Page 47 of Just for a Taste

T he concrete floor was chilly beneath me, yet warm enough to tell me I had been lying on it for a while. I was on my side, arms tied tightly to my side, shoulders aching against the hard floor. There were two men before me.

Even in the dim lighting, I recognized the first man instantly. Who else could those gleaming, crimson eyes and broad, fanged smile belong to but Barone Basilio de’ Medici?

Unlike the pristine grooming he’d undertaken during our first meeting, the nobleman looked unusually disheveled. His long hair was mussed, there was dirt along his jaw, and he wore a muddy button-down instead of the suit I had originally seen him in. Despite the mess, he still looked just as composed as when we had first met, if not more so.

To his side was a stranger in somber dress and visage. He stood behind Basilio and to the side, an elegant shadow.

“Who—” I began to ask, then stopped. I knew the answer.

The man was broad-shouldered and glowing with health, despite his age. He was a normal Italian through-and-through, sun-kissed even in the shadows, with curly salt-and-pepper hair. There was something I recognized about his high cheekbones, his defined Cupid’s bow, and most of all, the look in his hazel eyes. Utterly dead and yet intensely ablaze. Zeno’s father.

He folded his arms behind his back and bowed slightly at me, and the dim light glanced across a scar—a thin, silvery streak where his lips had been split down the middle at one point. I fought against the ropes harshly as his leather shoe appeared at my nose, but they did not give in the slightest. I wriggled desperately, then gave in as Basilio sat me up and propped me against the wall, clutching my cheeks in his grimy hands.

I squirmed out from his grasp and pulled my face back as far as I could in those ropes.

“Why are you doing this?” I demanded, holding back tears. “I thought we could talk this over!”

Basilio sighed, straightened, and tilted his head to the side with a genuine frown. “Talk? Don’t be ridiculous. I undid the existence of your ritus sanguinous , you know. I pulled every string I needed to pull, and not a soul has spoken your name since that night. Company stocks have been unaltered. But I still know.”

I didn’t say anything, just glared and pretended his words didn’t feel like daggers in my chest.

With a small sigh and shake of his head, Basilio continued, “I won’t lie to you, Signorina Bowling. Beyond protecting the Medici name, this may not be personal to Uncle Vincenzo—” he paused and pointed at the man at his side “—but it’s personal to me. You made me break promises, and more importantly, you’ve stolen someone dear to me.”

“Why are you telling me all this? Aren’t you wasting your breath when you’re just going to kill me?”

He laughed a genuine, mirthful laugh and shot a glance at Zeno's father. “Oh, Cora. If we wanted you dead, you would be. But Zeno would find out that his everything is nothing , and I assume the worst for him.”

“Then what do you plan on doing to me?” I asked, squirming again. The ropes burned against my arm, which made me want to squirm even more. But of course, the rational side of me knew there wasn’t a point, so I instead opted to glare as hard as I could.

“I plan to make you leave, Cora. If money doesn’t, and if a dead bird doesn’t, perhaps pain will.”

“Nothing will—” I began to say, but he slapped me hard, so hard that he knocked me over.

I tried to say something, any sort of stinging response, but all that came out of my mouth was a staggered wheeze. Basilio scowled down at me, holding his hand with disdain, as though it were my fault it stung—as though it were my fault there were parallel tears in his eyes, and even guilt on his face. He reeled back again, and I squeezed my eyes shut, bracing for the blow.

“Basilio,” Zeno’s father snapped, voice low and harsh. “Do not dirty yourself. You have done enough.”

When the blow did not come, I cautiously opened an eye. In the brief instance I had closed my eyes, the man had transformed. Now, the Basilio before me stood erect with a cool and calm expression, focused more on fixing the cuffs of his sleeves than anything else.

“Of course,” he replied to Vincenzo. “I’m wasting time messing with her.”

“Correct. It is as I’ve always told you,” Vincenzo said, taking a few steps toward me with his hands clasped together behind his back. “Medici do not dirty their hands. That is what the help is for.”

As the patriarch neared, I held my breath. If he wanted to, he could kick my face, or pull out a knife and kill me on the spot. I craned my neck up to see him, but this effort was meaningless. Vincenzo bent over, folding at the waist, strangely formal. He gave me little more than a cursory glance and sighed, looking disappointed with what he saw. With a small nod to his nephew, the pair walked off into the distance.

