“I can’t have him plotting behind my back.” She steadily returned his gaze, and at last he seemed to realize that it was pointless to go on arguing.
“You’ve made up your mind.”
“I don’t have a choice.”
“And you think the video really was shot by this girl Valerie?”
“I was there when she was filming it. The only question is, how did it get into Trevini’s hands?” She hopped off the edge of the bed, walked past him, and looked over the gardens at the shimmering sea. Cutters were on the way to their fishing grounds. It was going to be a clear, starlit night, and the moon hung in the sky, bright white in the evening twilight. “You’ll look after Iole, won’t you, if…?” She watched the window cloud with the moisture of her breath.
“Don’t talk like that.”
“If something happens to me, either tomorrow or some other day, then I want you to look after her. And Sarcasmo.”
“I’m not going to let anything happen to you.”
“Promise me.” She turned slowly around to face him, and saw that the evening light was bathing the whole room in gold. Fundling, the furnishings, the walls—and Alessandro. Everything seemed to glow. “Iole has no one else in the world.”
“I know. And I’m as fond of her as you are.”
“Sarcasmo has special diet dog food.”
That made him laugh.
“And he loves his Kong.”
A sound came from the bed. They both swung around.
A wasp, buzzing, was hovering over Fundling’s closed eyes.
Without thinking what she was doing, Rosa lunged forward and opened her mouth—and out shot her long, forked snake’s tongue, catching the insect in the air and crushing it in a fraction of a second. Before she realized what had happened, she was standing there, bent double and coughing. She spat the dead wasp out on the floor.
She murmured a curse that even she didn’t understand. Her tongue quickly went back to its usual shape, but the horrible taste was left in her mouth.
“I didn’t mean to do that,” she groaned, shaking with disgust. “It…it just happened.”
Alessandro put his arms around her. “We can learn how to control it,” he said. “How to start the transformation deliberately. Or how to stop it in its tracks.”
“And you of all people are going to teach me?” She remembered, only too well, the outbursts of temper that always ended with his transformation into his panther form—at the expense of his jeans and T-shirts.
“It’s all just a question of practice.”
She raised one eyebrow. “So what do you get up to in secret when I’m not around, capo Alessandro?”
He kissed her, but when his lips opened she retreated; she didn’t trust her tongue. It probably still tasted of the wasp’s poison.
“Well?” she whispered.
“I’ll show you how to do it.”
“Here and now?”
“No.” He was openly grinning now, but with such charm that she felt dizzy. “I know a place where no one will disturb us.”
CREATURES OF THE SAME SPECIES
“YOU CAN’T BE SERIOUS.”
“I come here often. And I know how we can get in.”
“Get into a zoo?”
He gently took her face in both hands and smiled. “Trust me.”
“Okay.”
“Are you sure?”
“Hell, no. At least, not if we stand around here any longer.”
At Valcorrente they had left Route 121. In daytime, they could probably have seen the gray volcanic slopes of Etna from here. Now, however, just before midnight, the grounds of the Etnaland water park were a brightly lit island surrounded by deep darkness. Alessandro had parked his Ferrari on a path in the fields, next to a high chain-link fence.
They walked along the fence on foot for about fifty yards and then reached a place where it had been cut neatly apart to waist height. Several small twists of wire held the incision together so that it couldn’t be seen at first glance. Alessandro removed them and held one corner back for Rosa to slip through.
“We’re such a couple of criminals,” she whispered.
“I recently donated a hundred thousand euros to the zoo.” Alessandro followed her in, and closed the gap in the wire netting again. “And one of my firms delivers animal feed on special terms.”
She made a face. “And let’s not forget what kind of animal feed it is.”
“That’s all in the past. Since the Carnevares got out of the disposal business, everything’s above board.”
It had taken a good deal of courage—and great difficulty—to give up one of his clan’s most profitable ventures overnight, so she merely nodded, and looked through the bushes on the inside of the fence at a path leading