Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Rook lands in Rome and and drinks two cappuccinos to try and shake off the dregs of her flight. A red eye that she slept only fitfully through. Watched the sun set over the Hudson and is now watching it rise on a different day over the Trevi Fountain. Long haul flights always scramble her brains like eggs. On the flight, she cut her espresso with airplane red wine until she’d offset the effects of both, rolled around in her seat, refreshed the map, watched herself arc over the world, losing all sense of time, scattering her equilibrium across the sea.

Rook bounces her crossed foot, tapping her nails against the espresso cup, trying to decide if she should order another. Probably not, she thinks, she already feels wired, but she has no sleep and no time. Four hours to wait before the first train up to Chiusi Scalo and then a blisteringly short wait until the last train to Montepulciano. Then to find the house amongst the narrow streets, to try to flex her rusty Italian for the elderly landlord, to try to sleep in a new place in a new place, to let herself give in to sleep knowing that when she wakes, often during the night, moved by the shifting light of the street lamps, she’ll have to remind herself where she is and there will be that moment when she feels like a kid again. Rook flags down the waiter and orders another cappuccino.

Rook was born here, technically. In Rome. She doesn’t remember it, of course, and they left so quickly - Long Island before she was even one - and anyone she might ask about it, her birth, is long dead. This early in the morning, the tourists are still sleeping. Rook is out with the street sweepers and the flower sellers. A nun walks quickly past the Trevi, habit flapping, orthopedic shoes silence on the cobblestones. A woman sits heavily on the rim of the fountain. Rook can tell she’s not from here and also not a tourist in the traditional sense from the same thing: her tall, heavy backpacking pack. She still has it strapped to her back, bowed a little forward. With the sun shining now above the buildings, the woman’s face is totally blotted out by the light. All Rook can see is long dark hair piled atop her head. The woman looks up at the rising sun, seems to brace herself, then heaves her backpack up, disappearing down the square.

Rook takes a sip of her third espresso, decides it’s probably too much - too much money, too much caffeine - but she keeps drinking. She has an email from her advisor sitting unanswered. Questions about her research timeline, her plan to train to Florence for the archive. And if she’s well. Always if she’s well. Though what that means in academia has never been clear to Rook. With I care about you followed swiftly by I need you to rewrite this draft by Friday. Rook stretches her legs out in front of her, pulling the hem of her sundress up so her thighs can bake a little in the sun. This early in June the full brunt of the Mediterranean summer hasn’t yet settled over the countryside and so the sun is mild and the air is cool in the mornings and scented with baking bread and coffee grounds and the faint ferment of preserved citrus. A pigeon alights from the top of the fountain and, in the early morning light, the spray from its wings look like little jewels as they fall back to earth.

Rook falls asleep on the second train even after the three espressos. She drifts off in her seat, vibrating from caffeine and exhaustion, that sort of pleasurable, frightening nervous energy after a long flight to a new place. She sleeps resting her head on her knees, cradling her backpack for a pillow. She dreams of the countryside rolling by but more. Of Roman ruin crumbling to the green, neat rows of wine country fading gently to the craggy rocks along the sea, the faintest hint of olive in the air. She watches the gnarled branches of their trees twist toward the sun. Rook’s other drizzled olive oil on everything. Oatmeal and coffee and in the center of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. The taste of olive oil is stronger in Rook’s memory than her own mother’s face which blurs like an old home movie. Rook’s mother who looked just like her grandmother, who Rook is the spitting image of. She lived in Montepulciano in the thirties and the forties when people spoke in hushed whispers and watched the skies. In her dream, Rook watches the sky. In her dream the town lifts itself brick by brick toward the clouds. She feels herself lifted by the legs, dragged upward, the clouds soft and freezing against her bare skin.

Rook knocks her shin on the train’s little table when she wakes. All at once, almost painfully, as if pulled up from underwater. She checks for her wallet, her phone, her passport. Finds them all clutched to her, body crushed together, legs nearly up onto the train’s window. She rubs at her eyes, wicks her tongue around her cottony mouth. It’s afternoon. The sun high in the sky over fields of golden ochre hemmed in neat squares by rows of squat, green trees. Rook wipes at her eyes again and checks her phone. Four pm. The sun will be up for another five hours. The day feels endless, the dream far away. She feels a moment of that fear, the one she expected. Childlike and rootless. But it dissipates quickly and she settles back in her seat, wondering how long is left on the ride and if she has time to track down the coffee trolley. And that’s when she sees him. A man sitting in the seat just across from her. The train is packed, full of tourists heading to the walled cities and the vineyards north of Rome, but in their foursome of seats it’s just the two of them. He doesn’t say a word to her, doesn’t look up. Rook uncurls herself and sets her backpack on the seat beside her. He looks a little older than her, maybe mid-thirties, but he wears the expression of a much older man. A little drawn, mouth tight, eyes tired. His skin looks deeply bronzed by the sun, but there’s a sallowness under his eyes, like maybe he hasn’t seen it for a little while. The white billowy shirt he wears hangs loosely on him, open at the chest to reveal wiry muscle and a smattering of dark chest hair. When he turns to look out the train’s window, he doesn’t acknowledge her, doesn’t even seem to notice her. He has a striking aquiline nose, his inky hair pulled back at the nape of his neck, the sun makes his beard look almost blue in its darkness. He doesn’t look at her when he turns away from the window. He drinks his coffee, pages through a book she can tell he’s not reading, just by the way his eyes don’t move over the text. The train will pull into Montepulciano in an hour and the sun will still be high in the sky. She’ll flex her rusty Italian for the elderly landlord. She’ll try to sleep in a new bed.

Chapter Text

When Lucanis was a boy, he would sometimes go to Pisa with his mother. They would get pastries at Vecchio. Lucanis liked the ones filled with Sicilian pistachio cream, his mother just a simple croissant and a cup of coffee. In the afternoon, she would leave him in the plaza, tell him to play and not wander far. He did not wonder where she went off to because he liked to play in the grass and look at all the people trying to lean with the tower. It did not occur to him to worry for her. She would come back just before evening and find him there and some evenings, before they took the long train back to home, she would take him to the Museo della Tortura. Because he was a young boy and young boys like to pretend they enjoy such things. And maybe too his mother wanted to prepare him for the life he would lead but could not yet grasp. He would look at the heretic’s fork and the hanging cages and felt a sensation, an emotion, that he could not name them. Lucanis knows it now. Humiliation. He learned it well there during his evenings at the Museo, witnessed it many times when he became a man, became a Camorra, but in the past year he has tasted every shade of humiliation he could dream up and many that he could not have even begun to imagine. This past year, there were times on the cold concrete of the place where they kept him, where he wished for the rack.

