Page 186 of Marcello

Friday night finally came.

I chose the slinkiest black dress I had, which really wasn’t that slinky. More Good girl goes to funeral than Sex and the City, but at least it showed a little cleavage.

I had never been allowed to wear makeup and had no idea how to apply it, so I went without.

I didn’t own a purse – where would I go with it? – so I left Eugenio’s phone behind, too.

The only thing I took was the money, which I tucked in the front of my bra. I’d seen women do that a lot in films and TV.

On Friday at 9:30 PM, I told my parents I was going to my room to watch a movie and kissed them goodnight.

Once I was upstairs, I immediately got dressed.

The one potential wrinkle in the plan was that there wasn’t a lock on my door. Papa was so freaked out about my safety growing up that he didn’t allow me to lock my bedroom door. (Thankfully the bathroom was safe, otherwise I wouldn’t have been watching my special ‘me time’ videos in the tub.)

If Papa got suspicious and checked on me, he would find I wasn’t there. But he hadn’t done anything like that since I was 14, so I felt it was worth the risk.

At 9:55 PM, I went down to the kitchen through a side stairway, slipped out the back of the house, and walked as confidently as I could through the gardens.

A foot soldier passed by me. He nodded his head but didn’t say anything.

It worked!

I got to the back wall at 10 o’clock. Eugenio was the only one there.

“Alright, let’s go,” he grumbled as he unlocked the gate.

I followed him down a series of steps to the end of the pitch-black corridor, where he unlocked the second gate.

Before we walked out, he turned to me and pointed at the sky. “The camera is up there, so don’t go too far until I say so.”

“Is there audio?” I whispered.

“No, just video.”

As we exited, I looked up. Sure enough, a surveillance camera was watching the hill below us, which had a series of stone steps bordered by scrub brush.

Nobody was out there.

My heart thudded nervously in my chest. “Where is she?”

“She’s a whore,” Eugenio said contemptuously. “They’re always late.”

Asshole.

She might have been a prostitute, but she was a human being, too – and she was helping me out.

Once again, I resolved to keep Eugenio’s phone forever.

After about five minutes, a lone figure appeared far down the hill and began to climb the steps.

It took her two minutes to reach us beneath the camera and out of sight of the surveillance guys. By the time she arrived, she was breathing heavily.

She was roughly my height, with long, dark hair like mine – but she was at least 10 years older than me. She wore heavy makeup, a headscarf, and a very slinky black dress that was much shorter than mine.

“What the fuck?!” Eugenio snarled. “That looks nothing like her clothes!”

“You told me to wear something black, not dress like a grandma,” the woman snapped. Then she looked at me. “No offense.”