Chapter 7
Blood had glued my shirt to my ribs, and each breath pulled at the fabric in ways that made me regret every life choice that had led to this moment.
I slammed my thumb into the intercom button outside a run-down apartment building, leaving a red smear on the plastic that someone was definitely going to have questions about later.
The intercom crackled. "Closed."
I pressed a copper Ferryman’s coin against the lens. "Not to me."
The gate buzzed open, and I shoved through into the courtyard. Each step sent fresh pain through my side, and I was leaving a trail of blood drops on ancient cobblestones that were going to be hell for someone to clean up.
The apartment door looked like every other door in the building with its peeling green paint and brass numbers worn smooth. I knocked twice, paused, then knocked once more.
An elderly man in a wrinkled shirt and reading glasses answered the door. "You look like shit."
"You really know how to make a guy feel special, Doctor Manush." I stepped past him and tried not to think about how much blood I was getting on his floor.
"Bedside manner costs extra." He gestured deeper into the apartment. "Back room. How long?"
“Ten minutes. Maybe twelve.”
I limped into what passed for a living room.
Mismatched furniture and medical journals covered every surface.
An old woman sat in a corner chair, needles clicking in steady rhythm, and she muttered something in Romani when she spotted my blood-soaked shirt before returning to her knitting.
A teenage boy hunched over a stack of euros at the coffee table, and the bills disappeared into a wooden box the moment he registered my presence.
"Stevo, get the surgical kit," Dr. Manush said in accented English.
The boy took the stairs two at a time and came back with a medical kit that looked far too professional for a family apartment.
I peeled the jacket off, and torn skin pulled in ways that made my teeth clench. The shirt came away slower, stuck to dried blood. Fresh red welled up where I'd disrupted the clotting.
Manush snapped on a pair of gloves. "Kitchen chair. Now." He grabbed a bottle of grappa from the counter and shoved it at my chest hard enough to hurt. "Drink."
I tipped the bottle back, and fire burned down my throat. Manush grabbed supplies while Stevo appeared at his elbow with thread and antiseptic.
"You have any candy? Sugar helps with shock."
Stevo vanished into the kitchen and came back with wrapped caramels. I shoved three in my mouth at once.
Manush cleaned the wound, and cold antiseptic bit into raw flesh. "This is going to hurt."
The first stitch punched through skin before anything went numb, and I focused on something other than the fact that Manush was sewing me back together like a seamstress on a deadline.
I thought instead of Rafael's hands, the taste of his lips, the want radiating from him even as he slid the knife into my side.
The memory turned pain into background noise.
My phone buzzed, and I typed one-handed while Manush kept stitching.
Need extraction. Rome to Rio. Fast and clean. Can meet you in Paris.
Diego's response came back immediately.
Diego
Mierda, tiny assassin! What did you do now? Charles de Gaulle private terminal. Eight tomorrow night. Bring cash.
I stared at "tiny assassin" and my eye twitched. Diego was never going to let me live down being five foot seven", but at least he'd agreed to help me flee across continents.
"Almost finished." Manush placed the final stitch. "This isn't my best work, but it'll hold together longer than most relationships." He slapped gauze over the wound site, and the pressure made me wince. "Sit up. Slowly."
I pushed myself upright, and the room spun. Manush steadied me until the world stopped trying to throw me off.
"No acrobatics for forty-eight hours." He pressed a bottle of pills into my palm, and he closed my fingers around them. "Antibiotics. All of them, even if you feel better. I don't want your corpse on my conscience."
Stevo handed me a worn t-shirt from a laundry pile, and I shrugged it on.
I pulled out two ferryman's coins and pressed them into his hand while yanking the shirt down. "Thank you."
He examined the coins briefly, then pocketed them with a nod. "Back exit. Service tunnel to the metro. And good luck, Lorenzo. You're going to need it."
The service tunnel smelled like wet concrete and garbage.
I ran through the darkness, following Manush's directions while my side screamed with each step.
The maintenance shafts led up to Trastevere station, and I emerged among late-night commuters who barely glanced at one more shadow from Rome's underground.
But I wasn't alone at the station. A woman stood by the ticket machines, tracking movement instead of trains. A maintenance worker made his third pass over the same floor. Two armed men in leather jackets flanked the exit.
Bounty hunters.
I bought my ticket and moved toward the platform. The woman followed at a careful distance. The maintenance worker abandoned his mop, and the leather jackets fell into formation.
There were forty-five seconds until the train arrived, but I still had two minutes until my time was completely up.
The leather jackets closed in, and one muttered in Italian, "Fuck the rules. Penny's worth the risk."
They lunged.
Two sharp cracks split the air, and both men dropped with neat holes in their foreheads. I glanced up toward the sound and caught a black Stetson disappearing from a high window overlooking the platform.
The Pantheon didn't tolerate rule violations. Not even for a ferryman's coin.
Especially not for a ferryman's coin.
Screams erupted, and I used the chaos. Bodies slammed into me as I slipped through panicked commuters, elbows catching my ribs where Rafael had cut me.
I made it onto the train just as the doors slid shut, and through the window I watched the maintenance worker calmly return to his mop while people fled around him.
The conductor passed through, checking tickets. My hands shook as I handed mine over, and the adrenaline crash hit hard enough to make my vision blur at the edges. I needed somewhere private to fall apart for five minutes before I could think straight again.
I also needed chocolate. I passed through the dining car on my way through and grabbed three candy bars. Emergency supplies were very practical, and I deserved something good after the night I'd had.
I walked through the train cars, checking compartments until I found an empty one and slipped inside. Privacy, finally.
The bed folded down from the wall, and I drew the curtains. My side throbbed with each movement, and I couldn't stop touching the bandages, pressing on them and tracing where Rafael's blade had gone in.
I pulled out the Judas Coin and studied it in the dim light.
Such a small thing to destroy a life. I rolled it across my knuckles the way Dionysus had taught me twenty years ago.
I'd been so desperate for his approval back then.
Now I was going to kill him for a different coin.
My hand trembled, and the coin clattered to the floor. I bent down, picked it up, gripped it tight in my fist until the edges bit into my palm hard enough to hurt.
Someone had given that coin to Azevedo. Someone wanted Dionysus dead and had engineered the perfect trap to make it happen.
And somehow, Rafael was all mixed up in this now. I wondered what he’d think of me if he knew I was on my way to Rio to kill his father.
I pressed my forehead against the cool window as the train lurched forward and tried to process it all.
It felt like fate that Rafael and I should meet again after all these years, but maybe it wasn’t.
It couldn’t all be fate. Someone had to have given Azevedo the Judas Coin for a reason.
Dionysus must’ve requested me for this job for a reason.
There were too many moving pieces for this all to be fate.
And yet…
I touched my fingers to my lips and tried to remember the taste of him.
No wonder every encounter had burned. No wonder he'd looked at me in Eden like he wanted to destroy me and devour me in the same breath. We'd been circling each other for two decades, and neither of us had known it until tonight.
The boy who'd watched his father buy a feral child had grown up to become a priest with Azevedo as his mentor. And I'd grown up to kill that mentor.
Outside the window, the Italian countryside disappeared into darkness. Every shadow could be hiding Pantheon assets. Every station could be an ambush point. I checked my watch. Still hours before I reached Paris.
Rafael Oliveira was a problem I didn't know how to solve. Dionysus's son shouldn't have looked at me with so much heat in that courtyard. It was as if he couldn't decide whether he wanted to kill me or kiss me.
Whatever he wanted, it wasn't holy. And I had no idea what it meant for what came next.