Humiliation, he has decided, in his extensive coerced investigation of the subject is something best done to the body, not the mind. The mind can think and the body cannot. It can reason, it can cope. The body is a simple animal and what a simple animal wants is warmth and comfort.  And it is in the subtle twisting of the body where the mind begins to lose grasp of its thinking. Where it too begins to only react to the primeval way that all things in the body answer to.  Where thoughts become heartbeat, uncontrolled and indecipherable. When he thinks of humiliation now, as the scholar he has become, he thunks of the first week with the Cosa Nostra. That would be his illustrative example. Lights bright and constant, no food, no water. These are dignified torments, torments a man can be made to withstand and still keep himself together. Hunger is solitary, so is thirst. They exist inside the body. True humiliation comes from the things that happen outside of it, to it. The touch was worse than the lack of it.

Lucanis doesn't know why they chose wings. Irony maybe. Mockery maybe. A caged bird. They're not well done, the wings tattooed on his back. They had to hold him down and when he struggled the lines ran. He can see them when he looks in a mirror. Each errant scratch where he struggled, each moment when the pain made him jump. But it wasn't the pain that has stayed with him. Or even the permanence of the mark that made it so awful. It was something deeper and stranger. Something he'd never felt before. The idea that his body did not belong to him. Or that it did but it didn’t matter. A deep angry horror that for them, his body, this act, they were all symbolic. But he had to live with it. With the itch and the scabbing and the memory of being stripped down and held on the cement floor. His body that only wanted coffee and a soft touch, brisk morning The tattoo, or no, the tattooing, birthed a deep humiliation that drilled down to his core, to the marrow. Lucanis has killed many people in many different ways. Some from afar, some so close that he could feel the pulse slow, then stop. But he knows, in his bones he knows,. that he's never made a man feel the way he felt. Never once. Death is more dignified. Easier. Death leaves less of a mark. "Lucanis." He glances up, aware now that he'd been staring into his lap. "Did you hear what I said?"

Lucanis clears his throat. "Could you say it again, doña ?"

Her gaze cuts through him, sifts through his mind. It's always been this way. From the time he was a little boy she could enter his mind with her gaze. Could watch him and reveal nothing all while making him feel as though he had revealed everything to her. Today, this morning, the June sun out and high in the sky, he a grown man, has nothing to reveal. All of it is there, on his body and in his eyes. "Were you listening to me?"

"I was trying," he says, voice even, but quiet from disuse. And he sees her eyes soften a little. He knows this transition. He remembers the very first time he saw it. Out in the countryside near the sea when he was just a boy, climbing trees and swinging his body around. And she watched him from the veranda, sipping coffee and lemoncello, looking at him a her grandson and then her asset. She's doing it again. Lucanis wonders what kind of asset he is now. He wonders if he would be a better killer now. More brutal, more detached. He wonders if he could do it now at all. “I’m tired," he says and it's true. He has not allowed himself to sleep for longer than an hour at a time since his first night back. In the prison, he dreamed of home, but here. he dreams of the prison. And so he subsists on espresso and caffeine pills, so exhausted that sometime he feels nauseous. The food here tastes like ash. The food he loves, the food he dreamed about in such sumptuous detail that sometimes he woke up and was sure he could taste it.

"Take a break," Catarina says, "go to the countryside."

Lucanis chuckles. "What? To the countryside? Like a hysterical woman in an old novel?"

She looks at him down her hawk nose. "Is that not how you feel, Lucanis?" He opens his mouth, closes it. Beyond the great window behind her, evening light spills like a mosaic over Naples. The great window never opens, but his grandmother always cracks the one nearest to her desk and through it Lucanis can smell the woodsmoke of early summer, the nights still cool, and the scent of the sea. The skin around his eyes is tight from no sleep and his mouth feels paper dry. He had come here, dragged his body through the narrow streets to Caterina’s house, not to be sent away, not to be appraised, but to ask a question to the woman he has always known to go mass early every Sunday with blood still under her nails. Am I being punished? But he finda now, as evening draws to night and he sits in the familiar smell of his grandmother's office, cigarettes and frankencense perfume, that he cannot ask it for fear of her answer. That he is being punished, cosmically and by god, for taking the lives of others. And that his punishment will continue. He does not want to ask this question anymore, he wants a stiff cup of coffee even though it is past ten in the morning. He wants to sit out on the veranda like an old man and watch the people below and the ocean as it roils along the rocks.”Go to the old Villa, stay there until the winter, and then come home.”

"I haven't been to Montepulciano since I was a child."

"All the better," Catarina says, lighting a long cigarette. The sun has disappeared behind the city's skyline and the light casts her in deep chiaroscuro.

Lucanis buys the train ticket on Viago's laptop, unwilling (or maybe, if he's honest, unable) to wind his way back down the Neapolitan streets to his little apartment. He shares a cigarette with Viago and they don't talk even though Lucanis can tell it is eating Viago alive not to.

When Viago goes to bed, Lucanis pretends to. Lays silently in his cot, breathing slowly, eyes closed. He's well practiced at this, pretending to sleep. When he hears Viago begin to snore softly he rises silently from the cot and heads down the old, winding stairs to the kitchen. He'll make himself another espresso, he'll sit out on the veranda like an old man and watch the stars circle overhead.

Chapter Text

Breakfast is at dawn. Rook wakes, bundled in an old quilt, to see a line of orange light spreading across the horizon. The knocking continues. Steady, not frantic, but loud enough to wake. "In a minute," Rooks says, at first in English and then corrects herself to Italian. When she went to bed, there was a chill in the air, a holdover from the still wintry grip of spring, but her room is on the top floor of the narrow house and the heat from the old woman's kitchen hearth worked its way up through the night and Rook finds herself covered in a fine sheen of sweet. "I'm sorry," she says, slipping on a pair of shorts and heading for the door, "I didn't set an alarm." Though she never agreed to and the impulse to apologize like this seems to come from nowhere. Rook locked the door before she went to bed, an old habit, and one she intends to break here.

The old woman waves her off and turns when Rook opens the door. She's a full foot shorter than Rook and so Rook, never tall, finds herself towering over someone for the first time in her life. The old woman, Graziella, walks both with a stoop and the agile grace of a cat and she's already making her way down the narrow, curving stairs by the time Rook has had a chance to step into her slippers and start to follow her.

She's thrown the windows open in the kitchen and a slight breeze dances through the fabric curtains. "Breakfast," Graziella says, with a wide sweep of her arthritic hand.

