Page 79 of Fastest Kill

Frederica had watched her zero it in a field outside Athens when Frederica was fourteen, lying beside her in the tall grass while her mother explained patience and breathing and what it meant to understand your target before you pulled the trigger. She had watched her clean it at kitchen tables in at least six countries, methodical and quiet, the way other women wound down with a glass of wine. It was Despina's baby as much as Frederica was.

She stood there, the gun in her hands, and the shock hit. It bypassed the part of her brain that had been keeping the panic locked down.

The rifle was in its case because her mother wasn't here to carry it. Despina was in the hands of an ancient monster, and this room smelled like her, and her mother's glasses were on the nightstand, and her reading was marked with a folded receipt, and she hadn't rinsed her glass. Frederica sat on the bed as the room spun.

"She has never been beaten." She heard her own voice, steady, which seemed wrong. "Not once. Not in forty years of the work she has done. Not by anyone." She held the gun tighter. "Why take her alive? Leverage against us? Against Tore?"

Dario spoke from the doorway. "I don't know."

"You're supposed to say you do."

"I know, but I'm not going to lie to you." He came into the room and stood in front of her. "I don't know why he took her, but she's alive, and that means we have time, and we will find her."

The one certainty Frederica had carried since she was a child was that her mother was a bad ass, that Rhodes was safe because Despina lived there. Now that immovable fixed point was simply gone.

Frederica had no training for this feeling. Something began to crack inside of her, and she couldn't stop it.

Dario's arm came around her, and he pulled her in so she was resting her face on his stomach. He did it the same way he dropped the robe over her in the kitchen that morning in Venice because it was something she needed.

Frederica went rigid, her whole body resisting because she was exposed and vulnerable. Dario didn't move, didn't ask her to stand to make the hug easier. She sat rigid in the circle of his arms for three full seconds before something underneath all of that gave way. She put the rifle down and let her arms go around his waist. She buried her face into him and took one breath. Two.

She wasn't going to cry here, in this room, before her mother was home and safe and capable of teasing her about it. After her heart rate slowed down, she pulled back, and Dario let her go.

"When she wakes up properly from the drugs they would have given her, and she works out that Tore was left bleeding in the garden, she's going to make her kidnapper's life a living hell."

Dario laughed, soft and low. "Out of everyone Agrippa could have chosen to use against us, he went with your mother. What an idiot. The man is clearly not as clever as he thinks."

Something shifted in Frederica's chest, and the laugh came out of nowhere. "He has absolutely no idea that if she gets half a chance, she will destroy them from the inside out."

"None," Dario agreed, laughing too. "She's going to be running his cult by the time we get there."

Frederica stood up, kissed him on the mouth because she needed to, put the rifle in its case, and picked it up. "You lock the kitchen, and I'll take the front. We need to hunt this bastard down and go and clean up the mess my mother makes of him."

34

The Foscari house hadn't seen this many people crammed into it since Niccolò was alive. The library was now loud with people who had absorbed bad news and hadn't yet found a place to put it.

Leo had come from the Colleoni villa with the doctor and had the coffee on by the time they got back from Rhodes. Dante had pulled the largest table into the center of the dining room and was setting chairs.

Giana sat with her laptop already open, her dark eyes moving across whatever Leo had sent through before they landed. Silas had his arms crossed in the corner, looking pissed. Iz was beside him with her laptop open and doing hacker things Dario wouldn't pretend to understand.

Dario should have guessed Silas wouldn't be left behind because he wasn't about to let his daughter walk into a fight without backup.

The doctor was one of several they had on staff. She was a composed woman in her fifties who had been treating Colleoni casualties for fifteen years and asked no questions she wasn't required to ask. She was already working on Tore in the ground-floor guest room at the back of the house.

Frederica hadn't gone in to check on him yet. She stood near the library door with her jacket still on and Despina's rifle case propped beside her. She was the calmest-looking person in the room, which wasn't a good thing. She had shut down whatever she had been feeling and was now in her killing calm.

Dario didn't know when she would explode, but he wanted to make sure he was there when she did.

Serapis came down from the upper floor when Leo called him. He took one look at Frederica's face and went still in the doorway.

"Tell me," he said, his voice rough from the nap he had taken when they left.

Dario ran through the flight, the gate open, Tore in the garden, the evidence of how hard Despina had fought before they got hold of her, and the scale of the assault.

Serapis's face shifted as he spoke to something Dario recognized as dread, which didn't bode well. When he finished, Serapis sat down in the nearest empty armchair.

"Did you know something was coming?" Dario asked, his eyes narrowing. "What do you know that you haven't told us?"