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He sighed and ran his free hand through his hair. “It was a fleeting thought during those first few hours when we got back. One of dozens. I decided the more appropriate option was for me to go and send them back to you here. Either that or send you away fully stipended and buy you some house to live in wherever you wanted.”

Taking advantage of the gap between us, I crossed my arms. “But youknowwhere I want to live. And you know I don’t want some allowance. That would just makeyoufeel better about it all, not me.”

Zeno scoffed and gave me a bittersweet smile. “I told you, didn’t I? I’m a selfish man.”

The rumbling sensation of someone laughing while pressed against me was too sweet, and despite myself, I loosened up again. Of course, my emotional guard remained. “How do I know that me being there isn’t just a fleeting thought? How am I supposed to believe that you aren’t going to change your mind?”

“Oh,mia passerotta, that will never happen,” he murmured, wrapping his arms around me tightly. “Now that you’ve agreed to be mine, I have no intention of letting you go.”

Ba-dump, ba-dump.I didn’t know whose quickened heartbeat I was hearing, but I got the strange feeling they were synchronized. That was all it took to give in to it once again—that intoxicating feeling of infatuation.

“I’ll go with you.”

I pulled his face closer, threw aside the sheets, and breathed him in. He pulled back to meet my eyes and assess my intent, and I gave a smirk and nod.

Released from self-restraint, Zeno lowered me onto my back and stared down at me, already teeming with electricity. I caught a glimpse of his eyes in those few milliseconds before he kissed me, full of passion.

I could spit in his face and cut his throat, I realized, and even to his dying breath, he would love me more than life itself.

Chapter 33: Pensato

My vision was blurred, but I could still see the faint movement of rolling along my nose and cascading to the water’s surface. I could have gotten goggles or trained myself to open my eyes more widely within the mineral water, but it didn’t matter—more important than that was the feeling of simultaneous weightlessness and fullness. Finally, when my lungs burned and the stream of bubbles ended, I surfaced.

“Are you ready yet?” Lucia grumbled at my side, making a point to hold the pitcher of milk and honey within view. If Lucia had caught me leaving Zeno’s room rather than my own that morning, she didn’t say anything.

Regardless, she was acting oddly bitter.

I smiled at her and nodded. Lucia poured the pitcher, and I watched as the milk swirled around the tub and shrouded me in an opaque cloud.

“Do you think the other residence has a tub like this?” I asked. Hopefully some small talk could brighten her mood.

Lucia gave the water another stir for good measure, then replied, “I don’t know. I’ve never been to any of the other houses.”

“I guess we’ll find out,” I said, holding my arm out to her to scrub.

Lucia paused and gave me a strange look. “Didn’t Duca de’ Medici tell you? Signora Carbone and I aren’t coming with you.”

Under her harsh gaze, I couldn’t help but pull my arm back against me and hug my legs. “I, uh, didn’t hear about that,” I admitted.

“Not even Doctor Ntumba is coming with you,” Lucia said. “I don’t like it, signorina. I have a bad feeling about this entire trip.”

I gave her a weak smile. Her words were dark, but I refused to let them touch me. Not when I felt so happy for the first time in days.

“It’ll only be for a few weeks. It should be fine.”

Lucia went back to scrubbing me, and a painful silence hung between us for several minutes. Once she began to scrub my legs, she spoke once more, her voice now somber. “I’ve seen people around the abbey the past few days, signorina.”

I pulled my legs back in and sank deeper into the hot water in an effort to stave away burgeoning goose bumps. I had seen them, too—glimpses, really, but I had seen them nonetheless. They were different from the others. As clear and realistic as the fleeting sights of my family were, they were clearly not real. Just like dreams upon waking, there was a clear disconnect from reality. In contrast, the silhouette I had seen in the moonlight yesterday, and the shuffling I had heard in the grass that morning, were very real.

No,I told myself.That can’t be true. They must be shadows from the abbey.

“The Abbazia di Santa Dymphna shows you your ghosts,” I said, echoing Signora Carbone’s words from months ago. I wasn’t sure if I was saying them to comfort Lucia or myself.

∞∞∞

The bag on my shoulder was lighter than it had ever been. My day bag had traveled with me from Red Creek to London, London to Sicily, from Sicily to the Abbazia di Santa Dymphna. And now it would come from the Abbazia di Santa Dymphna to Puglia.

The inside of the bag was dented from the corners of books, and there was a pocket I had sewn in to hold pill bottles. The zipper always caught midway through its track, which was swollen from where it had been overstuffed with all of my clothes. Now my bag held only pill bottles, the bracelet Zeno had gotten me, and a few sundresses.