The kitchen is as narrow as the house and has that cluttered comfort Rook remembers from the Jersey kitchens of her friend's Italian grandmothers. Hard wood and dusty floral fabrics. They sit silently across from each other at the little, rickety table near the oven. Graziella opens a newspaper and doesn't touch her food. Rook, hit with a sudden animal hunger, starts in immediately. Two slices of bread warm and thick as though they'd just come from the bakery she knows is just a block down. One with butter and a prosciutto that melts like it is and the other with a thick chestnut spread that Rook wonders if Graziella made herself, jarred it in the fall for just such an early summer's day. Rook eats them quickly, washing each down with a sip of the dark cappuccino sat beside the plate. Graziella glances up from her paper to watch then, seemingly satisfied with what she's seen, goes back to reading.

The house is just off the main plaza along a row of narrow buildings whose sides are so close they look at if they’re touching. The kitchen window look out at the street and as Rook starts in on her soft boil egg and a few bites of cucumber, she watches a few early risers pass by. The night before she dreamed nothing. A counterbalance, maybe, to the vivid dream she had on the train. Rook tried to watch the man from the train depart into the city, thinking of the bare muscles of his chest and bandage taped to one side of his jaw, but he'd vanished somehow in the time it took her to heft her luggage out from above the seat, as if he'd never been there at all, another part of her dream, though she'd watched him over the cover of her paperback that remaining hour, watched him look out the window and seemingly see nothing, watched him finish his coffee and keep drinking out of the empty cup.

"Market today," Graziella says, looking up from the newspaper, "please." She nods back toward the fridge. "List there."

Rook's first showing hadn't been her best, Tired from the trip and turned around, she'd stumbled over her Italian and now Graziella speaks to her only in monosyllables as if she's worried Rook won't understand otherwise.

"I'm happy to do that," Rook says, throwing on her mother's accent to try and show that yes, she actually does speak Italian.

"Good, good." Graziella says, shuffling off with her newspaper tucked under her arm. Rook's cue, she assumes, to take care of the dishes.

Rook leaves the house with Graziella's neatly written list and thirty euros that she'd tucked in between for her. The sun has begun to crest over the buildings. There's a spot, she knows, just a few blocks over where you can climb up the side of the walled city and look out over the rolling hills of vineyards and out toward the distant sea. Her mother told her this, once, maybe more than once, or maybe she'd dreamed it. In her mind's eye, Montepulciano is made of google searches and old photographs and the water warped pages of her mother's diary. It feels almost sacrilegious to be here. the town is so old - its walls the subject of the first chapter of her dissertation - that all of the photos, from the forties, the seventies, the nineties, have the same background, hardly a thing changed. She should email her advisor back, Rook thinks as she winds her way around the town's mostly quiet central plaza, fountain gurgling against ancient stones, at the very least to tell her that she made it. That she is well.

Rook realizes she's forgotten something on the list almost halfway back to the house, flustered with the way her Italian seemed to suddenly fail her the moment she began to look. She curses, turning back toward the market, and then she sees him.

He's sitting outside a cafe just off the plaza's fountain, drinking a cup of coffee and looking out at a pair of doves playing on the cobblestones nearby. His hair is down loose today, inky around his shoulders, and he's dressed in a sweater, as if the mild June weather is too chilly from him. A much more conservative top than the flowing open shirt he'd worn on the train.

“I saw you on the train." Rook surprises herself. She'd barely registered her movement across the plaza, had no plan to speak to him before she did it, as if compelled by some spirit inside herself. She’d felt moved, almost religiously, to do it. That out of all the towns on that train line, ones much bigger and more interesting than this, she would see him again here. After the train, after that strange dream. Rook gets this from her mother, she thinks, or at least what she remembers of her mother. A lightning strike of impulsivity. An obsession with the serendipitous.   The man looks up, blinking, surprised. "On the train from Chiusi Scalo." He glances behind him, as if to check that she's not talking to someone else. "We sat across from each other." Rook doesn't know why she's being so insistent, but she feels like she needs to talk to him, wants to very badly.

He seems to settle in his chair, peering carefully up at her. In the sunlight, his eyes look clear and umber-colored like the rings of a tree. Maybe that's why she wanted to talk to him. The color of his eyes, the way he looked through her on the train. "Alright," hey says, voice deep with a thick Neapolitan accent."Maybe I remember."

Rook swings her bag a little more securely over her shoulder. "Would you mind if I got a coffee with you? I'm new to town.” She feels so strange and up front.

He narrows his eyes. "With me? Do I know you?"

"Just from the train." SHe holds out her hand. "I'm Rook."

He takes her hand, but doesn't shake it. Instead, he presses his lips gently to it. Then says, “What sort of name is Rook?"

"Short for Renata."

"Sure," he says, but when Rook pulls out one of the iron chairs across from him, he holds up his hand. "Listen, Rook. Maybe someone else will have a coffee with you. You seem like a very nice girl. I don't think a nice girl would want to have a coffee with me."

"Why not?" she asks, sitting across from him.

He appraises her, looking long at her face, before switching to slow, halting English. "Go find a good boy to hang around. Someone who will take you to a museum."

"I can speak Italian just fine," Rook spits back.

One side of his mouth quirks up. He raises an eyebrow, switching back to Italian. "Can you? Why aren't you listening to me then?"

The fountain gurgles peacefully behind them both. The sun now over the ridge of the wall shines warmly down and the city has begun to wake, a muted bustle beginning to sound along the city streets. "Why can't I just drink a coffee with you?"

"Why do you want to?" There’s a sweetness in his eyes, maybe that's why she came over here. There’s a dark charm to him that she’d missed on the train, but can see now so clearly, saw even from across the plaza.

"You looked lonely."

He scoffs. "Very American observation and a very American course of action."

"My mother was from here. Montepulciano." She tries to school the defensive tone from her voice and does not succeed.

"But you're not." Rook stands there. She feels strange, like she might still be dreaming. Did she dream of him? Dream of falling up while he stayed firm in his seat on the train ? No, she doesn't think so, but his visage was the first thing she saw when the dream released her. "Sit," he says, gesturing with his hand to the chai across from him. "I'll get you a coffee."

They don't talk, not really. She learns his name is Lucanis and that's about it. He does't ask her anything either, but she finds that his company is almost soothing. Finds that all the strange, frenetic darkness. They sit and they drink their coffee and they watch the people passing through the main plaza and every so often Luxcanis will look through his newspaper, reading it so slowly, Rook's not sure if he's reading it at all. For a monument, it seems like he's forgotten she's there, but when she gets up to leave, rooting through her purse to pay for the espresso he bought her, he waves her off. "This one's on the house."

