An Heiress in Venice (9 page)

Enzo:

She’d called me arrogant to my face many times before, and she was right each and every time. And this time, when everything was on the line, I was more than arrogant. I was ruthless.

I wasn’t an asshole. If she genuinely didn’t want me, I could get the message. I cared about her and I loved her, but I was capable of leaving her alone. But this was something else. Her body clung to me at Casanova; her eyes sought me out. Yet she kept pushing me away, and I wanted to know why.

Something told me I couldn’t leave her alone tonight. She was too vulnerable and too afraid, and I cared for her too much.

I knew she wanted to end things. I could see her try to form the words, and I didn’t give her time. “I’ll walk you back home,” I said instead, when we were ready to leave.

“Enzo,” she protested, but today, I wasn’t going to waver.

***

At the door of her
palazzo
, she opened her mouth to speak the words that would end this thing, and again, I cut her off. “I need to use your bathroom,” I lied shamelessly. “Can I come upstairs?”

She nodded, clearly tense and unhappy. I was unmoved. The stakes had never been higher, and I had never been more ruthless.

Then, in her bathroom, my eye caught sight of a crumpled photo in the trash, and I fished it out, and everything clicked into place.

***

Alice:

My heart stopped when he came out of the bathroom, and I saw the blank look on his face, and the photo of the two of us kissing in his hand.

“Explain,” he said. Just the one word. Absolutely no emotion.

And so I did. I told him everything, right from the start. The letters that started coming just after Ian’s death. How the police in Houston had found nothing, and had mocked me. The threat against Craig Dearborn, the guy I went out with just once. The fact that I had fled to Venice, hoping to outrun my unknown letter-writer. I didn’t bother explaining the threat against Enzo. He knew about that; he held the photo in his hands.

“You are safe in Venice,” he said when I was done.

“Really, Enzo?” I scoffed. I was angry; I was heartbroken by his lack of emotion. “I’d never thought of you as naïve. Do you think that an occasional cop or two, walking by my street will stop this person who has stalked me for three years?”

He laughed disbelievingly. “Do you think I’d leave your safety up to chance,
gattina
?” he shot back. “After everything that has happened in the last month, you don’t trust me?” He shook his head. “You’ve had two guards watch you around the clock, right from the first day we met. Someone’s followed you as you’ve walked from your apartment to the bakery. Someone’s kept an eye on you, at all times, so that you’ll be safe.”

I gazed at him, disbelief warring with anger. He’d arranged for guards to watch me. The fucking infuriating arrogance. “You had guards shadow me? Were you going to tell me?”

He shrugged. “I told you you’d be safe.”

I clenched my hands into fists, to prevent myself from taking a swing at him. “You are angry with me for not telling you about the letters?” I hissed. “Well, consider me furious about you not telling me about the guards.” I glared at him. “I did something to protect you, the same way you did something to protect me. What’s the difference between us?”

He looked at me, and now, I could only see sadness in his eyes. “The difference,
gattina
, was that my protection was designed to keep you safe, not to dictate your choices. Your protection, on the other hand, was designed to push us apart. You could have told me about the letters at any time. We could have figured this out. Together. Instead, you chose to keep the walls around you.”

He took a deep breath, and continued. “I’ve been here for you. I’ve let you set the pace. I’ve put myself out there, because I care for you, and I want you. But I need something from you too, Alice. I can’t do this in a vacuum. It’s too one-sided this way. If you care, you need to make a move too.”

I couldn’t. Maybe I was letting my fear rule me, but I’d lived with my fear for three years. I didn’t dare let myself hope for anything else.

“Leave,” I whispered, closing my eyes.

I started making my plans to flee as soon as the door had shut behind him.

Enzo:

I should have walked away.

Instead, I called Antonio and we met at his villa in the middle of the night, and we both studied the photo.

“It’s taken outside the front door of the
palazzo
,” Antonio noted. I nodded. I was already on a laptop, searching through property and rental records. From the angle, the photo had been taken from one of the buildings opposite the street from Alice. Three buildings, thirty six apartments. Thirty-six potential suspects.

Antonio came to stand over my shoulder, and I scrolled through the names of the tenants, he stiffened. “What?” I asked him.

“A familiar name,” he replied. His eyes were far away as he remembered. “Vincenzo de Luca.” He shook his head. “A fool.” He smiled, but his eyes were hard. “I cannot believe he was careless enough to use his real name.” He picked up his phone and made a call, moving away to talk to the person on the other end of the line.

“We’ll locate Vincenzo by morning,” he said.

“Who is he?” I asked.

