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“Blame Felix and answer the question.”
Blowing out a breath, I did my best to explain. “It’s kind of my thing. I can get a sense for the energy of a place by being close. It’s hard to explain.” A faint tingle snaked down my spine. “Shit. They’re leaving.”
“How do you know?” Cal looked around for some indication that there was anyone in the house or that anyone was departingthe premises while I started speed walking back to our borrowed boat.
“If they’re leaving, don’t you think we should pop inside and make sure your Spidey sense was right?”
“No, and stop calling it that.” The second we were back at the dock, I tossed the mooring line onto the deck and climbed in. Cal was a few seconds behind me.
By the time we hit Rio Marin, a boat was pulling out of the slip behind Azzura’s villa.
“Okay, not gonna lie, I thought you were pulling my leg.”
I glared at Cal while I motored into traffic in the main canal. The boat that had left Azzura’s villa wasn’t far in front of us, and I could see there were at least three people aboard the boat that looked almost exactly like the one we were on. A tall man with dark hair was at the wheel while another man and a woman with her hair wrapped in a turquoise scarf and large sunglasses covering her eyes sat in the back.
Traffic was heavy, and I did my best to stay with them while not drawing attention to the fact we were following them. For his part, Cal stood next to me, his head on a swivel, watching to see if anyone else had left the villa and was following us or if anyone had noticed we were following Scivolo. With the large number of boats traversing the canals, I didn’t think it would be easy to tell who was following who, but I appreciated Cal’s vigilance all the same.
When Scivolo and her men took a turn toward Piazza San Marco, I followed, careful to maintain my distance. The captain of her boat pulled them into a public slip, and the other man who had been sitting in the back of the boat with Scivolo jumped onto the dock and secured the boat with the mooring line. Both men helped Scivolo onto the dock, and the larger man who’d been captaining the boat took her elbow as she ascended several stairs to street level.
Cal and I found a public slip not far from where our target had docked, and we hurried through the same routine, tying the boat up and heading toward the street. By the time we hit the Piazza, Scivolo was walking toward the Basilica, carving her way through the crowds of people and pigeons.
“What is she doing?”
Instead of passing through the ornate front entrance of the church, Scivolo and her bodyguards had turned before the Basilica, heading down a small passage.
“I’m not sure, but hurry up.”
Putting on a burst of speed, Cal keeping pace with me, we almost ran smack into a group of tourists. Their guide shouted something at us in a language I didn’t recognize, and Cal and I made it down the passageway in time to see Scivolo enter the Basilica through a hidden side entrance. Knowing she was inside the church, we slowed down and took a second to get our bearings.
Cal pointed to a small marble sign that marked the entrance as the Porta dei Fiori. “What’s that mean?”
I shook my head. “Did you even read the file from Reuben?”
“Yeah, up until the part where it said I had to be fake married to you.” Cal’s voice bounced off the marble around us.
“Shh! That was on the first page.”
He shrugged, and I sighed. It felt like I was doing that a lot lately for myriad reasons. “Translated, it means flower door or door of the flowers. It’s the entrance for people who come to the Basilica to pray instead of just to look around.”
“I assume we’re going in?”
I nodded.
Cal’s face twisted with displeasure like he wasn’t sure what would happen if he crossed the threshold. “Fine. After you.”
I pushed open the heavy wooden door, and we found ourselves in a small vestibule that led into an area withrows of benches attached to padded kneelers. Several ornately carved wooden boxes flanked the exterior wall. The low echo of murmuring tourists could still be heard, but this area of the church was much quieter than the main section, and it was obvious from the handful of people sitting with rosaries wrapped around their hands, their eyes closed in prayer, and those kneeling, their heads bent over folded hands, that this was an area for quiet reflection and contemplation.
The two men who had been with Scivolo on the boat were seated in a pew outside one of the ornate wooden boxes, but Scivolo was nowhere to be seen.
“Where is she?” In the quiet space, Cal’s whisper near my ear made me jump.
“I don’t know.”
“So what do we do now?”
“We wait.” I shuffled into the last pew. From the middle of the bench, we could see the entrance we’d come through, all the pews, and all the wooden boxes, as well as the large votive stand at the base of a marble statue where several people were lighting candles.
“Now what?” Cal looked completely unsettled.