Upon flickering off the sole light in the room, their footsteps diminished into silence and darkness.

After it became clear they wouldn’t return, I considered trying to sit up again but gave up without even trying. It wouldn’t make me feel better. I had never felt colder and darker and more alone, and cutting up my arms by wriggling around wouldn’t help. It was easier to close my eyes and pretend this was some horrible dream.

Just as I had resolved to sink into the concrete, a light shone on me. I squinted into it and perceived the outline of an approaching figure. My eyes adjusted, and a familiar set of features became discernible just among the visible edge of the light.

A tall, barrel-chested man with a meek look in his beady eyes and a strange nervous quirk in his lip and brow. He had a well-groomed russet beard and finely combed hair.

“Signore Urbino?”

I had seen this man so many times over the past year in the abbey but had never truly spoken to him. He had become something of a strange accessory in my mind, a piece of furniture shifting around the same few locations hourly. But I realized he looked entirely at home standing in the shadows, more so than he ever had in the abbey.

Urbino approached me slowly, his expression strangely flat. The distinct scent of shoe polish grew stronger.

“Signorina Bowling.” Urbino’s greeting was in the form of a strange, low growl. He peeled his gloves off slowly, and for the first time, I glimpsed his hands. Thick scars covered the surface, and the undersides of his palms were entirely and evenly burned.

Urbino roughly grabbed me by the ropes and jerked me upright. The action came easily to him, and I broke out in a cold sweat with the horrifying realization that this seemed far from the first time he had done such a thing.

Pleas poured from my quivering lips. “Please don’t hurt me! I’m begging you, please! I’ll do anything—I’ll give you anything!”

He tilted his head at me in the distinct manner of a hawk before it dove. How is the best way to do this? his eyes said. Where is best to sink in my claws?

“I’m telling you, don’t hurt me!” I tried to force my shaking voice to be as stern as possible. “Someone will notice I’m gone, Zeno will—”

Urbino tossed his head back in a scoff. “Zeno will what? Hurt me? Zeno and I have played many times. He never even tried to fight back! Lash after lash, he just sat there, shivering. The weakling didn’t even try to fight when his father installed me in the abbey.”

I could see Zeno in my head, a young boy hugging his legs, his shirt tossed aside in a heap on the ground, with dead eyes that did not cry and a body that did not flinch when the whip came down.

The reason for my trembling had changed. More than scared, I was furious.

I leaned forward and spat on his shoe. Urbino stared down at his feet, eyes wide and jaw open, and glowered at me. Then he unleashed.

He grabbed my head, slammed it against the wall, then pulled it back and slammed it again. I felt a sickening crunch, felt my incisors gnash through my tongue. Grasping my head so tightly with his hand I thought it might burst, he ground the side of my face into the wall, so that dirt and stone joined the pulp of broken teeth and blood in my mouth.

Every ounce of me knew I should scream or fight, but I was a limp, breathless from the pain and adrenaline coursing through me. He released me, and as I slid down to the floor, my vision became blurred. A foot rammed into my stomach, and I felt something snap. He kicked me again in the same spot, and instead of a crack, all I heard and felt was a hollow squelch.

Black spots clouded my vision, and the universe seemed monochrome, except for all the red around me—the red I was coughing up, the red pooling around my chest. My whole body was one dull ache, like a hand seared to the bone. I felt the occasional sharp pain—my fingers being snapped, my hair being yanked—but none of it drew me out of the feeling of floating. Every snap and thud echoed outside of my body, unable to fully penetrate the pool of darkness and nothingness I was suspended in.

Eventually, the vague sensation of spinning was all there was.

I don’t know how long I was in that pool. Brief vignettes appeared before me, but I struggled to process what they meant before they faded away.

The first few times there was only the floor. Then, a door opening. Screaming—but not from me. A bang reverberating from across the room, along with the smell of gunpowder. The man who had been kicking me, but now on the ground with his throat torn open. White hands pulling apart skin and muscle and fat as though they were layers of a quilt. Being lifted into the air by trembling arms. The click of a seat belt. Inertia pulling me back into a seat. Trying to pull something off my eye, but discovering it was my eye, only bulbous and swollen shut. Being lifted again. Several voices, both familiar and new. A sharp prick in my inner arm, my jaw being forced open, a stern voice saying, “18 etomidate and 125 succinylcholine IV stat. 7 millimeter tube.”

Then the full descent into nothingness.