Chapter 33
Rainbow in the Dark, cut through the library just after midnight.
It had been her father's contact tone since Frederica was sixteen, and she had assigned it herself because Tore had once described his life choices as demons that never let him go.
She had never changed it and picked up before the first chorus.
The breathing hit her first, wet and struggling.
"Baba?" she demanded.
"They came for her." His voice was fractured in a way she had never heard from her father. It was barely there from pain.
She heard something breaking, a door, raised voices in a language she didn't recognize.
"They came for your mother. I couldn't stop—" The line went dead.
Frederica was already on her feet. "They hit the house."
"Who?" Dario asked, tossing his cards down.
"I don't know! It has to be Agrippa, right? He knows we are onto him, and Tore helped us." Frederica was fighting to get all the anxiety down and find that calm place she reserved for stressful jobs.
"How bad?"
"I don't know. The line dropped out, but he sounds hurt." She was already dialing Tore back. Ringing. Ringing. Voicemail.
"We need the plane. Now," Dario said to Rodrigo. He made a call, and they all scattered to get their gear.
The Colleoni jet was wheels-up out of Marco Polo inside forty minutes, which was, in Frederica's current state, forty minutes too long. They had to use a boat to get there faster, and she was still climbing out of her skin.
She stood in the forward section of the cabin as the aircraft climbed, calling Tore's number again and again, but getting no answer.
She called Despina's number and got six rings, then her mother's voice, pleasantly telling her to leave a message. Her chest clenched so tightly that it left her struggling to breathe. She paced the length of the cabin. Sat down. Called Tore again. Nothing.
Giana had suggested she call the police, and Frederica knew she couldn't. Her mother wouldn't have been taken without a fight, and God only knew the carnage she had left behind.
Dario didn't try to stop her pacing, didn't suggest she sit down, didn't offer her any reassurance because he wasn't that fucking stupid.
He was just there, solid and still. She could feel him tracking her without watching her, but she was too focused on the phone in her hand to think about what that meant.
Rodrigo was in the rear of the cabin on the phone with Leo, getting satellite footage of the Rhodes property. Giana was coordinating the island connection, transport, and the doctor-for-hire that Frederica hoped they didn't need.
Kon and Athena sat with a calm quiet because they were familiar with the long hold before a situation that hadn't resolved itself into something you could shoot yet.
Somewhere over the Adriatic, fifty minutes into the flight, Tore finally picked up.
Frederica sank to the floor as her knees gave out. "Baba, what the fuck?"
His voice crackled through, thin with pain. "I'm in the garden. I can't get up. I've twisted my leg, and something is wrong with my shoulder."
Frederica strained to hear anything suspicious in the background. "Are they still there?"
"No. They took her and left. She fought them.
I need you to know that. She took three of them apart before they managed to get hold of her.
They had numbers, not skill. They sent enough of them that skill didn't matter.
" A slow, ragged breath. "They took her alive.
She was conscious when they put her in the vehicle, but they will drug her now because she killed so many. "
"Can you move at all?" she asked, trying to stay calm.
"To sit up. Not further."
"Don't hang up. Don't move. We're less than an hour out."
"Don't call the police."
Frederica made an irritated sound. "I'm not an idiot, Baba. We are coming to you, and we will deal with it."
"My girl…" Tore said with a wheezy laugh.
She kept him on the phone but didn't speak much after that, just enough to let him know she was there, a voice in his ear while he sat in the dark garden with whatever was broken in him and waited.
She listened to his breathing and kept everything she was feeling locked up tight. She could fall apart later, once her father was safe and Despina was back with him.
When they landed in Rhodes, Frederica pushed their driver aside and got behind the wheel. Dario got in beside her before she could drive off without him. Rodrigo and the others could follow.
The gate to the house was still open when they arrived.
That was the first clue that told Frederica how wrong the night had gone.
The ornate iron gate that Despina locked at sundown because "a locked gate is the first conversation you have with anyone who wants to get inside," was wide open.
Frederica was out of the car and pulling a gun from her shoulder holster before she told Dario to follow her.
She didn't need to. He was beside her with his own gun drawn.
She pointed to the garden path on the left side before gesturing to the one on the right. Dario nodded, and they split up.
She found Tore lying on his side in the long grass at the base of the old, stone figure of Hermes rising above him in the dark, face worn smooth with age and salt air.
Tore's fingers were resting against the carved plinth, like he had reached for it at some point and simply stayed that way on his side. His face was gray, and the left side of his shirt was dark and soaked.
"Baba." She was on her knees, her hands moving over him with the systematic checking her mother had taught her before she was old enough to understand why a child might need to know how to assess a body for damage.
Cracked ribs with a deep gash that accounted for the blood on his shirt.
His shoulder was dislocated, not broken.
The cut above his hairline had bled a lot but had stopped. Nothing immediately fatal.
"I told you I couldn't get up," Tore said, which was the most ridiculous thing he could have said in that moment.
"You also told me you were fine over the phone when we were landing, which was a lie."
"I was fine-adjacent?" Tore took her hand. "It was Morosini's men. I saw one of them at a dead drop years ago."
"Good. Now, he's made himself an even bigger target," Frederica growled and squeezed his hand.