She smiles at him. "Sure." Then, "thank you. Maybe I'll run into you again."

Lucanis smiles, a wry sort of quiet smile. "Maybe so." Rook swings her bag over her shoulder but before she can turn to go, he says, "Don't get into trouble."

Rook smiles, laughs. "Is there trouble to get into around here?"

"There's trouble everywhere, caro."

Chapter Text

He passes the time not quite reading the newspaper. Lucanis used to do this every morning, especially when he was on a contract. It would give him a lay of the land. Most of his cases were in Rome, Naples, Florence, once in Vatican City (that one he’d gone to confess the same day, went to a priest just outside the city limits), and the newspaper would tell him all kinds of things. Births and deaths and weddings. The personals would give him a sense of the ways in which he could get close to his targets. Rome is prudish, Vatican City seethes with lust. But today, now, he can only look at the images, read the headlines. Montepulciano doesn’t have its own paper, too small, but it circulates the one from nearby and much larger Lucia. A wine festival in a few months. Good weather predicted for the next week, warm, sunny. A local parish is running a food drive. A town council finally agrees to a long disputed resolution. Lucanis drinks his coffee and wonders if he’ll ever kill again. He wonders how long he will live. He drinks his coffee.

Lucanis sees her briefly as she passes through the plaza, feels a brief flicker of recognition. But then he lets it fall to the wayside. He's sure he's never seen this woman before; he's had so little chance to see a woman who wasn't his family or in the Family in the few days between his rescue and his travels to Montepulciano. And this woman cannot be in the Family. She's young, though maybe it's just the fresh look in her eyes. She doesn't look tired the way everyone he knows looks tired. Or maybe not tired, but weary. World weary. But Lucanis, as a matter of surreptitious indulgence, watches her pass. The early morning sunshine glints beautifully off her hair, long and caught easily by the breeze, a dark color like the wings of a crow. She has long, fawnish legs and he watches them stride across the cobblestones and feels guilty. Men shouldn't ogle women like that, he thinks. It's been a long time since he felt the touch of a woman. Or a man for that matter. Such pleasures have been beyond him for more than a year. He scarcely remembers them. Lucanis takes a sip of his coffee. He's pent up, but truly that is the least of his problems. The lack of sleep is starting to make him feel woozy and unsteady. He'd stayed up all night last night, pacing the halls of the villa. It's too big for him, all those rooms. There's a maid, he knows, and a groundskeeper, but they've been scarce. He knows them only by the traces they leave behind - a neatly folded bath towel, freshly planted gardenia bushes and honeysuckle outside the kitchen window. When he wasn't pacing, he was looking at the kitchen, imagining himself a day over the stove, slow cooking lamb, rolling pasta himself, cutting it finely. A feast but for who? Not just him. A feast for all his ghosts.

And he's thinking of this, his feast for ghosts, when he looks up and finds the woman standing beside him. Sun around her head like a halo. He wonders if he ought to go to mass.

Lucanis doesn’t know why he lets her sit across from him, why he goes inside to get her a coffee. He doesn’t know why he adds a spoon of sugar and asks for a little cream, but she smiles when she tastes it and that makes him feel something that he can’t quite identify. It’s been like that, since his imprisonment, all of his emotions dulled and jumbled. Expect fear, rage, spite. The sun shines so beautifully on her hair  and her cheeks and he wonders, for longer than he should, if he’s in a dream. He had such florid dreams with the Cosa Nostra. So rich he could taste them. An each time he woke up from his dreams, there was a new, fresh grief. Each morning for a year, he would wake up and his body and his mind would tell him that he was home, back in his apartment in Naples overlooking the sea. And each morning he would  be reminded again that he was not. That he was there in that basement, bound and sore and full of  new, blooming fear. Lucanis looks at her. Rook, short for Renata. And he wonders if she too is a dream. He’s been feeling that in a hazy way since his release. Expecting each morning to have to feel a fresh grief. His vision wobbles, but he knows that it’s from exhaustion, from too much caffeine. It’s easy watching her. Watching her watch others.

He should be suspicious. Of this strange woman who so eagerly offered herself up as a morning companion. But Lucanis is too tired to be suspicious and he is, against his better judgment, enjoying her quiet company.

Renata, a good Italian name, but going by Rook, a snappy nickname that would have branded her American even if she didn't have that nasal American accent and sometimes mix up the past and present tenses. He should be very suspicious, especially when she said that she knew him from the train. He doesn't remember her, but he doesn't remember much from that journey. He’d taken it full of spite, angry to be dismissed so summarily and frightened of his own feeling of disconnection.

But Lucanis has to remember that the train they were both on only stops in a few places, Montepulciano the biggest, and this is a small town. He's not surprised necessarily that someone sat down with him, but he would have expected an old man to come and shoot the shit, complain about the coffee, try to get him to play chess inside the cafe. He shouldn't be suspicious of her just because she's a foreigner and just because she’s beautiful. And he's not, really, otherwise he wouldn't have bought her a coffee. He wouldn't have asked the barista to grind the espresso finer, to make it darker, make it more rich.

"So, what do you do?" He finds himself asking, buoyed by exhaustion and bored of his paper.

She seems a little startled to hear his voice, pulled out of her reverie, a real expert people watcher, he can tell. "What do I do?" Her Italian is better when she isn't trying, falls more easily of the tongue. He inclines his head as if to say go ahead. She laughs and the sound is light and Lucanis thinks about how it feels to laugh and wonders how long it has been since he's done that. Laughed. Not bitterly, not scoffing. But laughed. A long time. A time he can barely remember that plays in his memory with a fine sepia grain. "I study," she says, "I study architecture. The history of it. Medieval architecture, ancient architecture," she laughs, but this time a little sheepishly, "Italian architecture, obviously."

"Obviously," he parrots back and finds himself rearranging her in his head, reslotting her into a different category than foolhardy tourist. He sits back in his seat, crossing his arms over his chest, regarding her, and all of a sudden he understands what has been so funny about her, so appealing. She isn’t afraid of him.

Lucanis finds the note when he returns home, afternoon settling down into evening. A piece of paper wedged between the mail slot and the front wall. He expected this, but wasn’t sure what its form would be. Lucanis can’t decide if a letter is a good or bad omen. He expected this and yet he can feel his heart start to pound. It wasn’t like this before. Even after everything he’d seen, everything he did, fear didn’t feel like it does now. Lucanis takes the note from the crack and glances around the front of the Villa. The security system, as far as he can tell, is still activated. If he wanted, he could check the cameras, get a good look at whoever left this note. Useless, he thinks, whoever left this would know how to stay out of view from the camera. And even if they did not, and this strikes more fear in him than anything else, would they be so brazen as to stand in the view of the camera, what would that accomplish? Would he know them? Would it matter? He doesn’t read the note, he knows what it will say. Maybe nothing. It’s not meant to be read. The message is in the delivery. The Cosa Nostra knows where he is.

