should wait.’ So I waited… and I lost the moment forever.
“Now, maybe proposing to her wouldn’t have changed anything.
“But it might have changed EVERYTHING.
“Maybe she would have known beyond a shadow of a doubt that I hadn’t disappeared because of one stupid fight. Maybe she would have waited like you said she would… if she was the One.
“It doesn’t matter now because what’s done is done.
“But for you, the door hasn’t closed yet. You still have a chance.
“The truth is, there is no ‘right time.’ There is no perfect moment. We just tell ourselves there is because we’re afraid. Of fucking up… of losing what we have. So we wait for the perfect moment… which never comes.
“When you’re a sniper, there’s a brief instant when you have everything lined up in your sights. The shot will never be perfect – it can only be ‘good enough.’ So you shouldn’t wait for the perfect moment. You look for a moment that’s good enough.
“If you wait and the moment passes you by, you might get a second chance if you’re lucky. But you shouldn’t count on that. And you should never, ever count on it being perfect.
“When everything is good enough, you have one decision to make: ‘Do I pull the trigger?’
“And the only rule is… when you have the shot… you take the shot.”
Dario stared at me for a long moment in silence –
And then he stood up. “Let’s go.”
“Go where?”
“Back to the café.”
I smiled. “You sure you want company?”
He arched an eyebrow. “Just in case I run into trouble… I could use my enforcer.”
I nodded and smiled. “Alright – let’s do it.”
Just as I stood up, Niccolo barged into the room without knocking, his face an ashen grey.
“We have a problem,” he announced.
136
All seven of us – Dario, me, Niccolo, Adriano, Massimo, Roberto, and Valentino – huddled in front of the computer monitors.
After Alessandra had escaped and fled to the church, I installed extra cameras to monitor the gap in the wall and the secret passageway that led from the servant quarters to the forest. I had hidden the cameras so well that they were impossible for anyone to see unless they knew precisely where to look.
Our foot soldier Giorgio had been on surveillance duty in the monitor room, toggling through the various camera angles, when he spotted a figure crawling through the gap in the wall.
