TWENTY-ONE
Chiara
Numb.
That was the only word
Jack was gone, riding off to his villa, avoiding D’Angelos and our Chucky-slime summoning superpowers. He was probably already writing chatty emails back and forth with Candy White and planning their happy life together—
Scratch that. I knew it wasn’t true, so why did I go off obsessing over it?
Jack was right; I didn’t give him enough credit. I needed to trust more. The memory of his disappointed, outraged face. How many times had past boyfriends given me a similar look? But to receive that particular expression from Jack . . .
The memory gutted me.
Inspector Paola called Tennyson’s phone after Jack left, forcing me to push aside my maudlin thoughts.
“Given your unhealthy obsession with media attention, we stepped up the arrests,” she reported. “All suspects are in custody. You are free to go where you’d like. We don’t feel your life is in danger anymore from the Tempeste family.”
Her words were decidedly anticlimactic.
So . . . that was it?
Where was the big showdown? Everything being decided and over in one huge, dramatic scene? Figures that real life would never follow cinematic patterns. It dragged on, resolving itself in fits and starts.
I was a free woman, on all accounts. Why that freedom felt like a cage, I didn’t understand.
I loaded up with Tennyson in his Jeep and drove south. I figured he’d just drop me home in Florence, but Tennyson encouraged me to stay with him.
“I would worry about you in Florence,” he said. “Someone tried to kill you just two days ago.”
“Why? The police say I’m in the clear.”
“Eh, but why take the chance? Let’s give it a couple days. Come hang out with me,” he said keeping an eye on the road.
Realization blazed through me. “Something is going to happen! You saw it!”
“Chiara—”
“I knew it! You’ve been seeing things about me for a while now.”
“I haven’t seen anything specific regarding you.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“This is just common sense talking here. Not some vision I’ve had. I’m a soldier and a psychic tuned into the future emotions of other people. If someone with the intent to harm you gets within a quarter mile of the house, I’ll know. Even better, I’ll know ten minutes before they arrive.”
I chewed on my lip, eyeing him sideways, still not sure I was buying his explanation. Tennyson was good at holding his emotions close, and this seemed a little too coincidental.
I wasn’t letting this go. “Me staying with you doesn’t make sense, Tenn. Either my emotions are a burden to you, or the Tempeste family is still after me and you get caught up in it. Either way, I put you in danger.”
“Every breath is danger for me, sis.” Tennyson scoffed. “But I do feel better when I’m helping someone else.”
“Really? I thought my emotions drove you nuts?”
“They do.” He grinned. “So it sorta balances out, I guess.”
I swatted his arm.
“I hate you.”
“I hate you, too, Chiara. More than you’ll ever know.”
Ah. Brothers.
Fine. I was too emotionally fragile to not accept Tennyson’s offer of support. Besides, it felt good to help and be helped in return.
“Thank you,” I said after a moment.
“You’re welcome.”
The next week passed in relative calm.
I worked from Volterra, spending time with Tennyson. My brother seemed to be doing better. The black moods that had so often encased him in the past were fewer. He smiled more often.
I called Nonna every day. On the third day, I asked her about Babbo and what he was like as a kid. I wasn’t sure why I asked. Maybe some part of me wanted to see Cesare from another angle, understand his decisions better. Or maybe I wanted to create new memories of my father. As a family, we didn’t talk much about Cesare, so I was hesitant to open up an old wound by asking for stories of my father.
But Nonna laughed and told me she loved talking about her only son. She told me hilarious story after hilarious story. Obviously, my father was a bit of a handful as a child. But the stories did little to illuminate his decisions as an adult.
As for the other man in my thoughts, I was lost when it came to Jack, my emotions a confusing muddle.
I adored him, and I hated him for making me adore him.
I was furious at him for criticizing me, and I was terrified that there might actually be a thread of truth in his criticism.
But mostly, I was disappointed in him for giving up on us.
I wanted him to fight for me.
Instead, he had left . . . looked me up and down and then shook his head, No. Rejecting me. Proving once again, I wasn’t enough for a man I loved.
