Page 34 of Just for a Taste

M y 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.

Pack lightly, Zeno had told me. I’ll buy you everything you need.

The roar of the private jet was starting up (who would have ever guessed I’d ride in one of those?), audible even through stone walls, and I could already imagine Zeno’s impatient huffing at my delay. I rolled my eyes at the thought and quickened my pace.

I passed by his desk, and my eyes lingered as they usually did. It was human nature, I hoped, to be nosy, especially when I was accustomed to seeing pages full of lyrics and sheet music. I hoped they could be some precursor to the wondrous documents I would uncover.

This time, however, the desk was covered in something entirely different. Rather than loosely scrawled script, there were pages full of typed-out charts. I saw names, dozens of names, many of which I recognized. I remembered, albeit vaguely, many of the nobles from the ball. All of these names were attached to faces that had whispered and pointed at me, even outright jeered. The columns next to the names contained addresses, names and ages of family members as young as six, and names of their businesses and frequented areas. Some of this information was underlined, starred, highlighted, or otherwise annotated.

I stopped at the desk and flipped through pages in a desperate attempt to find some information that could explain these lists in a normal way, but as the pit in my stomach told me, there was no normal explanation. More pages revealed more names and more intel. Secrets and scandals.

Blackmail material.

Behind me, Urbino’s familiar footsteps echoed through the halls, and before me, my shadow grew darker and shorter with the approaching light. Shit. I threw my head from left to right in the hopes that if I waited long enough, I would know what to do. The steps grew louder, and the light brightened. I was still shrouded in darkness, but only for a few more seconds.

In a panic, I clutched the papers close to my chest, then finally arranged them as closely to the position I’d found them in as possible.

Just as the footsteps were about to turn into the closest hallway, I managed to sneak off.

I rounded the corner, hugging the wall, then slid down until I was sitting. My ears pounded, and I closed my eyes as tightly as I could, forcefully suppressing gasps of air into shallow, quiet panting.

There is no normal explanation for those lists , I thought once more. There is no normal explanation.