Chapter Text

When Rook chose this town, she lied to her advisor. Montepulciano represents the best example in the Tuscan countryside of medieval repairs of ancient architecture she wrote, know that her advisor, chained as she is to Byzantium, would have no idea Rook was lying through her teeth. She couldn’t tell her advisor that she’s come here for her mother. She can’t even really tell herself that. So she’s thrilled, and a little incredulous, the find that she wasn’t entirely full of shit. As if she manifested this architecture. She wonders, with some fear, if she could do that same with her mother.

The afternoon is high in the sky when Rook finally begins her work on the outer wall, the air smelling like warm wheat and honeysuckle. Room wipes sweat from her brow. She’s dressed in a pair of jean shorts and a flowing white cotton shirt that is supposed to keep her cool, but has so far just been sticking to her skin. The hiking boots she bought at a department store because they reminded her of Laura Dern. White tube socks poking over the tops. She wonders if she looks like an archeologist or an idiot.

Rook takes a swig of the water Graziella packed for her in a glass jam jar. It’s dusty at the base of the wall, at the bottom of the hill where Montepulciano sits, and it’s sticking to the sweat on her legs. She’s taking rubbings of the spots on the wall where she can see a clear distinction between the materials, signs of repair, building up the structural integrity. Montepulciano is a medieval city to its core, in every cobblestone and every carved door, but one built on the ruins of a Roman settlement. It makes sense, Rook thinks, looking out at the sprawling vineries below. From here, she can see the whole countryside. Invading armies would have to pull their trebuchets up a 45 degree angle, trying to fend off a rain of arrows from the city’s battlements. Today, there’s a dreamy haze over the horizon, as if the wheat fields are reaching up into the sky. Rook didn’t dream last night, slept hard and peacefully, and so today feels like a dream, all warm and hazy.

“Find anything interesting?” Rook jumps at the sound of the voice, dropping her charcoal and scrambling a little, displacing a few small rocks. They roll crumbling down the hill toward the river, down where the invading forces would have to ford their trebuchets. “Did mean to scare you.” The woman standing over Rook, casting a shadow over her, has a smooth, elegant voice and when she eyes adjust, Rook can see that the woman is just as elegant as she sounds. She stands tall over Rook even when Rook stands, brushing dirt from her shorts. Rook appraises her, tries to place her, but nothing comes to mind. She’s quiet she’s never seen her before, but the woman looks at her with a familiar gaze. She has her dark hair pulled off her neck by a tortoiseshell clip. Is dressed in a well-starched white button down with the buttons provocatively down and tucked it into a pair of almost conservative pair of dark green slacks. “Neve Gallus,” she says, holding out her hand, and it’s here when Rook realizes that she’s speaking to her in English, “can we talk?”

They sit at the same table where she sat with Lucanis the day before and Rook feels it as an echo and also, more practically, wonders if this is really the best coffee in town or if it’s the only coffee in town. “You’ll have to forgive me for sneaking up on you,” Neve says, carrying to small cups of espresso to the table. Rook wonders what about her makes people keep buying her coffee. Maybe she looks a little down on her luck, a little vulnerable. Maybe she looks poor. “I want to hire you.”

Rook raises an eyebrow before taking a sip of her coffee. Unlike Lucanis, who’d sprinkled a little sugar and a little cream into her coffee, Neve’s left it black. “I’m not exactly looking for work.” Rook pauses, narrows her eyes, “and how do you know who I am? ~Do~ you know who I am?”

Neve chuckles. She’s beautiful in the most classic sense of the word. High cheekbones and thick, well-shaped lips. The crook at the bridge of her nose adds a distinguished air, like the best of a Roman emporer. “Montepulciano is a small town in every sense of the word.” She smiles, whipping a long cigarette from her pocket and lighting it with a flourish. “Graziella gossips. We’re neighbors. Her and I. And you and I now, I suppose. I heard last week at the stoop that she had a new tenant arriving, an archeologist, and when I saw you digging around I figured that was you.” She smiles. “That or you were some kind of delinquint, both of which fall under my purview.”

“Who are you again?” Rook asks, taking a long sip of the espresso. She wonders if this dreamy feeling she’s had her first two days here is because of all of the caffeine.

“I’m a private investigator.” And then, like on cue, she pulls a business card from the same pocket that her cigarettes came from, and slides it across the table. Rook glances at it. Matte, professional, but none of this means anything to her. Beyond the cloistered halls of the academy, Rook’s expertise is, frighteningly, limited. “I’m working a case, trying to track down an antiquities dealer. It would be helpful to have someone with experience in the field.”

“Antiquities is a broad field. So broad I’d hesitate to even call it a field.” Rook crosses one leg over the other. She likes this woman, even though she’s not exactly sure why. A hunch maybe, a good energy.

“I like you,” Neve says as if she’s just read Rook’s mind. “You’re exactly the kind of person I’m looking for. Too smart,” she says with a smile.

“I’m here to conduct research for my dissertation.” Late in the afternoon now, people are moving slowly through the plaza, a few sitting on the edge of the fountain. “I’m not an antiquities dealer. I’m a researcher.”

“I won’t take up too much of your time,” Neve says, taking a long drag from her cigarette. She holds it like women from the twenties, profile striking with teh sun at her back. “I just need someone to bounce ideas off of, someone who knows the ins and outs of this world. Not the buyer side or the seller side, but someone with the knowledge to sniff out bullshit.” Rook laughs, looking away toward the fountain. Graziella told her that in the evenings she should go to the plaza. Drinking, dancing. ~You’ll meet someone nice~ she’d said. Rook wonders if Lucanis comes to the plaza in the evenings. She thinks probably not. Neve inclines her head to try and catch Rook’s eye. “I’ll pay you.”

That night, Rook dreams of the plaza. Lucanis is there, his dark hair almost blue in the low light of the lanterns. She sits and watches him from the table where they drank coffee. In the dream, the cobblestones beneath her feet begin to etch themselves a message. An invisible hand carves the shapes of stags and cats and crows. They end at his feet. Lucanis looks at them and then look up at her. His mouth moves, but she can’t here him, as if a silent fog has fallen between them. He starts to gesture wildly, pointing behind her, but Rook can’t move, can’t turn to look.