Okay, so clearly I had lingering Daddy issues. When would the pain of Babbo’s betrayal end?
Naturally, rather than deal with the problem, I did what I did best—I avoided thinking about it, buried myself in work and cursed the world, men and Jack in that specific order. The whole time firmly telling my broken heart to buck up and deal.
I heard nothing from Jack personally, though he did speak with Tennyson every day, often via video chat. Which meant I had to sit one room over—I couldn’t physically force myself closer or farther away—listening to Jack’s sexy laugh and rounded aristocratic drawl as he discussed podcasts, museum display schedules and media interviews. Apparently, Jack also continued to explore the D’Angelo archive, laboriously reading Cesare il Pompaso’s writings, trying to find more clues.
As for the black vellum pages, Claire had taken them to be scanned by an expert in Rome. We hoped to get the results back any day.
I was sitting in the drawing room nine days after leaving Jack, sorting through research materials on the couch, when Tennyson plopped himself down beside me, his laptop under his arm.
I smiled at him. “You seem to be doing better nowadays.”
His lips curved up at the edges before he shrugged. “I don’t know if I’m doing better, per se. I still feel fractured and fracturing. But, as I’ve said, helping others makes me feel more whole. Acting as a true oracle makes me feel less divided.”
His gaze drifted away as he spoke, eyes looking out the open windows, across the terrace to the space where the old tower had once stood.
The summer air hung with humidity, the kind of humidity that swathed the Tuscan hills in hazy smoke and turned even breathing into a muggy chore. The rural roads around Volterra showcased fields of giant, yellow girasoli—sunflowers or ‘turn suns’ if you took the translation literally—obsessively tracking the sun across the sky as they danced along the horizon.
Tennyson turned back to me. “How are you?”
“Fine. Just researching.”
“And your visions?”
“Meh. I’m the same as I’ve always been.”
A murmuration of starlings swept past the window, darting and swirling into the sky.
“A storm comes.” The words passed my lips before I thought.
“You’re getting better at that.”
I gave a one-shouldered shrug. Anyone who lived in Tuscany knew that it only took a tiny bit of cold air to turn dense humidity into a powerful thunderstorm.
But me? A psychic?
I had spent my life thinking I was merely a victim of the D’Angelo curse drama. I struggled to accept that I might be part of it.
“Do you think I’ll go insane?” I asked.
“ Go insane? You mean you can travel farther down that path?”
“Ha-ha. You’re hilarious.”
“C’mon, that at least deserved a rim shot.”
“Not a chance.”
Silence.
“No,” Tennyson said after a moment. “I don’t think you’ll go insane.”
More lip chewing. How did Tennyson know that? He sounded ridiculously sure—
Oh!
My eyes bugged out of my head, staring at my brother.
“No, Chiara.” He didn’t even glance my way while opening his laptop and powering it up.
“But you know! You saw!”
“You have got to stop. Not every thought or suggestion out of my mouth is foreseen. It doesn’t work like that. Besides, I will neither confirm nor deny any future knowledge.”
I swatted his arm.
“Ow! Stop being such a brat.” He cringed away from me, lifting his laptop in defense.
“Stop keeping important information about my future from me. What do you know?”
“You’ll be fine.”
A beat.
“That’s it? That’s all you’re going to say?”
“Yep.”
I threw myself back into my chair. “You’re a terrible person.”
“I can live with that.”
Tennyson responded to email and then snagged some of my research materials and started reading. I tried to get back to my own work but instead found myself alternating between staring out the window toward the ruined tower and sending Tennyson evil sister vibes.
“I’m doing you a solid here.” He shuffled the papers, not looking up. “Would you mind pulling back on the die-Tennyson-die emotional roller coaster? It’s giving me a headache.”
Gah! Stupid brothers wouldn’t even let me brood in peace.
But I did send him sunny unicorn and rainbow thoughts with chocolate sprinkles and glitter. Lots of glitter.
Tennyson laughed.
That didn’t stop the feeling of impending doom.
Dark clouds billowed on the horizon as the afternoon wore on. The storm felt suffocating. Breathless. Like the whole world waited in the balance.
