“No need,” he said, jolly once more, bouncing on his toes as if he couldn’t wait to let me in on a wonderful secret. “You’re going to come with me because you want to.”
I snorted, the Neapolitan coming out in me as indignant rage burned clean through my cultivated class. “In your fucking dreams, kid.”
“I am no kid. You will refer to me as Lord Davenport.” He ignored my scoff and stepped forward with over-bright eyes as glazed and madly rolling as marbles set loose. “And you will willingly come with me because if you don’t, I’m going to blow up everyone you love right here in this slum.”
My neck pained sharply as fear hooked into my spine and pulled me taut. “What?”
“It’s pathetic really, how easy it is to buy items for an explosive. Ashcroft was so mad, you see, that Alexander took away his dick and bullocks, that he was happy to give us a nice and easy recipe for a homemade bomb.”
I squeezed my eyes shut against the truth I saw in his face, the eagerness in his expression that told me he wasn’t bluffing. I knew Ashcroft was recovering from his injuries, learning to be both a eunuch and a cripple in an expensive recovery home upstate, but I hadn’t thought he would join forces with Noel to get back at us. At least, not like this.
I was sure it occurred to Alexander and Dante, and that they were keeping an eye, but with everything going on with the elopement and Dante’s arrest, they hadn’t been as vigilant. We had won the battle, but it seemed we forgot that we had yet to win the war.
“Where is it?” I asked him, desperately trying to figure a way out of the situation.
“The kitchen, of course. The explosive isn’t very strong, so I’m counting on the gas in the room to really set it off with a proper bang.” He smiled so wide, I thought he could swallow me whole with his big mouth. It felt like staring down a barracuda while I was prone in the water. “If I don’t leave here with you in the next ten minutes, the Order acolyte we paid is going to slink into the kitchen and set it off.”
He watched me as a bomb went off at the center of my gut, as my internal organs spasmed and collapsed, as my heart erupted in a bloody mess of deceased hopes and dreams. He watched, and he cupped himself through his flannel trousers as my pain made him hard.
“No time to say goodbye I’m afraid, not if you don’t want to say goodbye for good,” he said, soto voce.
There was a crinkling, static sort of sound rushing through my ears as if someone was unwrapping a candy beside each ear, and it took me a long moment to realize it was the sound of my panicked heart frantically churning blood through my veins. I wished I was smarter, quicker, just readier to deal with a situation like this.
I had to go.
I wasn’t going to put my loved ones in jeopardy and all of them, every single last one of them really, was in Osteria Lombardi that night. If I facilitated, if I called out for help, what would happen to them?
Surely, Rodger wouldn’t let himself get blown to smithereens.
“No,” he said, answering the questions that played out over my face. “We’re close enough to the back door that I can make it in time.”
Cazzo!
I couldn’t bear the idea of everyone dying because of my willfulness, not when I didn’t have any other plan up my sleeve to save them. My mind wheeled through options, calling the police somehow, flagging down someone after I left with Rodger, leaving a clue as to was going on so that they could at least find me quickly…but there was nothing. Not really.
“Five minutes left, but we are pushing it, don’t you think, slave?” Rodger asked with wide, guileless eyes.
He was a good actor, as good as his pernicious father. If I called for help walking down the street with him, who would believe this teenage, beautifully dressed adolescent would be a threat to me?
“You’re coming,” he told me because he saw the way my shoulders slumped, he saw the way my heart flickered and went out like a flame in my eyes.
“I’m coming.”
He nodded and then walked on his bouncing toes to my side where he offered me his arm the way a gentleman would at a ball. His gentlemanly gesture was so flagrantly contradictory to our circumstances that it made me simultaneously want to laugh and cry.
I didn’t take it.
Instead, I shoved out the door and went down the hall out the back door into the stagnant, cold air of the alleyway without looking back at the crowd of partygoers. I didn’t know what I would be moved to do if I saw them again and so, I denied myself even that last look.