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Oh god, I’m going to have to look up.It felt like my head weighed a hundred pounds as I forced it up and met the man’s cold, dead-eyed stare. “Um, California—Los Angeles,” I squeaked and then silently cursed my monumental lack of backbone.
“Hmmm, and do you visit often?” he persisted in a tone that said he wasn’t buying a word I was selling.
“No, this is my first time,” I lied.
“Is that so?” It seemed like a rhetorical question, but he looked at me expectantly.
I nodded. My throat was too dry to force another word out.
This was abadidea. This was the absolute motherload of bad ideas of all time. This would go down as one of the worst ideas in the Hall of Fame of bad ideas.I’ll wait for my plaque in the mail.
The man didn’t believe a word I was saying, and somehow, I had a feeling in the pit of my stomach that Victoriarecognizedme. It was beyond me, though, how she remembered what Sofia Luca looked like. Were she and my mother friends? How was she able to recognize me despite the decade that had passed, despite the toll puberty and a life without Italian marbles had taken on me?
She knew who I was. She knew the truth.
Every time her gaze landed on me, the heat around the room seemed to gather around me, the way I imagined the single bulb in interrogation rooms felt like on the skin. The fact that I was eating dinner with the Costa family was just now sinking into me.
I was in a den of lions.
A naive kitten in a den of sharp-fanged lions.
Nico’s gaze kept swinging back and forth between me and Victoria. It didn’t take long for the dawn of recognition on his face to fully break.
I was definitely getting eaten alive—and I didn’t think Nico was going to use his tongue this time.
I stood up without thinking.Stupid!
“Can you please tell me where I could find the bathroom?” I asked Nico in a quiet enough voice I hoped the trembling in it was less noticeable.
“Third door on the left,” he said, pointing toward a hallway off the left side of the dining room.
I nodded my thanks, pushed back my chair, and tried to walk out of the dining room with anything but the composure of a girl whose death was faked a decade ago and was supposedly buried six feet beneath the ground.
If Nico didn’t kill me, I had no doubt Lorenzo Costa would have no qualms about doing it. Despite his age, he looked like a man who’d have no trouble ripping a person’s heart right out of their chest with his bare hands.
I walked right in here.The Costa estate.This was basically suicide. I might as well have pinned a name tag to my chest next to a big, round bull’s-eye.
Down the hall, the closed doors prickled my curiosity despite my fragile situation. They always did that. When I first walked into my hotel room, I checked all the rooms and the closed doors, drawers, and cupboards, just like I’d done the first day in my dorm.
Vito had taught me the importance of knowing one’s surroundings. “You know what curiosity did to the cat, passerotta?”Vito would ask whenever he caught me snooping in the kitchen cupboards, the linen closet, or the side tables next to the sofa.
I did know what curiosity did to the cat.
I walked right past the closed doors and headed to the bathroom near the end of the hall. Inside, I stumbled to the marble sink and splashed water on my face.
A naive kitten in a den of sharp-fanged lions.
No one ever said anything about what curiosity did to thekitten.
I stared at the girl in the mirror, my blue eyes brewing a storm beneath. I looked around the bathroom. There was a window on the left. I walked over and checked it closely; it wasn’t the kind that slid open on tracks. I would have to smash the window to get out.
I wasn’t dumb enough to set off a security alarm. I’d be caught before I even climbed through.
I plopped my butt on the toilet lid and pinched my nose, the peach hue on my fingers a blur in my peripheral vision.
I could ask to speak with Nico for a moment, just the two of us. I’d get him alone and tell him the truth. I could only hope that he asked me to leave quietly instead of throwing me to the lions.
But I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want to tell him the truth. I didn’t want him to ask me to leave.
