Page 60 of Fastest Kill

Frederica didn't fill the silence with the things people usually filled it with. No, 'I'm sorry your father died' or 'your mother was a monster.' She just drank her coffee and stayed present, and that was all he needed.

26

The water taxi's engine was a low thrum against the call of gulls, tourists, and lapping waves. Frederica watched Venice slide past, a watercolor painting bleeding at the edges. Ochre, terracotta, and rust-red plaster peeled from facades that had been standing when Serapis was a boy and a hell of a lot longer before that.

Dario sat opposite her, his back to the driver. He wasn't looking at the scenery. His gaze was fixed ahead on the approaching bend in the canal, his jaw tight. He hadn't been this tense in the last few days, but this was different. It was a homecoming he hadn't had time to prepare for.

The Tuscan Colleoni villa was a fortress, a monument of ancient stone and martial history, designed to keep the world out. This was the opposite. The houses were packed shoulder to shoulder, leaning on each other for support. They were part of the water and the city's life. Ancient but beautifully alive at the same time.

They hadn't had time to talk about the fact that they had ended up in bed together again the previous night. Frederica didn't want to dissect it or debrief it. It seemed stupid to do that, and she was coming to terms with the realization that she didn't want to put her usual walls up between them anymore. It was exhausting, and the bastard saw through it anyway.

She wasn't over Agrippa fucking with her, either, or the mystery of the woman he mentioned. She couldn't deal with that and fight with Dario, too.

The taxi slowed, turning down the Rio della Fava, and Dario pointed, "That dock there."

The Palazzo Foscari wasn't a palace. It was a tall, narrow house of faded brick, three stories of arched windows looking out onto the canal. Time had softened its edges, worn the stone of the window frames, and stained the walls with damp. It looked less like a building and more like something that had grown up from the canal's silty soil.

The driver cut the engine and nudged the boat against the mossy dock steps. Frederica stepped out, her boots finding solid ground. The air smelled of salt and damp stone and something faintly floral from a window box full of plants two houses down.

Dario paid the driver with a quick exchange in the Veneto dialect, and then he was on the steps beside her. He stood for a moment, just looking up at the house.

The door was heavy wood, painted a dark, lacquered green, now scuffed and weathered. In its center was a bronze lion's head, its face contorted in a silent snarl, a heavy ring through its mouth, and verdigris blooming in the lines of its mane.

Dario reached out, but not for the ring. His thumb found a small, almost invisible stud on the side of the bronze plate, no bigger than a rivet. He pressed it, and with a faint click, a narrow panel slid open, revealing a key safe.

Frederica smiled because he knew this door not as a visitor, but as a son, in the same way Frederica knew to look under the saint's robe for the spare key in Rhodes. Dario twisted the dial of numbers that the thief in her couldn't help but memorize, and he retrieved an iron key.

The lock turned with a groan, and the door swung inward. He stepped aside, "Ladies first."

"Pfft, lady," she said, but went in.

The air inside was cool and smelled of old leather, beeswax, and the faint, lingering aroma of coffee beans.

Dark blue walls drank the light from the tall window on the landing, and a thick, crimson velvet runner muffled her footsteps on the wide wooden staircase that curved up into the gloom. Dario flicked switches and light from a blown-glass chandelier overhead scattered soft, jewel-toned colors across the polished floor.

It was silent, yet restful and peaceful. The only sounds were the distant chime of a church bell and the low hum of boat engines and lapping waves.

Dario closed the door, the sound a heavy thud that settled into the quiet. He let out a breath, looking younger somehow, as if the threshold stripped him of any bullshit or burdens. Frederica put her bag down out of the way and looked around her.

"I like it," she declared. "No balls anywhere to be seen."

"He never changed it and wouldn't let Gabriella hang any balls," Dario replied with a soft chuckle. He ran a hand along the smooth wood of the banister. "She wanted to gut the place and put in white walls, chrome, and glass. My father wouldn't let her. It was his family home, and if she wanted to redecorate, she could do it in the villa."

"I can't imagine a man strong enough to tell Gabriella Colleoni to fuck off," Frederica replied.

"He didn't say it in those words exactly, but he could always win her over with a kiss and a smile," Dario replied. "Only one who could. She never came back here after he died. Couldn't handle it. It's the only reason it still looks like this."

Frederica walked further into the hall, her eyes adjusting. This wasn't a statement of power like the villa. It was a home, and the evidence was everywhere, in a hundred small details. Photographs hung in mismatched frames along the wall leading upstairs. Not the stiff, formal portraits from Tuscany, but candid, lived-in moments of the Foscaris through the decades.

There were three boys, limbs tangled together on a sofa, asleep. Rodrigo, the oldest, with his arm thrown protectively over a much smaller Leo. She saw a photograph of Niccolò, younger than in the other portraits, laughing, with his arm around a teenage Rodrigo whose expression was one of pure, unadulterated hero-worship.

Her eyes found Dario amongst the shots. He was maybe ten or eleven, grinning a gap-toothed, triumphant smile at the camera, a smear of chocolate cake on his cheek. In another, he was a toddler, curled asleep on his father's chest in a worn armchair, a tiny fist clutching the fabric of Niccolò's shirt.

He was watching her look at them with a faint, sad smile on his lips. "We did have some normal moments as a family before he died."

Frederica felt a familiar, unwelcome tightening in her own chest. This was the warmth she knew. It had a similar, if a slightly more restrained, feel of her own parents' house—the easy comfort, the lived-in clutter, the silent testimony to years of affection.

The Colleoni brothers hadn't been born into the cold war she had witnessed when Gabriella had still been alive. They'd had this, and as soon as Niccolò wasn't there to hold them together, she had taken this warmth from them.