She wakes up tangled in her sheets, mattress squeaking beneath her as she moves. It’s darkest night, so dark in the room that when she opens her mouth it feels like the darkness comes inside her. Rook rubs her eyes and stands, decides that maybe a glass of water might be nice, might get her back to bed. Her eyes adjust to the darkness and when she throws open the curtains the lamplight filters in. There, on the cobblestones, just out of reach of the light, Rook sees a man. Not Lucanis. Not anyone she knows. The man stands there in front of the house. She can’t see his face, can’t see if he’s looking up at her, but all the small hairs on the back of her neck rise. Rook closes the blinds, tries to rub the dream from her temples. She slowly heads down the narrow stairs to the kitchen.

Chapter Text

Lucanis wakes with the sun, which is, in and of itself, some new, remarkable thing. Though, when he was off a contract, he used to do it all the time. Wake with the sun, watch it arc above Naples, sip coffee for the taste and not as a bulwark against the bite of his dreams.

    His first week back home, the one he spent hooked up to IVs, near motionless in his hospital bed, he discovered he'd lost all circadian rhythm. In the hospital, he would wake in fits and starts. Wake up in the darkest middle of the night boiling with rage, frothing at the mouth with his own ire, consumed with vague and terrifying thoughts of revenge. And in the daytime, he would doze like a child, fingers rubbing the linen sheets to fray.

Today, this morning, Lucanis wakes up feeling almost like his old self. He rises from bed, slipping into the slippers he left there the night before and pads across the terracotta tile toward the kitchen. The maid, who he still hasn't seen, has thrown back the curtains and cracked the windows to let in some morning air. He appreciates that, it reminds him of himself. Some older version of himself. The one who lived in the apartment in Naples, who had routines and habits. Lucanis catches sight of himself in the window pane. He's handsome still, thank god for that, but he can see the toll that year took on his face. He's so much thinner now, his cheeks a little more hollow. If Lucanis were someone else, he would feed him back to health. It's harder to do it for himself.

    He runs the tap for a while, closing his eyes to listen to the sound of the water, then bends down to palm some water into his mouth, swishing it around before swallowing it. The birds chirp brightly from the trees in the back garden and with the sun now high in the sky, the honeysuckle beneath the window smells warmly. Lucanis fills a glass with cool water from the tap and presses it against one temple turning to face the kitchen. He got a loaf of bread yesterday, some eggs from the woman who sells them in the plaza. He knows there are radishes out in the garden, herbs, maybe, maybe some early zucchini. He'll think of something. He'll cook it slowly. He'll savor the time he has to eat it out in the sun.

     Lucanis doesn't remember the cats. Or he does, vaguely, but not this many. The villa is overrun with them. Six or seven as far as he can tell, but there could be many more, he's having trouble telling them apart. They're fat cats with smooth, shiny coats. They sun themselves on the terrace, bound through the flowering bushes, lay on their backs in the grass. Lucanis think he's heard them rummaging around the house at night, but in his half sleep, he can never be sure if it's just his mind playing tricks on him. He feeds them the leftover crusts of his bread and the half of the soft boiled egg he couldn’t find the appetite to finish. When one of them approaches him, a calico with bright eyes and a tipped ear, he runs his fingers along the warm fur of its ears. Touch still feels knew to him, like a newborn baby fresh and afraid of the world. He'd turned off his body in the prison, a skill he learned from his grandmother in those dark days before he became a fully fledged crow, but it was never supposed to be for long, only briefly, in moments one could not accept. Doing it for a year his nerves down one by one. Now touch feels filtered through a second skin, as if he's a man inhabiting someone else's body. He's thinking about it too much now, can feel the warm light of the summer afternoon filter pale and cold. He tries to focus his fingers, feel the touch of the warm fur between them but the tomcat jumps off the railing and scurries off toward the tall grass, tail curved in the air. Lucanis watches him go and feels the day, the place, the time go with him. He's numb everywhere but his eyes and the corners of his lips and he is back there, kneeling on concrete, handcuffs digging new trenches in his wrists, peeling at the scabs of the barely healed old. His looking up at the light that shines down weakly and coldly from the tall and faraway ceiling. He is freezing, starved, he is afraid. He can feel himself becoming something new, losing parts of himself that he never thought could be lost to him, that he thought were fundamentally part of himself. Lucanis is there and he is here, gripping the stone railing tightly, unable to warm himself. He feels cold and like he'll always be cold. He can't stop his hands from shaking. Viago told him, in the brief time they spent together in the hospital, that maybe he should consider a shrink, should consider talking to someone. Dellamorte's don't see shrinks. They don't talk. They carve spaces in their bodies where they can put everything that is hard to deal with and keep it far away from the core of themselves. Final breaths and fearful stares. The smell of a bullet moving through the barrel of a gun, the warm feel of blood as it pulses through open wounds and then the chill when it finally stops. Lucanis itches at his back. It's a phantom thing now. The infection set in and it festered, but then it vanished, leaving angry raised scares in its wake. It shouldn't itch but it does. Some nights it burns. He's shaking he's freezing. The front bell is ringing. The front bell is ringing. It clangs all along the villa and it is so loud. Loud and unnatural to his ears. He has to grip tightly to the banister to keep himself upright. He's shaking, he's freezing, the front bell is ringing.

"Lucanis Dellamorte?" He thinks about shutting the door, thinks about the gun he has on the coffee table, the knife he has folded in his right sock. But she's not Italian. She doesn't look Italian and though she speaks it, she has a strong accent from somewhere else. North Africa, maybe, somewhere further east. She's dressed more expensively than anyone sent to kill him would be, but he doesn't like she knows his name. "The demon of Naples?” This time, he does try to shut the door, but she sticks her hand out to stop him. "Neve Gallus, private investigator."

He's still shaking from the memory back on the veranda and he hopes she hasn’t noticed. His voice is low and steady when he says "If you know who I am, you should know I'm not in the market for a cop."

"Private investigator," she corrects, smiling, “not a cop. And I'm not offering my services. I'm asking for yours."

“I’m retired," Lucanis says, trying again to shut the door, thinking again of the knife in his sock. Neve does not relinquish her hold on the door. They lock eyes, hold them there for what feels like a long time. Lucanis releases his grip on the door, lets it swing open.

Chapter Text

It's humiliating before it's frightening. It should be frightening immediately - a man with a knife and a tight hold on her wrist, the evening simmering low but the street lamps not yet on - but this has always been Rook's fundamental problem. She never reacts quite right. Like a rabbit in the road, she's slow on the uptake. Incredulous before she's cautious. So when the man grabs her and pulls her back into the alleyway she just left, when he flicks open his switchblade and presses it just as a warning to her back, the first thing she thinks is jesus christ, do I really look like a fucking tourist?

