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CHAPTER ELEVEN

PASCALSTOODTHEREfor a long, long time after the door closed behind him.

After she’d left him the way he’d told her she should.

He stood there in that office that he’d been so proud of before. The office that represented who he was. All he had. All he was.

But instead of admiring the sharp, modern lines and their juxtaposition with ancient Rome right there outside his window, all he could see was Cecilia.

She was everything he’d ever wanted. Poise. Grace. Elegance.

And somehow, despite all that, she loved him.

She loved him.

How could she possibly love him?

Pascal could feel his heart kicking at him as if it was trying to beat him up from the inside out. He was hardly aware of it when he wheeled around, grabbing his heavy coat on the way out, and muttered something largely incomprehensible to Guglielmo.

He needed to get out. He needed to get away.

He threw himself into the streets, the way he always had.

Rome was his first love. The eternal city—and his eternal and only salvation. Rome was how he had learned who he was, what he could do. Rome had made him. There had been years Pascal had believed that only the battered old streets of this city knew him at all.

He walked and he walked, chasing the December day toward its brief afternoon. It was two days before Christmas and the weather was raw. Damp and cold. Still, it suited his mood. It matched the tumult within.

He navigated his way over slick stone and around knots of people. It seemed to him as he moved that he could feel the pulse of the city inside him, the whispers of three thousand years of so many lives. Hopes and dreams, loss and grief, all there beneath his feet.

It was as if the stones themselves seem to hum with all the life—and love—that had happened here. Too many times to count. Rome was stories that could never be told, lives tangled together and lost in time. Myths that anyone could recite and smaller, hidden tales no one would ever know. He could hear that humming everywhere. He could feel it shoot straight down his spine.

Then again, he thought as he found himself in a far-offpiazzalit up with Christmas trees and a festive market, it could as easily be the carolers.

He stood there in a neighborhood he rarely visited, a part of the same grand mosaic of stories lost and found, lived and lost. And though it was not his custom to play the slightest attention to Christmas songs, or Christmas itself if he could avoid it, he found himself listening despite himself as they sang.

Songs of joy. Songs of peace.

Pascal had always preferred to believe they were lies…but the familiar songs didn’t feel like a lie this gloomy evening. He did.

And maybe that was why, sometime later, he found himself in a neighborhood he usually preferred to avoid. And worse, standing outside the house he knew well though he had only ever seen it in pictures. There had been some dark years when he had set men on this house, to watch it. To report back. To give him a sense of what it was he fought.

He had sworn to himself that he would never come here himself. Never in person. Not after all those times his mother had come here when Pascal was a child, only to be turned away.

Over and over again as she wept that she was dirt.

Pascal had vowed that he would never allow his father the opportunity to do the same to him.

But it was a short, bitter sort of day, and the long night was already gathering. He looked through the lit-up windows at tidy, unremarkable rooms that indicated the owners were well-off—if not particularly flashy. Even here there were Christmas trees on display and festive decorations that looked as if they were part of a design feature, not the kind of family nostalgia he’d always assumed the people who lived here indulged in.

Mostly because he never would.

And then a man he’d seen in pictures—often in a split frame next to his own face but never in the flesh—walked into the main room and frowned as he looked around as if searching for a mislaid item.

Likely not his discarded son, Pascal thought bitterly. Neverthat.

He wasn’t sure what he expected to see. A monster, perhaps. A worthy opponent, certainly. A focal point for everything he’d done and all the ways he’d gloried in rolling around in the dirt just to throw it here.

But all he saw in the bright windows was a shriveled old man. Alone.

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