Dario found them, assessed Tore with a quick, practiced look. He crouched down, slid one arm under his knees and the other under his shoulders. "On three."
Dario lifted him up, and Tore made a sound through his teeth that wasn't a word, but definitely a curse, then set his jaw until they got him to the car.
The others had pulled up, and Kon opened a back door where Athena had the first-aid kit already unpacked on the seat.
"The plane's still on the tarmac," Rodrigo told Frederica. "We can have him back in Venice in two hours, and our doctor has already left the villa in Tuscany to meet us there."
Tore started to object, but Frederica narrowed her eyes, and he quickly stopped objecting.
"Get him settled on the plane for me," she told Rodrigo. "We'll check the house and follow."
Rodrigo's eyes moved to Dario. Something passed between the brothers, and Rodrigo nodded and got in the car.
Frederica watched the tail lights disappear down the hill and turned back to the house. They went through it together, room by room, switching on lights and making sure no one was left hiding in wait.
Frederica forced herself to read the story the house was telling in the same way she read any scene after a brawl: what moved, what broke, what direction, and how many.
Kitchen: a chair overturned, a mug shattered on the tile, two patches of blood on the floor near the door to the garden that were not her father's.
Her mother had been in the kitchen when they came in.
She had put two of them down in this room alone, and the bodies had been dragged away.
At least that saved Frederica from having to drop anyone in the ocean that night.
Front room: nothing disturbed. They hadn't come through the front. Side entrance.
Hall: a long scrape on the plaster where something heavy had hit the wall. A bloody handprint at chest height, dragged downward from someone catching themselves or trying to.
Despina had made them regret entering her house and then some.
Frederica took the stairs. Her parents' room was untouched.
They hadn't come up here. She stood in the doorway for a moment, taking in the neat bed, the books on the nightstand, the small icon of the Theotokos that had hung on the wall since before Frederica was born.
Her mother's reading glasses were folded on top of a notebook.
A wine glass she hadn't rinsed before everything went wrong.
She crossed to the wardrobe and pushed the clothes aside. The safe was at the back, exactly where it always was, and undisturbed. She entered the combination—her own birthday, which was the only sentimental habit her mother had ever admitted to—and opened it.
Her rifle was there inside its case. Cleaned, assembled, scope detached, and stored in its own foam cutout. Despina had carried this rifle for decades.
Frederica had watched her zero it in a field outside Athens when Frederica was fourteen, lying beside her in the tall grass while her mother explained patience and breathing and what it meant to understand your target before you pulled the trigger.
She had watched her clean it at kitchen tables in at least six countries, methodical and quiet, the way other women wound down with a glass of wine.
It was Despina's baby as much as Frederica was.
She stood there, the gun in her hands, and the shock hit. It bypassed the part of her brain that had been keeping the panic locked down.
The rifle was in its case because her mother wasn't here to carry it.
Despina was in the hands of an ancient monster, and this room smelled like her, and her mother's glasses were on the nightstand, and her reading was marked with a folded receipt, and she hadn't rinsed her glass.
Frederica sat on the bed as the room spun.
"She has never been beaten." She heard her own voice, steady, which seemed wrong. "Not once. Not in forty years of the work she has done. Not by anyone." She held the gun tighter. "Why take her alive? Leverage against us? Against Tore?"
Dario spoke from the doorway. "I don't know."
"You're supposed to say you do."
"I know, but I'm not going to lie to you." He came into the room and stood in front of her. "I don't know why he took her, but she's alive, and that means we have time, and we will find her."
The one certainty Frederica had carried since she was a child was that her mother was a bad ass, that Rhodes was safe because Despina lived there. Now that immovable fixed point was simply gone.
Frederica had no training for this feeling. Something began to crack inside of her, and she couldn't stop it.
Dario's arm came around her, and he pulled her in so she was resting her face on his stomach. He did it the same way he dropped the robe over her in the kitchen that morning in Venice because it was something she needed.
Frederica went rigid, her whole body resisting because she was exposed and vulnerable.
Dario didn't move, didn't ask her to stand to make the hug easier.
She sat rigid in the circle of his arms for three full seconds before something underneath all of that gave way.
She put the rifle down and let her arms go around his waist. She buried her face into him and took one breath. Two.
She wasn't going to cry here, in this room, before her mother was home and safe and capable of teasing her about it. After her heart rate slowed down, she pulled back, and Dario let her go.
"When she wakes up properly from the drugs they would have given her, and she works out that Tore was left bleeding in the garden, she's going to make her kidnapper's life a living hell."
Dario laughed, soft and low. "Out of everyone Agrippa could have chosen to use against us, he went with your mother. What an idiot. The man is clearly not as clever as he thinks."
Something shifted in Frederica's chest, and the laugh came out of nowhere. "He has absolutely no idea that if she gets half a chance, she will destroy them from the inside out."
"None," Dario agreed, laughing too. "She's going to be running his cult by the time we get there."
Frederica stood up, kissed him on the mouth because she needed to, put the rifle in its case, and picked it up. "You lock the kitchen, and I'll take the front. We need to hunt this bastard down and go and clean up the mess my mother makes of him."