Page 34 of Blood Orange Christmas
“Marco?”
The keys slide off the nightstand, hit the floor, disappear like they’ve been planning this. I drop to my knees. Under-bed dust, a corner of a comic, nothing else. “Marco!” This time, half laugh, half warning like we’re playing. The sound comes back warped.
I’m already running when the air goes cold in my hands.
The service corridor has honest smells—soap, old wood, the ghost of garlic. At the end, the side door stands open two fingers. Winter breath sneaks through. I push. It swings too easily. The latch is out. The chain dangles with the cut loop hung back like a joke.
“Hey!” It claws up my throat, raw. “HEY!”
Boots on stone. The house makes Harrison out of air. He takes the door, the chain, my face, the calendar year, in one glance. “What’s wrong?”
“Marco.” The word hits tile and breaks. “He’s not in bed. The side door?—”
He moves without letting panic touch the hinge of his elbow. Hand to jamb. Hinge. Cut metal. Grain. He keys the radio clipped under his jacket. “Lockdown. All gates. All shutters. No one in or out. Child missing. Repeat, child missing.”
Static. Then Gabriella, solid as a floor. “Understood. Locking down.”
“Rocco,” Harrison adds. “Outer ring tight. West grove first, then olive press path. Camilla, phones. Kill guest Wi-Fi. Pull every camera.”
“Copy,” Camilla says. You can hear her fingers moving. “I’m blind on the ravine. Tree cover’s thick. I’m rerouting feeds.”
I’m the only one not moving right. I grab his sleeve. “He had his shoes. Elephant was on the bed. The chain. Why was the chain?—”
“We’re going to find him.” He says it like a knife you can trust. “You know his routes. Where does he go when he’s a knight?”
“The fountain. The saints’ corridor. Pantry with the lemon spoons. Gramophones because they sing. Greenhouse because it’s warm.”
“Greenhouse,” he says into the radio. “Two to chapel. I want eyes on the ravine and lower vineyard. No sirens.” To me, “Stay with me.”
I should be anywhere but a door that doesn’t catch. I press my fist to my mouth until bone answers. Breath returns. “I’m coming,” I say, and he doesn’t waste seconds arguing. We run.
The villa shrinks and hardens in lockdown. The gate hums, thuds. Shutters drop one by one, a slow percussion around the walls. Guards step out of shadows like they were under glass. Two Moretti cousins who lingered after the lunch crowd drift toward the arch with professional surprise baked into their eyebrows.
“What happened?” a woman with pearls asks the air. “Is there a fire?”
“Inside.” Gabriella doesn’t break stride, her voice a blade with velvet on it. “Stay together. Do not touch the doors.”
“We’re guests,” a younger man says, tugging a cuff he’s practiced tugging. “We don’t?—”
“Inside,” Gabriella repeats, and he remembers how to act.
Pippo appears, prince-quick. Nose on my hands, my skirt, the threshold. He lifts his head toward the greenhouse and whines.
“Go,” Harrison says, and we do—under saints lifting blank hands, along the back passage that breathes wrongly, past a maid plastered to the wall by a stack of linens and a face like a prayer. Harrison touches her shoulder. She remembers to move.
The greenhouse glows green even under winter. The door’s propped with a terracotta wedge. Warm, wet air slaps my face and makes my eyes sting—the smells of soil and citrus and my grandmother’s July.
“Don’t step.” Harrison’s palm at my hip. He scans before his boot moves.
There, near the potting bench, where lemon leaves applaud themselves—crumbs, crushed under a heel. Biscotti sugar shines like stars in flour dust. Marco’s fingerprints are a pattern I know. He eats small bites and leaves the other half “for later”, because later makes cookie taste better.
Next to the crumbs lies a blue mitten with a white stripe. I pick it up. My body wants to fold around it and never stand again. I press it to my chest, then to Harrison’s palm because if I keep it, I’ll stop moving. He tucks it inside his jacket with the care you use for a hot pan.
Pippo’s whole body clicks into “trail”, nose low, tail straight, shoulders saying I know this story. A thin red fiber clings to the rough corner of the bench. I slide it free. Scarf thread. I pocket it like a charm and hate myself for magic.
“The back door,” Harrison says. Latch thrown. Wet prints stamp concrete and disappear into gravel. One large, one small. The small ones zigzag, because dragons’ eggs and chocolate mud and loud leaves are irresistible to four-year-old logic. The large ones don’t zigzag. They mean it.
“How long?” I ask, because time is a tool in kitchens and everywhere.
