Arcadia Awakens by Kai Meyer Read Free Book Online Page B

taking his because instead she was looking into his eyes, into that unfathomable deep-sea green that seemed even brighter in the sun-bleached graveyard among all the black of the mourners. Finally, after a short, almost embarrassed moment that hopefully no one else had noticed, their hands found each other.
    “I’m sorry,” she said.
    She bit her lower lip and was about to move on when he smiled—smiled at her from beside his father’s grave.
    “I hoped you’d come,” he said quietly.

THE SLAVE’S BOOK
    R OSA AND A LESSANDRO STROLLED together down the avenues between the tombs, keeping their distance from the other mourners. After expressing their sympathy once again, most of them were making for the exit from the graveyard, where a buffet had been set out in the shade of a tall stone cross, and waiters offered champagne on sparkling silver trays. The priest who had led the funeral procession was standing with the heads of the clans, taking lively part in their conversation.
    Many glances followed Rosa and Alessandro as they moved away from the others and past the monuments. Florinda never took her eyes off them, and Cesare also kept glancing at them. Zoe stood alone with a glass of champagne in the shadow of the archway. With those dark glasses on, Rosa couldn’t tell where or at whom she was looking.
    “We’ll start them gossiping,” said Alessandro. “I ought to have warned you they’d talk.”
    “Let them.”
    “You don’t mind?”
    “Should I?” She answered her own question with a shake of her head. “I don’t know nearly enough about this place to be seriously worried. I don’t know any of these people, so they can think what they like about me.”
    And that was the truth. She wasn’t interested in the others. She was on her guard only with him. Although at the same time she enjoyed the hint of risk in the encounter. Last year in New York she’d been sent to see a therapist who told her, straight out, that she lived in constant expectation of danger, and that she invited many of those dangers herself in order to eliminate the element of the unexpected and stay in control. By showing excessive aggression. Stealing stuff that meant nothing to her. And the high point of her career as a risk junkie to date was this walk with Alessandro Carnevare through the graveyard before the eyes of all the feuding Mafia bosses of the island.
    “At the airport,” said Alessandro, “I said something wrong. Something that made you angry.”
    “I wasn’t angry, and you didn’t say anything wrong.”
    “I did. And I’d like to know what it was. So I don’t make the same mistake again.”
    “I’m telling you it was nothing.” She was brilliant at nipping promising conversations in the bud.
    But Alessandro wasn’t giving up. “Anyway, now you know why I came back from the States. How about you?”
    “I’m on vacation,” she lied.
    “Your sister’s been living here for two years. How long is your vacation going to last?”
    “Is this some kind of grilling?”
    “Just curiosity.”
    “That’s why you wanted to talk to me?”
    He sighed softly and led her off the main path through the graveyard, turning onto a narrow walkway between walls of marble tombs. Five or six long rows of rectangular structures, with framed black-and-white photographs of the dead on them, giving their names and dates of birth and death. Flower arrangements lay on some of them.
    “I really wanted to give you something,” he said as they disappeared from the view of other mourners among the marble tombs. “A present. And then I wanted to invite you on an outing.”
    “Me—”
    “The present first.” He took something out of his jacket pocket.
    “Oh,” she said without enthusiasm. “A baby book.”
    It was tiny, smaller than a pack of cigarettes, with leather binding and gilt on the edges of the pages.
    “Unlike a real baby, it has the advantage of staying small and cute all its life,” he said. “And it doesn’t