Lightning flashed in the distance.
I refused to draw mental comparisons between this summer day and that horrific one with Babbo nearly twenty years ago.
Tennyson suddenly sat upright. “Claire just emailed. Look at this.” He stood up and carried his laptop over to the games table. “The results from the scans of those black pages from Cesare il Pompaso came in.”
I followed, sinking into a chair next to him, both of us looking at the computer screen. Documents floated through. I scanned them, mesmerized by what I saw.
“There was something under all that ink in the end.” I reached over Tennyson’s arm and clicked on the next image.
“Claire included a few notes.” He pointed at the screen.
In carefully studying the original documents, it appears Cesare lightly etched into the vellum. Instead of using ink, he used a stylus to essentially mark the message in the thicker vellum and then covered it all with lampblack. It took looking at the pages under infrared light to see the patterns.
“Clever.” Tennyson sat back.
“It is.”
A video chat icon popped up on the screen.
Jack.
Of course.
He would have been copied on this information, too.
Before I could say or do anything, Tennyson accepted the call. “Jack, my man. You see this awesomeness?”
“I do indeed.” Jack’s clipped British voice filled the room.
His face flickered into view for the first time in nearly ten days. Tousled hair still damply askew. Shirt still unbuttoned and wet. Eyes still a glacial blue.
He never changed and, yet, I felt like everything had.
I was staring at the face of the man I adored. The man who was disappointed and frustrated with me. The man who didn’t want to be with me.
I hadn’t realized, until that moment, how much I missed him. How fully he owned my heart.
Jack’s gaze met mine.
His face remained impassive. Not a glimmer of emotion. Nothing.
He really had given up on us.
Something painful and sharp lodged in my throat. I blinked rapidly.
Deep breath. In. Out.
I forced my emotions back. If Jack could act so unaffected, I could, too.
“It is fascinating,” Jack continued. “May I share my screen with you?”
“Absolutely.” Tennyson clicked and changed some settings. Jack’s face moved to the corner of the screen while the images Claire had sent over loaded onto the page.
The four scanned pages glowed at me. Each was covered in lines and boxes. I sat back, tapping a finger to my lips. The images made no real sense.
“All four pages are like this, though one page has what might be writing,” Jack said.
I instantly saw what he meant. I reached across Tennyson and double-clicked the file, opening it. I zoomed in and suddenly words appeared, written in elegant Italian:
My namesake will light the way.
Huh.
That was unusual.
“What is that supposed to mean?” Tennyson asked, leaning forward to scrutinize the writing.
“I am equally baffled,” Jack said. “The text at least is discernible. But the lines and boxes have no clear meaning.”
“It does seem haphazard.”
We studied the pages for a moment, each with a puzzled look.
Finally, Jack snapped his fingers. “Would it be possible to rotate and manipulate the pages together in a computer program?”
Ten minutes later, we were all staring at the four pages lined up next to each other in Photoshop. The pages featured lines and dots, rectangles and squares. No words other than the one scribbled line.
Calling precise directions, Jack had Tennyson turn and rotate and move the pages around each other.
“This is like a bizzaro game of Tetris,” I sighed as Tennyson turned one of the sheets upside-down.
“They are odd,” Jack agreed. “They actually look a lot like—”
His voice stopped, a thought obviously blazing through him. Jack barked a few more orders, moving the pages again.
“What are you thinking, Jack?” Tennyson asked.
“I’m not sure. But I do remember seeing something similar over and over on my own father’s desk.”
“What?”
Jack’s face suddenly animated, grin stretching wide. Abruptly, he looked like teenage Jack, happy and excited and ridiculously adorable. I sternly told my over-eager heart to stop with the acrobatics.
“These look a lot like an old architectural floor plan,” he said. “The way it would have been drawn in the early eighteenth century.”
Most of me wanted to hate him for being so smart, but it was kinda hard. He was just so . . . excited. And so . . . cute. And so . . . clever. And so . . . Jack. My heart continued to jump and leap in my chest.
Jack and Tennyson shuffled the drawings around, trying to make them fit together, the four pages making one larger image. If this was a floor plan, what would it be?
