Page 52 of Just for a Taste

F or the next week, I didn’t leave the bedroom on account of being “sick.” In truth, I felt perfectly fine—better than I had in months, in fact. But the entire household whispered about me as though I were a hospice patient. I had meals in bed, tea in bed, showers in the small bathroom attached, books and music curated to my desire. The finches were even trained to hop into travel cages to greet me.

It was someone’s will keeping me in those walls within walls. Someone had decided that I would isolate myself for three days, that the outside world would cease to exist. I did not know if this idea was Zeno’s or my own, nor which scenario would have been worse.

Just as I had awoken three days ago with the resolve to remain in bed, I awoke on the fourth intent to spend some of the day outdoors.

I had faded in and out of sleep, with Zeno at my side on occasion and the bed vacant on others. The final time I sat up, he was not there. A meal of some sort—I wasn’t certain if it was breakfast, lunch, or dinner—sat on a tray on the bedside table. Some sort of flaky pastry, warm and still steaming, paired with a creamy soup.

I had come to know most of the dishes served in the abbey. There was plenty of variety, of course, yet all the food was in the form of rustic Sicilian dishes I had researched before my first interview. Signora Carbone was fond of following the tradition of the land. Something about this dish, meanwhile, seemed vaguely French. I frowned and mentally went through my past few meals.

How hadn’t I noticed it before? Caprese salad, minestrone, and ribollita. They were all mainland Italian, or even outright foreign.

I tried in vain to parse the significance of this for a few minutes but gave up. My food and the bed were now cold and equally unappealing, so I abandoned them both.

Without a window or clock, the time of day was indiscernible as I stepped out into the hallway. The floor felt like ice beneath my feet, and the house had that strange, ethereal stillness that felt nocturnal. But as I peered into my old bedroom and saw light pouring through a gap in the curtains, my suspicions were confirmed to be wrong. It was simply an unusually still afternoon, much like the one during which I had seen Leonore.

But even on that day, there had seemed to be some sort of life in the abbey, with Signora Carbone and Lucia moving around in the background like mice, attending to the unforeseen machinations of the house.

I hobbled into the room, my breath eluding me. The air was heavy, full of my anticipation and something else entirely—a musty scent that was alien to this room, yet one which had been a close friend of mine for many years.

I ran my finger across the top of a bookshelf and found a fine, gritty layer on my fingertip. Dust. Something a conservatrix would have never permitted, even in a vacant suite. Signorina Carbone made Lucia clean the suite daily, and this degree of dust, though slight, did not accumulate with a single missed cleaning.

I slammed the window into its sill and yanked aside the curtains, which tore with a sickening sound and fell, limp, onto the ground. The room, now fully illuminated in many senses, was a wreck. The blanket and pillows had been scattered across the floor, every drawer thrown open and ravaged. Even the crosses had been torn from the wall.

“Lucia?” I called, as though she would be in the other room. “Signora?”

No reply, of course. I staggered out of the room, leaving the door ajar. The second it hit me, my heart raced, a terrible drum beating accelerando as all the clues unfolded.

When was the last time I had seen either of them? When had I last eaten the sort of food they cooked? When had my bedroom last been cleaned?

Badump-badump-badump-badump. Louder and faster my heart beat, the tiny vessels behind my eyes and within my ears visibly and audibly pulsating. Just as the tempo reached allegro, I became faintly aware of a song behind the drum—the gentle, steady first movement of “Moonlight Sonata,” played with the emotive yet skillful touch of Zeno’s fingers.

Vision darkening, I relied on the melody itself to guide me to our bedroom.

It took everything within me not to collapse back into the bed and allow myself to be lulled back to sleep by the music, to instead push beyond my sanctum and into Zeno’s. Through a haze, I could see him at the bench, head tossed back and eyes closed in a look of utter peace.

Anger swelled in me, rage at being unable to feel so calm myself.

I exhaled shakily, and the sonata seized midmeasure. “Ah, Cora,” Zeno said, glancing back at me. “What’s the ma—”

“Where’s Lucia?” I asked, balling up my fists.

Zeno looked away in the obvious manner of a guilty dog. It was one of those times where, in any other circumstance, I would have found the overtness endearing, or even adorable. But in this case, my greatest question was whether the beast had bared its teeth.

“Gone,” he replied after a painful silence.

My immediate question, and the realization that it had come so instinctively, rolled over me in a wave of nausea. “As in . . . gone-gone?”