“Petty two-bit crook,” Antonio replied. “Not too bright.”

My eyes narrowed. This guy had haunted Alice since she came to Venice. “I want first crack at him,” I said.

“I assumed that would be the case,” Antonio said mildly. “I’ll call you.” He looked at me. “How are things with Alice and you?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know,” I said, ignoring the heartbreak for the moment. “Let’s sort this out first.”

***

Alice:

What’s the saying? There’ll always be Paris? I went to Paris early the next morning, though I didn’t want to.

I didn’t know if I should be angry at Enzo or grateful for his help. I was a weird, conflicted mix of the two. I needed outside perspective and Paula’s bracing forthrightness. I’d lost mine, in the dominance and the submission, in the fear I’d been engulfed in because of the letters, in the incredible up and down that my life had been since I’d moved to Venice.

I needed a pause button. I needed time to think.

***

When Paula opened the door of her suite at the George Cinq, all I wanted to do was fall into my best friend’s arms and cry. I burst into tears.

“Alice,” Paula’s voice was concerned. “What’s wrong?”

Minutes later, a cup of tea was placed in my hands, and Jason, Paula’s husband was shooed away. I took a sip, inhaling the aroma of the delicate tea, and I smiled tremulously.

“Can I ask what’s wrong now?” Paula looked at me.

“Enzo,” I said. “My anonymous letter writer. You pick.” I kept my tone intentionally light. If I allowed myself to think about Enzo, I was going to cry again.

“Enzo?” she asked. Her expression hardened. “Did he hurt you?”

I lifted my head, startled. “Physically, you mean? No, of course not.”

“What happened?”

I told her the entire story. Then I told her what had been bothering me, the fact that I’d been guarded without my knowledge. “He crossed a line. He interfered in my life,” I said.

Paula took a sip of her own tea, and waited for me to continue. I closed my eyes for a second to push back the flash of pain I felt when I thought about Enzo. “Right from the start, he was making sure I was being followed constantly. Every bit of freedom and respite I thought I’d earned, he’d given me. None of it was real.”

“Umm, Alice?” Paula interrupted. “What the fuck?”

I gaped at her as she drew breath to continue. “Enzo wasn’t restricting your freedom,” she pointed out bluntly. “That was your stalker, wasn’t it? Enzo kept you safe, the same way you tried to keep him safe.”

“He should have told me,” I insisted.

“And you should have told him about the letters as well,” she retorted.

“I should have,” I agreed softly. All night, I’d been wondering why I hadn’t. I’d known from almost the start that Enzo would never mock me. He would have taken my concerns seriously; he would have helped.

“Maybe I didn’t think it could be real again,” I said. “When Ian had died, I decided I had to keep living. But I did think that I had already had my one shot at being loved. I couldn’t be lucky enough to stumble into love a second time.”

Paula sighed. “You are thirty-three,” she pointed out. “You have a lot of life ahead of you, and Ian would be the first person who would have told you that.”

She was right. It had been easy to trust Enzo at Casanova. I had surrendered control of my body to him. But my heart? That was fragile and could be broken. It had been broken when Ian had died. Perhaps I was reluctant to let it be broken again.

And yet, from what Enzo had said to me yesterday, he had placed his heart in my hands from almost the start.

He had been right. It was my turn to reciprocate. It was time I made a move.

“I think,” I said thoughtfully, “that I need to head back to Venice.”

“That’s a good idea,” Paula agreed. “But do you have time to have lunch with an old friend first?”

“Of course,” I said. I glanced at my watch. One-thirty in the afternoon. We’d talked for an hour, and my stomach was growling. “Lunch sounds good.”

“Give me fifteen minutes to change?” she asked. She was still in her dressing gown. “Then I’ll meet you in your room. You are staying here, aren’t you?”

I nodded. “No suite for me, though, I’m not fancy like the two of you,” I grinned, teasing her. Suddenly, I felt a whole lot better. “I was a last-minute walk-up and took what they had to offer. I’m on the floor below you.”

She rolled her eyes. My stomach growled again, and she pushed me out the door. “Okay, see you in a bit,” she said. “Meet you in the lobby in fifteen?”

***

Enzo:

As promised, Antonio had called early in the morning. I headed immediately to the warehouse he had directed me to. He was waiting for me outside the door. No one else was in sight.

“I had to send everyone off,” he said. I nodded my understanding. I was a high-ranking police officer, and Antonio was the head of the Thieves Guild. In public, we pretended we didn’t know each other, to avoid any appearance of impropriety.

“We aren’t killing the guy,” I told Antonio. “I won’t be party to murder.”