It only took a few seconds to put the images in the right places. I studied it for only a minute or two. The answer was obvious.
Tennyson frowned. “Is this—?”
“Villa Maledetti?” I asked. “It is indeed.”
We studied the plan. It was clearly the piano nobile of the D’Angelo villa where Tennyson and I sat. The drawing room, study, kitchen and so on clearly visible.
My forehead furrowed into what was probably my thinking hard look.
“This doesn’t make sense, though.” Tennyson ran his palm over the section of the floorplan where the modern kitchen stood. “The kitchen wasn’t here until about twenty years ago. Nonna created it out of a secondary drawing room. I still remember all the dust from the renovation. And Mom added the bathroom under the stairs only five years ago. Why is the modern floorplan showing up in an eighteenth century document underneath blacked-out paper?”
Chills zinged my spine. “Cesare il Pompaso must have seen the future. He obviously saw a lot of other stuff accurately, given what happened with Dante and Branwell.”
The guys were quiet for a moment.
“I mean, sure, he could have seen the future. But why?” Tennyson asked. “Why use this specific time period?”
I ran my fingertips over the scribbled words:
My namesake will light the way.
“Do you think that this could refer to Babbo?” I asked. “They were both Cesares.”
Jack nodded. “That would explain why the diagram shows the floorplan as it looks now.”
I studied the architectural rendering a bit more. One thing becoming frighteningly clear.
“The text runs over the top of the ruined tower.” I tapped the point.
Silence.
My namesake will light the way.
What had Babbo been seeking with the lightning? And lightning would illuminate the way to what?
The guys talked for a few minutes before Jack signed off. But I had tuned them out by that point, my mind churning.
What really had happened that fateful night? Had things occurred as we thought?
I stood up, walking to the open window, staring out to the ruined tower. Given how my life had been lately, you’d think I would have turned away.
But . . .
I was still that same girl. The one who never tapped out. Who never backed down.
Curious and nosy to a fault.
Was there something there we had missed over the years? Would something in the tower ruins light the way?
Suddenly, I had to know. I couldn’t wait even another moment.
I stepped out of the enormous window and on to the large terrace.
“Chiara!” Tennyson called after me.
I spun around. He stood outlined in the window.
“Come inside. The storm will hit in a few minutes. You’ll get soaked. If there’s anything there, we’ll find it later.”
I waved him off, sending him strong ‘I’m fine’ thoughts and kept on walking straight to the flowers planted amongst stones.
The remains of the ruined tower.
Somehow, it seemed right to be here with a storm threatening. This spot had ended it all for my dad. Mom hadn’t moved a thing after the tower was destroyed. She considered it my father’s grave, as there hadn’t been much of him left to bury. This wasn’t a place of sunshine and roses.
Well, that wasn’t entirely true. There were roses, I supposed. Mom had almost immediately planted a garden in the ruins. Turning a place of horror into one of beauty, she said. A living mausoleum. The flowers bobbed in the breeze, rustling against the fallen rocks.
Why had Babbo been up here that night? What had he been trying to do? Was the message from Cesare il Pompaso just a sick joke? The man clearly was a lunatic. And given his messages to Dante and Branwell, he liked messing with people.
Had Babbo just been caught up in some rambling vision that went awry? Had he even clearly understood what he was doing?
I scampered over the stones, studying them. Tumbled blocks of different shapes and sizes. Wind tugged at my hair and clothing. Twenty minutes later, I had nothing. The stones didn’t form any sort of discernible pattern. Nothing stood out as different or unusual.
Was Babbo trying to communicate with us through me? If so, why? And why now? Why lightning?
I couldn’t remember my sleepwalking dreams. Even my experiment in Riomaggiore was fuzzy. In some ways, that was the worst part.
I wanted to remember. Anything to blot out my last memory of my father. That split second eye contact before he deliberately turned away from me, the tower exploding in a blast of bricks and rock.
Rain started to fall, just like that summer afternoon so long ago. Heavy, pot-bellied drops, eagerly plundering the dry earth. I was soaked in seconds.
