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I let out a small breath, the muscles in my arms and shoulders screaming. I carefully rotated the ring, rewarded with the appearance of a small gap that had previously been hidden beneath the wood of the nose. I felt the gap, looking for a release mechanism or way to unscrew the ring from the nose, but other than the slight gap, there was no way to release, break, or remove the ring.

I released the ring and shook out my arms. “I’ve got bad news. There is no release mechanism on the ring. It’s solid.”

My mother looked at me in surprise. “Then how do we get it off the bull’s nose? Even removing all the ropes won’t free it from the nose. That doesn’t make sense.”

I didn’t have an answer, but no other solution presented itself. I reached up and felt all along the brass ring again, stopping on the slight gap. I rotated the ring until the gap was where the rope from the ceiling passed through the loop. I tried to push it through, but the rope was too fat to fit through the gap. I tried to force it, but it was clear after a minute that it wouldn’t fit no matter how hard I pushed.

I looked up and down the rope to see if there were any places where the rope was thinner, but it all looked the same thickness. Still, I continued to rotate the ring until it was adjacent to where the rope that was attached to the Gordian knot on the right side. As I’d hoped, that ropewasthin enough to pass through the gap. But it wouldn’t go easily, because the second loop through the ring was on the other side.

The rope was pulled so tight, there wasn’t quite enough slack to fit through the crack. I retrieved one of the horns and began prying apart the strands of the rope until I was able to fit some of the strands individually through the gap. Eventually, I was able to remove the rest of the rope from that side. With one side free, I had plenty of slack to rotate the ring to the other side, repeat the process, and drop the rope from the ring.

Like Alexander the Great, we’d succeeded in freeing the rope without having to solve the Gordian knot. Yet.

“You did it!” Alessa shouted, and everyone came around to congratulate me.

“It only means we have two out of three ropes off the ring,” I said. “But at least we can stop trying to unravel the Gordian knots. The ceiling rope remains and, of course, the wood of the bull’s nose holding it in place. I felt the wood between the ring and the nose, and it’s incredibly strong. Even using the horn to hack at it, I don’t think we’d be able to break through.”

“So, what do we do?” Gio asked. He had his arm around Vittoria, and she rested her dark head on his shoulder.

I thought for a moment. “Let’s review the remaining problems and visualize a solution. Mama, tell me what you see as the problems.”

She looked at me and then the ring still encased in the bull’s nose. “Step one. We must remove the rope from the ceiling in order to free the ring completely of all ropes. Step two. Figure out how to remove the ring from the bull’s nose. Step three. Once we free the ring, we place it in large indentation in the door and either press the small circle or enter a code on the keypad that we don’t know yet. And we must do all of that in eighteen minutes. Did I miss anything?”

As far as I could tell, she hadn’t. But something had started to bother me, which meant that during her recap, something had stirred inside my head. A potential answer or solution, I hoped.

But how long would it take before it surfaced into my brain as an action?

There wasn’t a minute to waste. “Gio, get up on the bull again and take another look at the ceiling bolts. Stefan, you help him. Mama, you and Vittoria check to see if there is anything we can do with the hitching post now that it’s free of the rope. Perhaps that is why we needed to free the rope instead and freeing the ring was a distraction. Then go over the platform and the walls looking for any anomaly that we might have missed. Alessa, take another look at the door. Everyone, be quick, because we don’t have much time.

“What are you going to do?” Stefan asked.

“Play to my strengths,” I said, heading toward the keypad. A gut feeling suddenly told me the answer was at the door, and I never ignored my gut feelings.

I studied the keypad for a several minutes. It was a simple black keypad with blue backlight. The keypad display was digital, which meant no worn-out keypads where you could determine the password by simply looking at which keys had been pushed the most. A blue backlight was more convenient in the dark and harder for interlopers to look over your shoulder, through binoculars, or via other electronic means to see you punch in a code. But how did that figure into this challenge?

The keypad was important, but how? It meant we’d need a code to get out, and I hadn’t seen a series of numbers or letters on anything.

Out of the corner of my eye, I noted Alessa peering intently at the indentation where the brass ring would go if we ever figured out how to remove it from the bull’s nose. “Find something?” I asked her.

“Not yet, but I’m convinced that, as with the knot, the solution may not be the obvious one. Subtlety seems key to this challenge. Perhaps all we need is a combination to unlock the door. Maybe the combination is inscribed on the gold ring, and we don’t have to remove the ring, just like you didn’t have to untie the Gordian knots completely.”

It was an interesting theory, even though I wasn’t sure how you could misinterpret Brando’s clear instructions—remove the gold ring from the bull’s nose. Additionally, I’d already looked at and felt every inch of that ring with my fingers, and other than the small gap, I hadn’t seen or felt an engraving of any kind.

But it didn’t hurt to have confirmation of that.

Fired up by her train of thought, Alessa raced over to the bull and asked Gio for a boost. He gave her one so she could examine the golden ring up close. Like I had, she studied the ring carefully, looking on the outside and inside of the ring and rotating it so she could see all parts of the ring…and found nothing. No way to break it, no way to remove it from the bull’s nose, and no secret code.

Nothing.

Disappointment showed on her face as Gio lowered her down. I realized I was not the only one who would take this failure personally.

“I thought I was on to something,” she said dejectedly. “It just felt right.”

I agreed with her. Ithadfelt right.

I turned and studied the door again. The answer had to be right in front of me. What was it?

“This small circular indentation bothers me,” I murmured. “I can’t figure out its true purpose. Every piece in a puzzle has a purpose, so what could this be?”