Page 116 of Be Still My Unbeating Heart

A new seam in the rock face had appeared: a craggy opening into darkness. Bastian heard the flutter of a heartbeat, smelled Matteo and blood, and he plunged forward into the space that lay beyond the opening.

The fireflies came in with De Luca and Whitby, illuminating the small cave. Whitby cast around her eye-lights and Bastian saw water trickling over the rocks, beginning to pool across the ground. It must be entering the cave from another point. A few candles were dotted around the cave, emitting a sputtering glow.

Bastian barely noticed the rest of his surroundings, though. He was too focused on the body.

A body on its side on the ground.

Whitby’s light picked out dark hair that crept over the rocks in serpentine tendrils. One pale arm lay unmoving, the other bound in white plaster cast, and Bastian recognized the cat-ears headband stuffed into the back pocket of his jeans.

“Matteo,” he whispered.

He was about to go to the unconscious—dead?—waiter, but then a shape moved in the dark at the back of the cave, as if disturbed by Bastian’s voice.

A shadow came into focus, stepping forward.

A second figure stood over Matteo. Lean and hunched and edged in darkness, as if he had been sketched with charcoal. The fireflies circled the figure momentarily, then scattered, disappearing into a crevice.

“Oh my god,” Whitby said. Her eye-lights flickered and extinguished, plunging them into a candlelit gloom.

But Bastian knew what he had seen.

Standing over Matteo’s body was De Luca’s brother.

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“Enzo,” De Luca uttered, and his tone held a thousand different shades of confusion.

Candlelight picked out De Luca’s brother, pale and shaking as he stood over Matteo’s prone form.

They all stared at Enzo in disbelief. Whitby was to one side of the cave, sitting on a rocky perch. Bastian stood by De Luca, who stepped toward his brother, but Bastian put out an arm to block him.

“Look,” he said.

Blood coated Enzo’s hands. It streaked his cheeks. He was barefoot and shivering in the cold, wearing a white sleep shirt and shorts that were still rumpled from bed. His eyes shone at De Luca, and they were blue, too, just like De Luca’s. Bright, clear, crystalline blue.

“Whose blood is that?” De Luca asked.

“Non lo so,” Enzo said.I don’t know.His voice was weak. Deep but childlike.

“You’re standing,” De Luca said. “How are you standing?”

“Non lo so.”

“How did you get here?”

Enzo’s chest heaved. His gaze was sharp with fear as he looked at Matteo, then the cave, as if seeing it all for the first time. He raised his hands, pushed them into his hair, appearing on the verge of tears.

Bastian noticed a scrap of paper on the ground beside the waiter. He could just make out a handwritten note.

Ci vediamo nella grotta.

Meet me in the grotto.

Had De Luca’s brother lured Matteo out there?

Peering closer, Bastian saw that the blood smears on Enzo’s face weren’t random. They formed patterns. Swirling symbols on his cheeks and forehead.Infinitysymbols, just like the pin badges they had found next to each victim.

“Were you going to kill him?” Bastian asked Enzo, gesturing at Matteo. He heard a faint pulse. The waiter wasn’t dead.