“One of the apartments in that building…it belonged to Gaettano. That’s—”
“Tano?” She stumbled back and knocked into one of the tables covered with model boats. “That Tano?”
“He was here a lot. He and Michele were good friends. Michele’s younger brother was shot a few days ago, but that didn’t hit him half as hard as Tano’s death a couple of months back. His brother Carmine was a bastard, even Michele could see that, and a coked-up walking corpse, too. More people mourned him in Colombia than here in New York. But to Michele, when Tano died it was—”
“I was there.”
He nodded. “Michele says you’re responsible for his death.”
“I wish I were.” She ran her hands over her face. After so long, she suddenly felt dirty and humiliated again, as if the rape had been only yesterday.
Tano. And Michele.
Once again she had to lean against the wall for support. “Anyone else?”
“Those two are the only ones I know about.” He was obviously uneasy, and not just because of the headlights approaching along the perimeter of the pond. “But there must have been others involved, probably two of three of the men waiting outside for us now.”
She closed her eyes, felt her breath streaming into her lungs and out again. And every time she let air out, something else rose with it, slowly, as if it first had to dig its way out from deep within her up to the surface. A chill that had nothing to do with winter was spreading through her rib cage, rolling over the remains of the serum in her bloodstream like a wave of quicksilver.
“What do you want from me?” she asked Mattia.
“If Valerie really is in Europe, then she’ll turn up at your place there sooner or later.”
“She dragged me along to that party with her, Mattia. If she knows what happened there, and that Michele was involved—”
“She was the one who told me about it, the very next day. That was the last time I saw her.”
Scales were forming on the backs of her hands. They felt like tiny hairs standing erect in an icy draft of air. “If I see her, I’ll kill her.”
“But she couldn’t help it! She swore that to me. She didn’t find out until later that night, when Michele told her. Michele was doped up to the eyeballs at the time. It knocked her sideways, and she came to me to—”
“Oh, sure,” she interrupted icily. “I bet she felt truly terrible. Because I had been raped. By her boyfriend.”
The sound of the car engine laboring as it made its way through the snow was getting louder. But Mattia was so desperately trying to justify Valerie that he took no notice of it.
“It wasn’t her fault,” he said. “She said she wanted to talk to you. She was going to ask you to forgive her.”
Forgive her. Rosa felt like laughing at him for his stupid, blind love for a girl like that, but then she remembered how she herself had fallen under her spell. Valerie had charisma that made it easy for her to bewitch other people.
“What do you expect me to do?” she asked. “Act as if nothing happened?”
“When you see her, tell her I’m waiting for her,” he said. “Tell her she can always come back to me, never mind what she’s done. You’re the only hope I have left. If Valerie’s alive, she’ll go to you to ask your forgiveness. That’s what she said then.”
Rosa thought of the video, and she wondered whether Valerie hadn’t, in fact, tried to get in touch with her long before this. She just didn’t understand how Trevini had come to be involved.
The car stopped by the terrace. Its headlights shone through the window, casting the shadows of the sailboats on the back wall of the room. They looked like rows of black teeth.
Rosa’s skin was moving beneath her clothes. Scales caught on fibers of fabric, rubbing against each other like the surfaces of Velcro fasteners. Her tongue split into two in her mouth, but it happened so naturally that she noticed only when she tried to speak.
For a second she wondered whether he had told her all this intentionally, to set off exactly this reaction—the one moment when she lost all control over her body.
Metal clinked as tools were unloaded from the car. Footsteps stamped through the snow, and then she heard voices outside the door.
Rosa realized that she wasn’t in human form anymore only when she sank