Page 20

Lunch. I guess I'm clean enough now to be shown to whoever is holding me here. After rinsing my mouth with the toothpaste and brush provided, I head out of the bathroom and stare at the thin man.

"I don't suppose you'll actually talk to me now that you're speaking?" I say.

He watches me for a second, then turns and begins walking down the hallway, but not in the direction we came.

I'm not going back to my room?

After hurriedly stepping into the sandals left at the door, I follow him. Again, the urge to run rises, but all the doors we pass are closed, and so I spare myself the potential embarrassment of running into a locked door.

He leads me into a vast kitchen that's triple the size of the one back at work and I can't stop my mouth from falling open at the sheer luxury of the place. Not only are there wall-to-wall high-end appliances, but there's also a clay pizza oven in one corner, and the smell wafting from it is enough to make my mouth water.

Until I see him.

An elderly man sits at the dining table next to floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking a vast garden that seems to stretch out until it touches the water in the distance. Neat, combed white hair sweeps away from his heavily wrinkled face, and a white mustache quivers as he bites into a tomato that spurts down his chin and lands on the napkin tucked in at his neck.

"Master." The thin man stops near the table. "She is ready."

He looks up from his plate of various vegetables and locks his watery blue eyes onto me. "Ah, Sabina. You look radiant. The clothes fit well, I take it?"

The pleasant way he speaks catches me off guard, as does the way he smiles, which makes his lips disappear up into his mustache like a cartoon character.

"Uh… yeah. Yes. They fit fine."

"Excellent." He lifts a wrinkled hand and waves the thin man away. "Please, sit. You must be hungry."

Anxiety flutters in my gut and sends tension south, hitting me with the sudden need to rush to the bathroom, but despite the kindness in the man's thick, Italian tones, there's something else there that makes me take the offered seat instead.

"Pizza won't be long." He plucks a tomato from the plate and offers it to me. "Fresh off the vine, right from the garden out there. Can't beat it."

I should take it. Everything about his warm, welcoming expression tells me I should take it, but there's something I can't place. The air around him is like the softness of grass brushing against my legs while knowing a snake lurks somewhere beneath the blades.

"I… I don't understand," I manage to say, wincing as my racing heart causes my voice to wobble. "What's going on?"

"Strange, I know," the man says as he pops the tomato into his mouth. "I'm Mario. Do you remember me?" His eyes narrow and the gray tint to his brows deepens. "It's been ten or eleven years since we last saw each other, hasn't it?"

In that instant, my blood runs cold while a sickening chill sweeps down my spine.

"What?" The word croaks from me like a weak breath, making Mario laugh.

"Am I really that easy to forget?" He leans forward on his elbow. "Judging from your expression, you never thought you'd see me again, did you?"

He speaks like he knows me, and given what he's said, maybe he does. I barely remember the faces from back then. There were far too many of them, and during that time of my life, everyone blended together.

I haven't thought about it in a long time. My life was hell eleven years ago, and I stuffed it deep inside me so that I never had to think about it and threw myself into my work.

What else was I supposed to do?

Mario stands suddenly with a grunt that comes from age and turns toward the pizza oven. "Smells like lunch is almost ready!"

"Please," I say, my voice strained as he collects the pizza peel from the counter and slides it into the oven. "Why am I here?"

Mario busies himself retrieving a pizza from the oven, and the smell is enough to make my stomach gurgle, but the thought of eating sickens me. The longer he waits to tell me the truth, the more my mind runs.

Eleven years ago.

I was fifteen.

A runaway from a broken home who couldn't care enough to buy me shoes, never mind where I went.