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“Not even close.” I pick up my phone and jump over a fallen trash can and a bench, zigzagging between cars to avoid the pedestrians on the busy part of the beach. As I run along the street, I open the Order app, which looks like a game app featuring three serpents on a pot of gold. I press the red serpent and hold for longer than usual.
My phone blares, red emergency lights flashing, telling me the members’ phones are blaring too. The emergency channel opens, and I instruct it to send out a mass message to any Order members on the island.
“Members, this is the Red Serpent. We have a situation on Isola Serenella . I’m looking for a white van seen in the proximity of the church. Anyone driving it or with it is to be taken alive. I repeat: alive. I want all exits, air, and water closed and the island completely blocked off. Lock it down. Lock it all down. Nobody leaves. Anyone who departed in the last half hour is to be apprehended and questioned.”
I round the corner of the hospital just as the emergency team of two men and one woman roll Cristina out on a stretcher. There’s blood all over her face and body. They rush her into the emergency department and are wheeling her into the back when she turns her head as if she sensed me running toward her.
Our eyes lock, and I make it to her side before they push her into a room.
“Cristina.” I take her hand. It’s cold, like my grandpa’s was.
She’s trying to say something.
“Sir.” The nurse bars me with an arm across my chest, stopping me so they can bring Cristina into what I presume is an operating room. “Sir, please.”
I don’t know what this woman wants from me. I must look confused, because she points at my hand still holding Cristina’s.
“Let go of her hand,” the nurse says, her brown eyes showing sympathy.
I look down, and for a moment, I think I’m not going to let go. I’m going with her. Wherever she’s going, I’m going with her.
“Sir, please. We have to operate.”
The woman pries my hand from Cristina’s cold one, and I stand there watching as the operating room doors swing shut.
This is where her mother and everyone from Frenchy’s find me. I turn toward them and say, “We wait.” Then I make my way to the chapel, where I allow my knees to fold.
32
THE NEWS
SEVERIO
Afew years ago, the Hungarian government offered me the properties of a man in dire straits in exchange for negotiating his release from a cartel prison. He poked into cartel business in Paris and got caught doing things he shouldn’t have been on their turf. They moved him to Mexico, where he sat in one of their prisons for two years before anyone found out where he was taken.
One of the properties was a hotel in Hungary. Before accepting the deal, I stayed in one of the hotel’s regular rooms so I could get a feel for the property from a perspective I normally wouldn’t experience. I do this anytime I’m investing in a large business. I feel it out from the perspective of its average customer.
It was seven in the morning, and I was walking down the hotel hallway toward the elevators when a room door opened and a man walked out, followed by a woman I recognized. I held the elevator for them while I stared at her familiar face, instantly knowing who she was.
Cristina Capone had grown into a beautiful woman. She wore a deep green dress with modest cleavage and a Virgin Mary plate pendant draped from a gold necklace. Her gold heels went wellwith her dress. She barely spared me a glance because the man she shared a hotel room with took all her attention.
When the couple left the elevator, I called in a favor with an escort service, and that night, the man who was with Cristina ended up with the girl I sent him. I made sure he never visited Cristina’s hotel room again, and I know he didn’t because I followed her on her way out of the hotel.
She looked sad.
I was thrilled.
That was many years ago. Cristina Capone never again crossed my mind. Until I found out my uncle was going to marry her, and I stopped it from happening. I keep telling myself it’s because I couldn’t let him inherit her fortune, but the truth is, I seized her fortune and his as well before the wedding.
I didn’t need to make a point of claiming his bride.
But I did it anyway, and I told myself I took his bride because I didn’t want him to marry her.
I told myself many things about Cristina except the truth. Like how I didn’t want her to marry anyone who wasn’t me. It took my malfunctioning parachute to figure that out.
Drago saved my life during our recent mission. We jumped out of a plane that was on a crash path into the sea, and my parachute wouldn’t deploy. Drago and I shared one until I untied the tangled ropes of the backup parachute and managed to land relatively well.
During the time I was freefalling, my life flashed before my eyes. It was then that I decided that if I lived, I’d marry Cristina. I would marry her, and I would settle down, and I would allow myself to love her, because a life without the other half of your soul is not worth living.
