Page 122 of Sinner's Vows

ARIANA

We’re on the highway speeding towards Rome. It’s no longer dark out, the sun glowing on the horizon. We’re driving in convoy, our SUV in the middle, flanked in the front and the back by the hired guns who have been with us since we landed.

Our plans are in place.

I’ve turned into a brunette student—thick glasses and ponytail, loose-fitting low-flung jeans and a T-shirt so tight, I feel exposed. It sells because with a slouched posture, aided by my heavy backpack and worn-out Converse, an annotated copy of Herodotus’sThe Historiesin my hand, I’m almost a carbon copy of my neighbor’s granddaughter.

At a first glance, whoever keeps track of the comings and goings in the apartment block would mistake me for her. It helps that my elderly neighbor always blurts out her granddaughter’s plans for the summer, and I know she’s working the American summer camp circuit to improve her English. They started planning for it already in February.

Dominic is sitting next to me, my hand in his as he stares out at the passing landscape. He doesn’t look like himself, either, and I’ve done such a good job of his make-up, looking athim makes me shudder. The shading and contouring, the extra temporary tattoos on his neck and arms to match Franco’s, the nose…everything to make him look like Franco at first glance. He’s in plumber’s coveralls and has rolled up the sleeves to expose more tattoos. There’s one problem universal in Rome—the plumping in those old buildings is a disaster. Something always blocks.

I’m not aware of the whole string of triggers he’s put in place with Benedict and Franco’s phone—I just know ‘Franco’ has messaged Pietro Garlini, and Benedict is communicating with my old team lead. He’s in charge of luring Pietro to my apartment, under the guise that Emilia Korhonen holds documents there both Franco and Pietro need. Documents related to Randazzo and his assets. A meeting time has been set for ten in the morning, and now we’re on a ticking clock.

Pietro Garlini has been keeping an eye on my apartment block since my passport tapped back into the country. We got this confirmation from Dominic’s team which has been stationed there overnight. It takes one to know one, but hopefully, Pietro’s team won’t spot ours. Dominic got the feeling that Pietro’s position is weakened, now that he can’t tap into Franco’s network to help him with his shady dealings. I in turn gave Dominic all our little tells, and it irks me to think I’m being watched for as if I’m the enemy.

Pietro will come early. I know his type, and we’ll be waiting in ambush. We timed this right to align with Mass. As it’s Sunday, my neighbor will be at church, and her Sunday ritual usually takes her two hours. Things I know that I’d never thought would come in handy.

As we enter Rome and head ever deeper into the heart of the city, traffic tightens, and so do my nerves. We’ve gone over this plan twenty times. We won’t fail. It isn’t even an option.

Dominic drops me off at the bus stop where one of the bodyguards is already waiting. It’s busy, despite it being what should be a lazy Sunday morning. Tourist season never wraps up, and as some of the cheaper hotels and youth hostels are in this area, people are out and about already.

For a moment, I just stand, taking in the familiar scenes of my city. Pigeons, cobbled streets, constant honking coming from somewhere, and there… the lovely stench of trash nobody’s collected in weeks. Yep. I’m home.

I don’t make eye contact with my bodyguard as I get onto the bus, and when, four stops down, I get off again, he is behind me, following me to the apartment block. I spot Dominic, now in a marked cheap-and-chirpy plumber’s van, as he gets out of the driver seat. He already has his worker’s gloves on, hiding the give-away pinkie that had me in tears last night. Two broken people, fitting together perfectly to make a whole.

I ignore everybody as I put the code in the door, walk into the apartment building, and hold the door just a second too long so the bodyguard can get in, then I go straight for my neighbor’s postbox where she’s got a key stuck to the box’s ceiling. I take the stairs to the second floor, with effort not glancing around, looking for anything inconspicuous as I’ve been trained to do.

I unlock the apartment and walk in, praying Paula won’t be home and has stuck to her usual routine. The familiar smell of her morning espresso, wrapped in stale cheap perfume, hits me, and it’s like a blanket of comfort wraps around me. I’m in my element. I can do this.

With a deep breath, I pause in the dark apartment, waiting for Dominic’s go-ahead. He was following me with his tools in hand. First, he’s going to use a signal jammer to block any hidden cameras in my apartment from taking footage. We have about three minutes to get into the place before he’ll have to switch the jammer off. It’s after all illegal in Italy, and we don’twant anybody to get a whiff of what’s going on here with a simple outage complaint.

Dominic’s message pops onto the screen of the phone I’ve been commissioned, and now I have to move fast. Paula and I share a balcony, and I open the door, go on my haunches to hide from the outside world, and crawl over the few potted plants that separate our spaces.

Once on my side of the balcony, I peer into my own apartment through a small slit in the drapes. I can’t see anything. I fumble for the key, right where I left it underneath one of the pots, and unlock the door. I slide it open, crawl in through the door, and close it again, then listen intently where I’m on the floor.

Nothing.

Nobody.

I exhale, and with speed, rush over to the front door where Dominic knocks twice, pauses, and twice again. I open for him, and as soon as he’s slipped in, he pulls me to him for a quick kiss.

“Closet,” he says, and I get into the narrow closet by the front door, the only space for winter gear and other random stuff, and wait. In the apartment, Dominic searches for any hidden cameras and shuts them down.

“There were only two,” he says through a crack in the closet door. “And they’ve run out of battery now. Definitely not the tech we have.”

“Now we wait,” I whisper.

“Garlini’s on his way.”

Of course, Pietro Garlini has a tail now, but whether he would notice or not is the question. Pietro has always been outwardly calm, but I bet with Franco going off on his own tangent, he might be getting nervous. He would like to see the man eye to eye and figure out what the hell he’s done with me.

A body. That’s what Pietro Garlini would want to see.It’s him or me.

Through the thin slit of the closet door, I watch as Dominic waits. He’s getting real-time updates from his team and is in on the messages ‘Franco’ and Pietro are sending each other.

“God help this fucker,” he murmurs under his breath. “He’s walking into it as if he’s fucking blind.”

Pietro is so arrogant, he won’t imagine Franco would double-cross him. Maybe Franco wouldn’t, but Franco is dead.

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