He shook his head with a wry smile. “We don’t talk about work for obvious reasons, Enzo,” he said, “but there’s a lot less murder in my world that you’d think. Still, Vincenzo will need to think that we are capable of killing him. He does some work for the Mafia once in a while. He’ll need to believe the threat is real.”

“That won’t be a problem,” I said tightly. My self-control was hanging on by a thread. “But is this creating a problem for you? That he is Mafia?” I asked Antonio directly.

“I protect my own, Enzo,” Antonio replied. “But there’s no problem. Vincenzo has been disavowed. This was a freelance job, and the Mafia doesn’t approve of freelance jobs.”

I was two year older than Antonio. In the orphanage we’d grown up in, that cold, bleak place, my body had often served as his shield when the people running the place had let loose with the belt. Funny how life came full circle.

I didn’t say this to him. But I placed a hand on his shoulder in thanks, and took a deep breath. “Let’s go in.”

***

Vincenzo looked like he was in his early forties. He was a big guy. He looked like a trouble maker; the kind of guy who would start brawls in bars. Not right now though. Right now, he was tied to a chair in the middle of an empty room, his arms and legs thoroughly restrained. His face bore some signs of recent bruising. He must have fought.

I shook my head. Antonio had let it be known that Alice was off-limits. To cross the head of Thieves Guild? Vincenzo was stupid. Or greedy. Or both.

I stayed a half-step behind as we walked into the room. Vincenzo took a look at Antonio, and shrank a little, before pulling himself together. “Fuck you, Moretti,” he spat. “You can’t hurt me. I’m Mafia.”

Antonio laughed, and it was a chilling sound that echoed in the empty space. “Even Mafia understands blood, Vincenzo,” he said. “I personally protected Alice Blackwell.” He shrugged off his jacket, carefully unbuttoning his sleeves and rolling them up. “You should have left her alone.”

Beads of sweat began to trickle on Vincenzo’s forehead. “You can’t kill me, Moretti,” he blustered. “The cops will be all over you.”

That was my cue. “Will they?” I asked, stepping forward out of the shadows. “Somehow, Vincenzo, I don’t think I’m going to concern myself too much with a two-bit punk like you.”

He paled. I removed my jacket as well, and rolled my sleeves back. “Now,” I said. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.” I smashed my fist into his stomach, and he doubled over in pain. “Let me be clear. That was the easy way. Why’d you send her the letters?”

He didn’t talk. He straightened, with a defiant expression on his face. I sighed. “Heroics are so pointless, Vincenzo,” I said, driving my fist into his gut again.

“It was a job,” he gasped out. “It paid well.”

“And you didn’t stop to think through the consequences, did you, Vincenzo?” Antonio smiled. He took out a cigarette and lit it very deliberately, and Vincenzo gulped, his eyes never leaving that glowing tip. “Who wants to hurt Alice Blackwell?”

Vincenzo kept silent, and Antonio leaned forward, his eyes hard. The tip of the cigarette was inches from his face. “The police are not going to protect you,” he said. “Your Mafia has cut you loose. You have one chance to live.”

Vincenzo looked back and forth between the two of us. I could see the expression in Antonio’s eyes, and there was not an inch to give there. I felt the same way. Vincenzo made his calculations and yielded. “An American,” he gasped. “I don’t know any more. I don’t ask questions.”

“Let’s try harder, Vincenzo,” I said. I bent down and pulled a knife from my ankle, and flicked the blade open. “I want a name.”

“Please, no,” he begged me.

“A name, Vincenzo,” I said flatly. “You went after my woman. I’m not in the mood to be forgiving.” My sweet Alice. I just wanted her safe.

“Jeremy Reinhart,” he said, slumping forward in defeat.

I looked at Antonio, and he looked at me. “That’s her lawyer,” I said, understanding dawning belatedly. Shit. Of course.

I reached for my phone instantly to call Alice, to beg her to be careful until I got there, but her phone kept ringing. Where was she?

Antonio’s phone beeped, and he read the message. “She just caught a flight to Paris,” he said, reading the message. “You know why?”

“Her friend Paula is visiting,” I responded, remembering something Alice had mentioned to me. Damn it. She was safe in Venice. In Paris? We could not protect her.

“My private plane is at the Lido airport,” he said. “I’ll call them; it’ll be ready. Go.”

“You have a private plane?” I asked him, briefly stunned, and he grinned.

“Don’t tell Lucia,” he said. “She’ll never let me hear the end of it. Now, go.”

I didn’t reply; I was already out the door.