“Are you asking if I killed her? Of course not!” Zeno scoffed, rising from the piano bench and tossing himself onto a chair. “You told me long ago she wanted to open a salon in the city. I simply funded her venture.”

“And Signora Carbone?”

He shrugged and took a long sip of wine. “Barone Sforza needed another conservatrix. She gladly took a position there.”

“And Signore Urbino?”

Silence. Dead silence, for God knew how long. Then, equal parts begrudging and matter-of-fact: “He’s dead, Cora. I shot him.”

Zeno might as well have knocked the wind out of me, the way my breath escaped me. I had always known, of course, but now the truth was inescapable.

Yet now that it was out in the open, Zeno held my gaze steadily. From here on out, I knew the answers would come out as smooth as silk, as though he were answering the time of the day. I wished I could stop myself from asking them.

“What about Basilio?”

“I caught up with him shortly after, once you were on the way to the hospital. He hadn’t gotten far.”

With each sentence, my voice rose, and now I spoke on the verge of yelling. “What did you do to him? How did you—”

“With a concrete block.”

I could practically see it: Basilio with his pretty face bashed in, arms and legs bent at horrendous angles, chest concave. Several ribs protruding from his chest, others impaling freshly burst organs.

Bile rose in my throat, but I couldn’t stop asking, “And your father?”

“I haven’t found him yet.” He sighed. Remorse showed on his face for the first time, far too late.

“And when you do?”

He darkened, eyes ablaze, nails digging into his armchair. “I don’t know. He almost killed you. Nothing I can imagine is sufficient justice. Regardless, I’d like to deal with him myself, unlike the others.”

I almost laughed at the surrealness of it all and could only echo his last two words. “The others?”

Zeno bore a hole into the floor with his eyes and gnashed his teeth. “What happened to you was no small operation. There were many others involved, like the man who drugged you. I don’t know if any of them met their ends swiftly, but even if they did, my father will not be afforded the same luxury.”

Faced with this realization, all I could do was look back at the beginning of our conversation. “What about Doctor Ntumba? Are you going to make her leave too?”

In only a sentence, I pulled him out of some sort of depth. “Noor? She has done nothing wrong. More importantly, she’s still treating—”

Finally, something in me snapped. “Come on!” I cried. “Let’s give up the act. We both know I’m healed! I don’t have a single goddamn stitch in me!”

Never had I spoken to Zeno in such a manner, and I regretted it for an instant at the sight of him genuinely wounded by the harshness of my words. But when I looked closer and saw that beneath the injury was his own guilt, I knew those words needed to be spoken.

I took a step back and turned away from Zeno, unable to meet his eyes. When I spoke next, my words were scarcely above a whisper. “I’m not better, and I never will be, will I? You’re never going to drink from me again, you won’t let anyone but Doctor Ntumba near me, and I’ll never leave this abbey.”

His silence was my answer.

I was once more left alone with only the gentle drum of my heart to break the silence. Discordant against its rapid rhythm, Zeno’s gentle footsteps slowly approached me. In a swift movement, he wrapped his arms around me and pulled me close to him. He, too, was trembling.

“Even if it means sending away every other soul, locking you away, and barring every window, I will do what I must to keep you safe,” Zeno said, voice husky in my ear. “I will repent for the harm that befell the most important thing to me of all. I will make the world burn.”

I hadn’t ever believed it was possible for words to become reality, and yet these words, spoken so vehemently, must have been bewitched. For the first time in my life, I truly feared what Zeno was capable of. Not in that unsettled way as when he spoke vacantly, or even in the flashbang manner as when he told me about his father, but truly.

“No!”

Zeno froze, and I took the opportunity to break away from him roughly. I tried to spin on my heels to see him, to step out and away from his grasp, but I fell to the floor. I tried in vain to stagger to my feet and put space between us but succeeded only in landing on my ass and skittering back.

Chest heaving, heart pounding, I stared back up at his crestfallen expression.

Zeno crouched on his heels and gave me a long, sad look. Just as he opened his mouth to speak, I cut in, “Zeno, I need to think.”

With a small sigh, he turned his head away and closed his eyes. His voice came out, low and shaky and just audible above the ringing in my ears. “Cora, I—”

“Zeno, no.” I rose to my feet and dusted off my skirt. “I need to be alone.”

He didn’t call out to me as I left. He didn’t do anything at all but sit there, already starting to disintegrate.