"Empty your purse," the man says in short, staccato Italian,.

He isn't wearing a mask and vaguely, in the back of her mind, Rook thinks that might be a bad thing, but all she can do is hiss at him. "I don't have any money idiot." She says 'idiot’ in English, really spits it at him.

"Don't be a stupid bitch," he says, ‘bitch’ in English, hissing in her ear and tightens his grip.

"I have thirty euros," Rook says, she can’t stop herself, "you want thirty euros? And the purse? The purse is a fake I bought on the Coney Island boardwalk. Enjoy that. You couldn't swell it to a dead man.”

The man freezes, his grip loosens and Rook is about to ask him what scared him more, the purse or her empty wallet, when she turns to see Lucanis standing behind him. He has his hand on the back of the man's neck, holding, just resting, but the man is frozen like Lucanis just scruffed him. "What's this?" He says, voice a lower octave than she remembers it being that afternoon on the plaza, a different, darker register. “?arassing little girls?" The man shakes his head violently and now Lucanis does grab him, fingers closing around the back of his neck and pulling him stiffly backward. "Hmm?"

"No, signore," the man says, his switchblade clattering to the cobblestones.

Lucanis releases him roughly. “I didn't think so." They both watch him scatter, running into the darkening night, the silence hanging between them. Lucanis turns to her. "It isn’t safe for a young woman to wander around at night."

"Montepulciano isn't safe?" Rook asks, incredulous, still spitting mad.

Lucanis look sat her practically crosseyed. "Are you insane?"

It starts to hit her as they approach the outer wall of the city, what just happened. The lamps are glowing now and the night is full of summer warmth. Below them, on the streets and in the plazas, people are dancing, talking, drinking. Lucanis is silent and there is a hardness to him that hadn't been there when they first met. Gone is the weariness, he could be made of stone.

"Thank you," Rook says, a little breathless. "Thank you, I don't..." She trails off. The last of the setting sun is still shining over the wheat and the grapes and it burns a fiery red as night snuffs it out.

"You ought not to walk along at night." His voice is gentle again, a little stiff, but he's looking hard at her, eyes clear and watchful.

“Is a small town like this really that dangerous?"

Lucanis looks at her as they stroll along the upper wall. "For a beautiful woman? All places are dangerous."

Rook flushes, turns away so he might miss it, but when she looks back at him, he is flushing too, looking somehow humiliated that he’s just said something like that. "I don't think he cared how I looked, I think he wanted my wallet." Lucanis just shrugs, hands in the pockets of his slacks, corduroy today. A cashmere pullover, a nice watch. Leather loafers without socks. Today he looks wealthy. He still has that bandage on his jaw. Rook thinks about asking him about it, then thinks better of it. "Regardless, thank you for stepping in. You put yourself in danger on my behalf."

He slows his walk to a stop and leans against the wall, hands still in his pockets. Backlit by the setting sun, his eyes are even clearer and more intense. They're soft too, when they look at her. "I wasn't in danger, caro."

He looks at her again when they make their way to the plaza, eyes softening even more. They'd been so hard with the man. Dark, almost a different color. "I told you to stay out of trouble." It's an admonishment but he's smiling on one side of his mouth, eyes glittering a little. 

Rook laughs loudly. Near them, the plaza has begun to glow, the sun disappearing down beneath the horizon. She can smell coffee and cooking meat, something sweet invthe air, powdery and sugary, woodsmoke from the little farms just beneath Montepulciano. "Hey. It found me.” His chuckle is warm, but it doesn’t change the look in his eyes.

Lucanis leaves her at the same cafe where they first met, with some reluctance, Rook thinks. Or maybe she just wants to think so. There's a lot of things she wants to think about Lucanis, but she feels guilty about each and every one. Rook wasn't raised Catholic, at least not the way people here are. Before her mother died, they went to church every Sunday but with a sort of ironic, sneering diner trip after, ice cream in the summer. Would you get a load of that guy her mother would say, over pancakes or between licks of an ice cream cone, referring to the priest. Like her mother was the kid being dragged to mass and not the other way around. It had been something of a surprise, though maybe it shouldn't have been, when she found her mother's bible amongst the things in the storage unit all thopse years later, dog eared and annotated. After her mother died, church was a little more sporadic. Christmas mass, Easter, A Sunday here and there. In her foster family, died in the wool Italian Americans, Sunday sauce was more important than Sunday Mass. She hasn't gone to church in a long time, hasn't really interrogated whether or not she believes either. Sometimes, if she remembers, she'll let a priest score her forehead with ash on the appropriate Wednesday, but not really for Jesus (is that why they do it? She can't remember if she ever really knew) but because it seems grim in an appealing way and gives her an excuse to morbidly slack off for all the rest of the day. So it's not Catholic guilt she's feeling about Lucanis, is what she's trying to tell her self. It’s something else. Something stranger. She wonders who she is out here. Who she thought she would be when she arrived.

The cafe, she's learning, starts to serve wine and aperitif once the sun goes down, lights strung across the patio flickering on, their golden bulbs reflecting onto the fountain. It's busier at night too, like some of the town's residents only come out after dark. Rook takes a long pull of the wine she ordered, red and very dry, and tries not to think about how, just an hour before, a man held her at knifepoint. She should feel more afraid. She doesn't. She feels, strangely but strongly, that if anything happened again Lucanis would emerge again, like he had from the shadows. Rook takes another sip of wine and assesses her guilt. Lucanis is older than her, she thinks, Lucanis held a pickpocket by the neck like a mother cat scruffing her kittens. And yet. And yet. She feels as if somehow she is taking advantage of him. There’d been that moment, after he called her beautiful, where he seemed to recoil into himself. Suddenly shy and maybe a little boyish.

“Oh! “Hi! Rook blinks, suddenly bleary eyed. A woman stands in front of her, backlit by the fountain and shimmering under the lights of the cafe. Somehow Rook knows immediately who she is. Maybe it's her hair, piled high atop her head and secured with a long pin. Or the tall, lumpy hiker's backpack that's resting against her thigh. The woman in front of Trevi, that early, early morning back in Rome. Rook blinks again, glances at her glass of wine as if to accuse it of something. It's wild that she would be here, all the way from Rome. There are a hundred other little towns in Tuscany that have better wine and more interesting architecture. Rook knows because she'll be going to them, tasking etchings of their ancient walls and sketching their crumbling paths.

"I'm sorry?"

The woman smiles. "You speak English?" She sits down across from Rook, a mirror of what Rook had done just days before with Lucanis and she wonders if this woman is feeling the same pull. "Cool." She smiles even bigger. She has the sort of smile, and the sort of cheeks, that make her eyes disappear when she smiles. "I'm Bellara."

