Page 161 of Dagger in the Sea

He scowled at me. “I know what to do, Turo.”

“Then fucking do it.”

Luca shoved at the guy’s body with a quick kick. “He’s unconscious now. He won’t remember much.” He patted the kid down, torso, sides, back, around his legs. He switched the guns.

My tongue was a thick, dry pillow blocking my mouth. My skull pressed in on my wobbling brain, and my head swirled in the heat shimmying off the stones. Luca approached me, a smirk barely visible on the blur that was his face.

I held out a hand. “Stay the fuck back, Aliberti.”

He snapped open his cell phone. “You’re getting paler.”

“Am I?”

“Maybe you’re wondering if your health insurance will cover you here in Greece, is that it? You Americans. Don’t worry, they have national health here so—”

“Skáse moré!”Adri’s sharp tone lashed at him and he shut up, punching buttons on his cell phone.

“Mr. Lavrentiou?” Luca spoke to Petros on his phone. “We have Marko—Yes, yes, do not worry, Adriana is here with us—” He glanced up at her. “No, they are both safe.”

Safe, yes. That’s what counted. That’s what mattered. Adriana and Marko were safe.

My eyelids were suddenly heavy, threatening to close. So heavy. I tilted my head but it didn’t help. My chest squeezed, and I couldn’t breathe through the dust. The rocky earth tilted underneath me. Long hair flying.

“Turo!”

That voice.

My pulse sprang and bounced in my neck like an errant rubber ball. My hand fell from my bleeding side, and I sucked in a tiny breath, that throbbing pain barreling through my body. She grabbed my red-stained hand.

“Turo,” her voice floated.

The sky twisted over me.

“Luca, get my car. We have to get to a doctor now! We can’t wait.”

Blue gray eyes swallowed me whole and I let them. I let them. A pair of cruel dark brown eyes took their place and my breath shorted.

Mauro.

All these years I’d assumed that I’d claimed a unique particle of Mauro’s being, just the one, and I’d liked that. No matter how tiny that one, dark particle was, I knew it existed and I was there. I’d counted on that—I had to be there, I was his son. I’d liked the secrecy between us. It was a special darkness where only he and I met.

What did my beautiful girl once tell me about Dionysus?

“Benefactor and Destroyer. The ancient Greeks understood that duality very well. In all their gods.”

Mauro had been my god for so long. Mythological power, authority, influence. The high lord of Chicago.

My father.

My would-be destroyer.

Fuck no.

47

Turo

Luca lifted me up,and with Adri on the other side of me, they got me in a car. Adri’s car. Marko was in the back seat next to me, head against the window, folded in on himself. She drove fast and hard on a highway, through the winding, twisting streets of Athens with Luca on his phone, speaking in spitfire Italian.

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