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Time spent gazing out of the window wouldn’t solve those problems. Stefano returned to his well-worn chair, his computer. He glanced at the half-full bottle of grappa sitting on the desk in front of him. Many like it had kept him company over the long, cold winter here. A shot of that would keep him warm for the next few hours as he worked. He grabbed a glass. Poured a solid measure into it. He took a hefty gulp which wouldn’t have done justice to a finer blend, but this local version was more moonshine than anything else.
The burn of it heated him from the inside out, fortifying him for the long night of work ahead. Stefano needed to spend some time on the second part of his plan to ensure that his brother and sister were protected. An almost impossible task, yet one which would yield the greatest reward for his siblings.
‘If you can find the Heart of Lasserno I’ll give you anything you want.’
A promise from a prince to a friend.
Back then, with an arrogance which should have sounded a warning of his future failings, Stefano had joked about being made Prime Minister. He and Alessio had both been younger and less world-weary then, trying to make their mark. What better way than finding the Heart of Lasserno—their country’s coronation ring—lost since it had been handed over to a foreign soldier for protection in the desperate dying days of World War II?
If he recovered the jewels, and if he found the ring, it would cement his position once more. He’d be able to walk back into the palace, his family’s reputation safe and assured, and respond to whatever command his monarch might make with some pride left.
But there he’d hit a wall built by time.
Stefano opened the document his investigator had emailed to him. Read it. No matter how much money he burned trying to find that Australian soldier, all he had was an unlikely amalgam of a name. Art Cacciatore. A man who’d ceased to exist—if he’d ever existed at all.
Stefano glanced at the half-empty glass on his desk. Tempting as it was to drown his sorrows, now was a time for work. He’d drink the castle’s cellar dry in celebration when his job was done.
The investigator’s report held no further joy for him so he left his desk. Approached an armchair near the fire crackling in a marble fireplace, readying himself for the seemingly endless chore of trawling through dusty boxes of family records for any useful information. The weight of the task, the exhaustion, the self-recrimination—all threatened to crush him. But this was not about his feelings. He wasn’t in the practice of granting sympathy for self-inflicted wounds.
As he sat down, a distant chime rang out. The doorbell? Perhaps the local village mechanic and handyman, Bruno, had finally decided to risk the weather and come to assess the castle’s heating, as he’d promised to do for the past week.
Stefano rose and left his office, rubbing his arms against the bracing temperature away from the fire. He made his way to the entrance hall past rooms shut down when his mother had left to live in an apartment in Lasserno’s capital after his father had died. The whole place looked as unlived-in as it had since he’d returned here all those months ago in self-imposed exile.
The bell chimed again. Loud, strident this time, as if someone had leaned on it.
‘Sí, sí. Sto arrivando!’
He reached the entrance foyer, undid the ancient locks, which groaned in icy protest, and hauled the front door open to a blast of frigid air.
NotBruno.
On the steps stood a woman doing her best to mimic a pale blue meringue in an oversized puffy jacket, zipped up high. A thick scarf wound round her neck, covering her chin. On her head was jammed a woollen hat, replete with polar bear patterns and pom-poms. Strands of golden hair had escaped from its confines, drifting round her face. Even though she was wrapped up tight against the icy breeze her cheeks had taken on a windblown pink and her nose glowed a cute rose-red. She gripped a solid-looking rectangular case in one gloved hand, and the rickety handle of a battered wheelie bag in another.
A traveller. Who now offered him a faltering smile from her generously proportioned mouth which lit the whole of her and turned ‘ordinary’ into something luminous.
A distraction.
He would have no distractions—not here. No angelic visions with pale skin, honey eyes and cherry lips. Whilst other castles in Europe were open to the public, his family had resolutely refused to share this most private of spaces. Barely any photographs of the treasures here existed in the public domain. Once he’d thought it a waste. Now he saw it as a blessing—one which he would not have disturbed.
‘Niente turisti,’he said, perhaps a little emphatically.
Those honey eyes widened and she took a step back, her mouth opening in a perfectly drawnOaccompanied by what sounded like a squeak...like a little mouse in his doorway. Except her eyes were not the eyes of a mouse. They flashed tiger-gold.
‘C-Count Moretti? Your Excellency? I don’t speak Italian.Non parlo It—’
‘No tourists,’ he repeated, in English now, given his initial oversight. The words rasped out of him and he cleared his throat. It had been so long he’d almost forgotten how to engage in polite conversation. Not that he felt particularly polite in this moment. The internet and guidebooks, if anyone still used them, were quite clear. ‘The castle does not take tourists.’
Her shoulders drooped, and then she seemed to collect herself. Straightened. ‘I’m not a tourist. I’m Lucille Jamieson.’
She said the words in a broad accent that was neither English nor North American, as if she had every expectation that he knew who she was.
‘You’re not from here.’
‘No, I’m Australian. But—’
‘Then youarea tourist and you have travelled a long way for nothing.’
‘I’m working in Salzburg right now, so only about fourteen hours’ drive away, and—’