"Rook," she says, holding out her hand to shake it.

Bellara shakes it back but then her eyes widen, as if suddenly becoming aware of something. "Oh god, was someone else sitting here?" She gestures at her chair. "Were you trying to be alone,."

"No, no," Rook assures her, not sure exactly why she feels so strongly the need to. "Please sit down. I was just..." She trails off.

"I'm backpacking,” Bellara says, "but it's so beautiful here, I'm thinking of spending the summer. SO I'm trying to make friends."     

"Me too," Rook says, feeling strange, heady from the wine, "I think." Bellara smiles so big and brightly and Rook remembers the feeling of the knife against the to fabric of her sweater, remembers the way the setting sun bronzed Lucanis’ skin. “Yeah, I am.”

Chapter Text

Lucanis forces himself to leave the house. Just like he forces himself to do everything else. Forces himself to get out of bed, to get in the shower. Forces himself to get dressed, to eat something. To walk around the villa, to read the newspaper, to check the locks on the doors. Forces himself to go to bed at a reasonable time even though he knows that all he will do is stare at the tile ceiling and will himself to a dreamless sleep that will not come because he will not let it. Because sleep comes marching hand in hand with his awful dreams and when he wakes from those he feels out of control of himself, full of an unspeakable rage that only ebbs in cold, cold showers or a brutal, punishing run around the property, one that leaves him drenched in sweat. Really  the only part of his forced, militant routine that he enjoys is his morning cup of coffee and then the dozens that follow it. He likes the process, the smell, the feeling, the taste. He likes the sound of his handgrinder and the way steam billows off the glass of the pourover when the water touches the coffee grounds. Something refreshing and new. But after a night like last night - one where he tossed and turned, the waking world brushing like a kiss against his dreams and his dreams were only about her, Renata with a knife at her back, Renata with her hands trembling as they walked the streets together. No, not Renata, he reminds himself, Rook. Silly, American Rook. Silly, beautiful, American Rook. Had he really said that to her? So out of character, so truly new of him. As if something grew inside of him for that year he was imprisoned, something he has yet to totally understand. So, no, after a night like last night, he does not have it in him to grind his own coffee, to wait for it to brew. And so he goes out to the cafe. to stretch his legs, to get a little sunshine, and to get some coffee that someone other than him made it.

His memories of Montepulciano are grainy. The soft sepia of childhood. A strangeness and separation made only more strange and separate by the fact that when he was there, amongst the olive trees and the trellises of grapes, he was Caterina's grandson and not her asset. Here, he was a child. A child who could sleep late and play across the lawn and in the cobblestoned streets with Illario. It made the return to Naples with the brutal training Caterina made him endure all the starker. So his memories of the city are strange, even the ones as an adult distant and blurred. But he is sure, even though his memory may be failing, that it is not so small that he should continue to run into her. Renata. Rook. Hair dark and long down her back, dressed in a lemon-colored sundress that skims high on her long, tan legs. He loathes himself for looking at her this way, fights an old, angry urge to cross himself. He'd seen her beautiful the first moment they met, but it meant nothing, it never means anything to Lucanis. Not like it means to Viago or Illario. But it's grown, this strangeness, before blooming hot and red when he saw her there in the alleyway, unarmed and spitting mad like an alley cat. She is young and she seems so innocent, so untouched by the darkness he first tasted in the womb. And maybe that's why he does what he does. Because when he stops looking at her long, long legs or the way the summer sun settles so beautifully on her dark hair, he sees who she is with.

Lucanis sounds rougher in English, more commanding, more threatening, and so he's glad that Neve Gallus doesn't seem to speak Italian so he can smile at Rook and say, in Italian, "caro, we can’t keep running into each other like this," and then take Neve by the arm and say in low, jerky English "come inside with me."

"You know each other?" Rook says, in English, standing from the little table out on the piazza where the two of them have been sitting.

"We do," he says in cooing Italian, "what a small world, hmm? Let me go get you a coffee." He watches and waits. Watches her eyes flit from him to Neve and back. He can see the gears turning in her head, but to his relief, she sits back down.

"We'll be back," Neve says, with a tense smile.

It's only when they are inside the cafe and out of Rook's line of sight, that Neve yanks her arm from his grip. "I seldom let myself be manhandled, Dellamorte.”

He releases her, feeling almost sheepish. "And I don't make a habit of manhandling women."

Neve grins, raising a single eyebrow. "Only men then?"

Lucanis winces. He didn’t used to be like this. Used to have better control over his emotions, his body. "What are you getting her involved with?"

Neve cocks her head. "You know her?"

"It doesn't matter if I know her. And I don't know you, but I know your type. You shouldn't involve a girl like that in whatever darkness you're involved in."

A shadow passes over Neve's face, mouth curling into a deep frown. "I don't have a choice."

"Neve told me to tell you she'll see you in the morning," Lucanis says as he brings another espresso to the table, relieved to be back to speaking Italian, "for your breakfast plans." He nods back toward the cafe. "She had to take a call." Which isn't a lie, but Rook looks at him like it is. She has the eyes of a feral cat and they are trained firmly on him. He feels himself blushing, a humiliating impulse from a man who's broken another man's neck with his bare hands.

"Strange that everyone seems to know everyone here." Rook says, sipping her coffee, face unreadable. She's different than she was the first time they met, all sunshine, and from when he found her in that alleyway, coiled spite,. Here, now, she just looks curious and Lucanis finds himself wondering how many sides she has to her and then, humiliatingly, how many she will let him see.

"It's a small town," he says, crossing one leg over the other, and letting the sun soak into him. A scarce, important pleasure. 

Rook raises an eyebrow. "A small, dangerous town?"

He cracks a smile at that and it feels nice to. He used to smile all the time as a boy. It's been a long time since he felt the need to. "Exactly, caro."

It's an impulse when she gets up to leave, to scrawl his number on her napkin. "For emergencies," he says and that makes her her laugh even though he see something flash across her eyes, the same something he saw that night on the wall, when she realized just exactly what had happened, or almost happened.

But the flash is gone before it even has a chance to settle. She smiles, jutting out one hip, and Lucanis tries not to admire the curved line of her body, breasts, waist, hips. He does not look at people like this. Not normally. Normally he looks at their pulses, at their fingers twitching for weapons. He looks at their pain points. "I don't understand you," she says and Lucanis thinks there's a richness to the way she speaks Italian, like she’s tasting something sweet as she talks. "Do you want me to call you or do you want me to stay out of trouble?"