Page 74 of Fastest Kill

"Baba is not coming because if he does, you will come too. I'm not dragging you into this. He is staying in Rhodes with you and not moving until it's over."

There was a pause that meant Despina considered this a problem, and Frederica could negotiate with them later. She would do better than that and refuse to tell them at all.

"How is the Colleoni boy?" her mother asked instead, throwing her off balance.

Frederica blinked. "Which one?"

"Don't start," Despina said pleasantly.

She looked out over the rooftops and bought herself a second by watching a gull make its way across the gray sky.

"He's fine. He had a difficult night reading his father's journal, but he's better this morning."

"Mm."

Jesus Christ, things her mother had learned to do with that one sound.

"And you? How are you?" Despina prompted.

"I just told you. I'm fine."

"Frederica."

"What do you want me to say, Mama?"

"Whatever is true." Despina's voice was easy, as it always was when she refused to let Frederica redirect her. "You've been around this man for weeks, in very close proximity, in high-stakes situations, which is how you were always going to fall for someone, because that is exactly your father's pattern too. So I am asking how you are. Not how the job is."

Frederica pressed her fingers to her temple where the cold had started to settle. "I like him. That's all."

"That's not all."

"I don't think it's going to be anything more than that, Mama. Even if he—" she stopped and tried again. "Even if what I feel is mutual. I'm not good at this. I never have been. I go into relationship-type things, and eventually I do something I can't take back, and it falls apart."

Despina made an annoyed sound. "That is a story you like to tell yourself so you can leave first."

"It's happened more than once."

"Yes, with men who wanted you to be smaller than you are." Her mother's voice hadn't risen or sharpened, and Frederica knew a gentle lecture was on its way. "When I met your father, I was certain I would destroy anything good I touched. I had trained to be violent and intense. Always a weapon, never a woman. I told him this, very sternly, and your father looked at me and said, 'Good. I need a woman who can keep up with me.'"

Frederica tried not to smile. "He didn't say that."

"He did. It was in the kitchen of a safehouse in Bari, with a bruise under his eye that I had put there." Despina sounded perfectly serene. "He has never been afraid of anything that could hurt him. He just needed me to be honest about the fact that I could."

Frederica said nothing. Her father did love to flirt with danger, and her mother was always dangerous.

"The Colleoni boy," Despina continued. "Does he know what he's getting when it comes to you?"

"He knows exactly what he's getting. He grew up around it. Nothing about me seems to worry him. It's annoying, actually."

"If he knows what he's getting, then stop deciding for him what he can handle. It will either work or it won't, chrysi mou. Only you two can decide whether it will be worth fighting for."

The call ended the way Despina's calls always ended, on her terms, as if the conversation was simply complete.

Frederica sat with the phone in her hand, the Venice sky overhead, flat and gray. Her mother had walked into a safehouse in Bari with orders to kill a thief and had ended up telling him her worst truth over a bruised eye, and Tore Alesci had looked at it and said, "Good."

Forty years later, Tore still called her Spina. His thorn. He always looked at her the way he had presumably done when she said the word weapon and decided that was exactly the kind of woman worth keeping.

Frederica let herself picture it, just for a moment, and all she saw was Dario's robe this morning dropped over her shoulders.