Brave the Tempest (Cassandra Palmer #9) - Karen Chance Page 0,47

used to do, growing up. I was a fisherman, in Napoli.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing,” he said, while his face argued with him.

I crossed my ankles and waited.

He eyed me without favor. “You have princes all but begging to get in here. All day, we get the calls. Marco tried to make a special phone number with an answering machine, but it filled up the first day. It has a generic message now, telling them to wait.”

“And your point is?”

“They all want to talk to you, yet here you are.”

“With someone who doesn’t?” It wasn’t a guess. I’d never seen Rico so uncomfortable before. Despite the casual pose, his shoulders were tense, and the cigarette ash was going everywhere, because he couldn’t keep his hands still.

“Okay,” I said. “Don’t tell me about the fish—”

“What is there to tell? They were fish!”

I waited some more.

“One of the men who lived with my mother for a while had a little boat,” he said, staring up at where the package had been. “It leaked and it had no motor. There were no motors then.”

I nodded, even though he wasn’t looking at me.

“He took me along to row and to bail. I asked him one day, why don’t we patch the boat? Then it won’t leak. He said, if we patch it, somebody maybe thinks it worth stealing. As it is, nobody wants a leaky boat.”

There was another awkward silence.

He turned to look at me suddenly. “You have the . . .” He tapped the side of his head. “The sight, yes? You see things?”

“Sometimes.” Not often anymore, thank God. The Pythian power was doing joyrides with my abilities most of the time, using them to help it guard the timeline, which was fine by me. I’d never had a good vision in my life.

“Then can you see it?” he asked. “Where we lived? How we lived?”

“No. At least, I might someday, but I don’t just order things up.”

He looked vaguely disappointed. “If you could, we wouldn’t be having this conversation,” he told me.

I wasn’t aware that we were having one, anyway. “Rico, could you possibly—”

“Eleven children, in two rooms,” he interrupted. “Mother used to laugh and say there was no room for the mice. But there was. There was just no room for me. As soon as I was old enough, I was on the streets. The fisherman was gone, and anyway, there were younger boys to bail by then.”

“How old was old enough?” I asked quietly.

“Fourteen. I think. I don’t know when my birthday was.”

“You weren’t baptized?”

He laughed suddenly, a short, quick bark. “Mother wasn’t often in church.”

He smoked for a while.

“It was just as well,” he finally said. “In those days, if you were non legittimo, they wanted everyone to know it. If I had been baptized, they would have called me Proietti, the Cast Out; or D’Ignoti, the Unknown; or Esposito, the Exposed.”

“The Exposed?” I got the others, but that one seemed strange.

“They used to expose unwanted babies on the hillsides, so that they died.” He shrugged.

I felt a shiver go down my arms.

This wasn’t . . . I hadn’t actually expected things to get this dark.

“I named myself Marino—of the sea,” he added. “I thought to be a fisherman. It was all I knew, and there were plenty of boats in Napoli. But one of the men knew my mother, and said stupid things.” He shrugged again. “I put a scaling knife in his eye.”

“Rico,” I said, not even knowing what I was going to say. But feeling like I ought to say something.

“I ended up a mercenary after that,” he continued, his voice low. “I did things, not so good things, you understand? If you could see them, you would know . . .”

“Know what?”

He looked away, back at that oh-so-interesting spot on the ceiling. “Her father is Jonas Marsden, yes? And her mother is—was—Agnes Wee-ther-by. That is right?”

He’d stumbled a little over the pronunciation of Weatherby, the harsher English syllables sounding strange on a tongue that, even now, was more used to lyrical Italian. Rico was the only one of my guards with a noticeable accent, unless they chose to have one. Or unless you counted Roy’s slight Southern drawl.

“Close enough,” I agreed.

He looked satisfied. “So. You see.”

I didn’t see a damned thing.

I said as much, and Rico looked at me like I was slow. But instead of trying to explain, he took the perfume bottle from my hands and frowned at it, as if trying to figure