“Don’t care. Tell me what’s wrong.”
Closing my eyes, I inhaled deep, hoping I could smell his scent from his phone but it was already gone. “Could you talk to me instead?” I hesitated, but then I spoke my mind. “I just want to hear your voice.”
He let out a derisive sound of cynicism. “Nice try, Principessa. We’re not changing the subject. Start talking.”
I noticed a background noise at his end. “Where are you?”
“Where are you?” he countered.
I trailed a finger over the ancient tile. “On the floor.”
“Why the fu—” He cleared his throat. “Why are you on the floor?”
“You were about to curse.” Maybe in another lifetime, I would have smiled.
“You were about to tell me why your voice sounds like you went up against a pack of cigarettes and lost. A couple hours ago, you sounded like an angel. Now you sound like you’ve been screaming or crying. Since you don’t strike me as the hysterical type, I’m going with the latter.” His voice became quieter. “So tell me, Principessa. Who made you cry?” His voice lowered with lethal intent. “Who do I need to kill?”
The tears, they welled anyway. “You think I sound like an angel?”
He inhaled, then let it out slowly. “I did. Now I think you sound like a woman avoiding the question.”
A shiver ran up my spine and erupted into chill bumps that raced across the back of my neck. “You think I am a woman?”
That time, he did not hide his curse. “Gesù Cristo. How old are you, Sancia?”
The tone of his voice, the way he asked it, I did not keep the answer from him like I had before. “Almost eighteen.”
Silence.
Pressing the phone to my ear, I lowered my legs and sat up straight. “Hello?”
“I’m here,” he muttered.
Alarm prickled at the edges of my already weary conscience. “I said something wrong?”
“No.”
“But you are not saying anything.” Before, he was talking. Now he was not. I should not have told him my age.
“I’m thinking.”
Oh no. “About?”
“Who I have to fucking kill.”
“I….” I did not know how to respond to that. I had ignored it the first time, but now I was not sure I should. “I do not know if you are speaking in jest.”
“You don’t talk like a seventeen-year-old.”
“What does that mean?” How did other women my age speak?
“Jest?” he repeated.
“I read many books,” I defended.
“No kidding.”
He didn’t say anything else, and neither did I.
A moment passed, then another.
I pulled my legs back up and listened to the background noise. I strained to hear his breathing, and I rested my head against my knees, but he still did not talk.
I neither rushed to speak, nor felt uncomfortable with the silence.
As far as my memory went, I grew up an only child. Silence was not my enemy.
His voice finally broke the spell he had created. “All right, what does ‘almost’ mean in Sancia speak?”
“Scusassi?”
“You heard me, Principessa. When do you turn eighteen?”
Lifting my head, I glanced at the glowing numbers of the clock on the nightstand. It wasn’t quite midnight yet. “Three days.” Technically—for another two minutes. Then it would be two days.
“Cristo,” he muttered before inhaling deep again. “I’m on a plane. I’m supposed to be gone for two days.”
“Oh.” A plane. That was the background noise, and why was he swearing about the fact that he would be gone for the next two days? I wanted to ask, but did not. “Are you allowed to use the phone on a flight?” I had never flown before. I did not know for certain, but sometimes when Papà was not at home and the house staff did not know I was around, they would turn on the television to stations Papà forbade me from watching. I had seen snippets of shows, news. I remembered something about the rules of flying.
He made the sarcastic sound again. “I can do whatever I want on my plane.”
“Your plane?” He had his own airplane? I did not understand. I thought the important people rode in the back of cars and the bodyguards or drivers in the front. Growing up, that was all I saw. But he had said he was neither a driver nor a bodyguard, the SUV was his, and now he was in his own plane?
“L’aereo della mia famiglia,” he corrected.
“What do you do that your family needs their own airplane?” He did not look like any businessman I had ever seen.
“Tell me who made you cry, and I’ll answer that.”
“No one made me cry.”
“Rule number three. When I ask a question, you answer it.”
“You are adding a third rule?” I suddenly realized my entire life was rules. I did not want any more. I especially did not want any with this man.
“You want me to take the phone away?”
“I am not a child.” What was he going to do? Come into my bedroom and physically remove it from my hand? He was on an airplane.
“For three more days, you are.”
I glanced at the clock. “Now it is two days.”
Colorful language filled the line as he muttered a string of curses that was a mix of Italian and English. “You’re killing me, Principessa.”
“You said you were the one who does the killing.”
He uttered a word in English that needed no translation. “Motherfucker.”
“You are very fond of swearing.”
“You bring it out in me,” he stated flatly.
I was not sure how to take that, so I tried to move the conversation away from it. “Do you speak English?”
“Yes. And I didn’t say I did the killing. I asked who I needed to kill. Quit changing the subject, and tell me why you were crying before I turn this plane around and piss my brother off even more. Not that I give a damn about him, but you’ve suddenly made me fond of breathing.”
“I….” There was so much to decipher in everything he had just said, I almost was not sure where to start. “You do not care about your brother?” How could that be? I did not even remember mine, and I loved him.
“No, I don’t. Did Santoro make you cry?”
“Not directly,” I answered vaguely, still not ready to talk about it. “Why do you not like your brother?”
“How many reasons do you want?”
“There is more than one?”
“There’s one main reason with a hundred that follow. What did Santoro do?”
“It….” I swallowed past a sudden lump in my throat. “It is nothing he did. Not on purpose.” I tried closing my eyes against the painful playback of the conversation on the stairs with Papà earlier, but not seeing did not mean not remembering. Opening my eyes again to the dark room, I focused on the too-handsome, mysterious stranger on the phone to distract myself. “What is the main reason you do not like your brother?”
“He’s a fucking coward.” Spitting the words out with a vehemence I had not heard in his tone before, his anger took me off guard.