I collapsed to my knees in the middle of the garden, breathing in the scents of lavender and roses and freesia. I backed up against one of the stones, holding my head in my hands.
I let it all wash over me. All the pain and revelations and hopeless yearning of the last several weeks.
Lightning flashed. Rain pounded. The fury of the external storm reflecting the chaotic agony inside my chest.
Why had Babbo chosen to leave me? How could he have looked at his little girl and still turned away? Why hadn’t I been lovable enough to stop him?
Light cracked across the sky. Rain pelted my skin.
How could he? How could he leave me like that?
Turns out, that was the real question.
From one heartbeat to the next, all my hurt and sadness over Babbo’s actions morphed into blinding rage. Furious. My hands shook. My breathing stuttered.
What man would allow his supposedly beloved little girl to witness his own suicide? How were those the actions of a caring individual?!
I ignored the tiny voice that whispered perhaps Babbo hadn’t understood. That his mind had been diseased and unable to understand what he was doing.
I didn’t care.
Babbo should have loved me more.
Dimly, I recognized I was sobbing. Heartbroken, gut-wrenching sobs. Like some dramatically pathetic heroine in a Nicholas Sparks movie.
Gah. I hated me and all my daddy issues. How could he have messed me up like this?
I curled my knees into my chest and let it all out. Messy. Chaotic. Tears and rain merging into one.
Crack. Boom.
Lightning streaked across the sky. Thunder rumbled the ground under my hands.
A tiny squeak had me turning my head. Looking down, I noted a small bird hunkered under one of the tumbled stones, body shaking as it weathered the storm. Its beady eyes met mine.
Of course. Of any bird I would see in a moment like this, it would be a sparrow.
Sparrow. Passero.
A traditional diminutive for children.
Mia passerotta. My little sparrow. My father’s nickname for me. I had always been Babbo’s little sparrow.
Was that all I was to him in the end? A brown, insignificant, common bird?
No one ever stopped to watch a sparrow in flight. No one gasped and went for the binoculars or told their spouse when they got home, ‘You’ll never believe it! I saw a sparrow today.’
Sparrows were small nothings. Unimportant. Was that how Babbo saw me?
Rain continued to fall as I sobbed. Some part of me noted that I was shaking. That my hand could barely close into a fist. That my legs were tingly and asleep.
Crying left me . . . empty.
Numb.
My mind drained of all thought. I had nothing left to give. But I couldn’t leave this garden. It seemed like my personal ground zero.
Wasn’t this feeling supposed to be accompanied by some grand revelation? A hallelujah moment where everything was made clear and I found my personal solution? Catharsis in action?
I had nothing.
Crack. Boom. Rumble.
Wind tore through the countryside, turning the rain sideways, dragging my soaked hair across my lips.
Crack.
Lightning snaked from cloud to cloud. A ribbon of silver lace scattering across the sky.
Someone would be hurt tonight. Pain. Terror.
A life would never be the same.
Crack. Boom.
Danger!
My heart clogged my throat. Breathing became a struggle.
A prophecy. This was another vision.
I felt it now. The sensation familiar and yet . . . new.
But what was the danger? Whose life would never be the same?
Stupid gift.
What was the point of having a GUT if it was so damn vague I could never understand what it meant until after the fact?
Crack!
I flinched, scampering backward to crouch against one of the larger blocks. The boom of the thunder rolled over me, slow and relentless.
I stared over the landscape. C’mon GUT. Show me something useful.
Nothing.
Crack! Crack! Boom!
Again. Nothing.
Okay, maybe I needed to mix the trance thing with the lightning. As I had done earlier, I willed my mind to clear. Unfortunately, my poor brain was too full of Babbo and feeling sorry for myself.
CRACK!
A jagged bolt sheered through the sky, tearing apart the atmosphere as it went. The scent of ozone filled the air. Thunder crashed.
A vision flashed before my eyes.
Searing into my retinas. Impossible to misunderstand or ignore.
A scene of black, white and red.
The black of night.
The white of Jack’s shirt.
The red of blood.
Jack’s lifeless eyes, staring through me.