by Lila Dubois
“Mr. Rathmann, Mr. Knight, I am Sophia Starabba.”
Her English was excellent, but she spoke with a delicious Italian accent. James had heard the expression “sultry voice” before, but hadn’t understood it until now, until Sophia.
Merely cataloguing her features, attire, and voice didn’t do her justice. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that a simple description couldn’t capture the essence of her, the expression that lit her face, the way she stood so casually confident. It reminded James of any number of stories where the beautiful princess sneaks out of the castle, and though she wears the clothes of a commoner, they don’t hide her nobility and beauty.
It was no wonder she was known as the princess.
The sedan she’d borrowed to pick up their distinguished English guests was barely big enough. Far larger than her Alfa Romeo, and a large car by Italian standards, the four-door black town car was barely large enough to fit James Rathmann. She knew him—by reputation, not by prior meeting—so Sophia had been prepared for his size. The tale of the rugby player who’d become a leading numismatist had been quite the talk of the art and archaeology community, and even made the news in some parts of Europe and New Zealand.
Knowing he would be a big man was not the same thing as standing next to him and having a sudden, vivid fantasy about being tossed over his shoulder and carried off to his barbarian lair. Sophia hid her grimace—the fantasy was immature and insulting to Mr. Rathmann. And it was even more insulting that the fantasy had expanded to include Mr. Knight, who would come riding to her rescue on a white steed, his sword shining in the sun.
She was thirty-five years old. She was a grown, sophisticated woman with a wealth of sexual experience. A woman who saw two attractive men and couldn’t help but have the most pedestrian fantasy possible. Maybe it wasn’t pedestrian so much as it was a fairy tale. A lifetime of being called “princess” had clearly left its mark on her brain.
Maybe next week she would take some time off, go to the Caribbean, find a man, take him back to her room, and do wicked, wicked things to him. And more importantly, let him do wicked things to her.
While sheltered in the privacy of a Caribbean resort, she could be a sophisticated, sexually mature, and aware woman. While at home, she needed to be the loyal daughter, honorable officer of the law, and protector of Italy’s art and culture. The loyal-daughter/officer-of-the-law version of herself did not—should not—have fantasies about a ménage a trois with two members from England.
“Where are we going, Ms. Starabba?” The knight—Tristan, he’d said his name was—leaned forward. He’d chosen the seat directly behind her, and the position left her a bit twitchy, so she settled for checking on him in the rearview mirror every few moments.
“To a villa just outside of Rome.”
“Is that where the coins are?” Mr. Rathmann’s voice was a delicious rumble, and it affected her in a way she didn’t like. No. That was not the truth. She liked it very much, but it was not the time or place to be thinking about those sorts of things, and he was not the right man for her, even for something casual.
Many members of her father’s territory took lovers from outside Rome before their marriages. It was almost expected that members of the Masters’ Admiralty would come to their marriages with not just sexual experience, but sexual expertise. But she was the principessa of Rome. She could not, would not, consort with members outside her territory.
In these modern times, the term “princess” had come to mean the innocent, brave heroine of children’s stories, or a stylishly dressed woman who took up humanitarian causes. That was not the kind of princess Sophia was. Her father would have made a good feudal lord. To him, his son and daughter were assets to be used in his quest to protect Rome. Marrying the princess was a reward he used to manipulate and motivate men and women in his territory. She’d been betrothed to three different trinities since the time she was twenty, and had even been publicly engaged twice. In all instances, her father had called off the unions.
As the ammiraglio of Rome, her father was the one who decided who would marry whom. He arranged the marriages of members of their territory the way other men play chess—every move calculated to elicit a specific outcome and response. The grande ammiraglio, the fleet admiral, had to approve every trinity, in every territory, but to her father, that was only a formality. He was, in his own mind, closer to a king than anything else.
“That is where the crime scene is,” she answered.
“Who is the victim?” Tristan asked.
“Victims,” she corrected.
Both men tensed. She could see James’s arms and shoulders tighten into hard mounds of muscle. Tristan had a hand on the back of her seat, and pulled against it as he sat forward even more.
“How many?” Tristan asked.
“Three.”
James bowed his head and crossed himself. A good Catholic boy.
“Jay-sus,” Tristan blasphemed. Not a good Catholic boy.
Sophia forced herself to stop thinking about James and Tristan. It was easy to do as the discussion moved to the horror of what was in the cave.
“The coins are…are in the bodies?” James’s voice had gone up an octave or two.
“In them? No, no, no. The coins were found near them. It is possible the coins are there by coincidence.”
“Possible?” Tristan asked. “You don’t sound like you believe that.”
“I don’t want to color your perceptions.” She honked a few times and whipped around an idiot car. They were nearly out of the city. She drove for another ten minutes in relative silence, growing impatient with the other drivers the closer they got to escaping the sprawling metropolis of Rome. A few times James sucked in a breath and clutched at the dash, and she could see Tristan’s wide-eyed, panicked expression in the rearview mirror. The English were so uptight.
She turned off E821, the main road headed south out of Rome. Within a few moments, they were out in the Italian countryside, the landscapes unspoiled—low rolling hills, tall Cyprus trees, gnarled oaks, fields of fat purple grapes. Here and there were straight-sided old country houses, interspersed with the occasional sprawling villa.
“Beautiful,” Tristan said. Now that there were fewer cars, the men had relaxed somewhat, though they tensed when she took a curve.
“Have you been to Italy before?” she asked them.
“Once, but just to Rome. The city I mean, not the territory.” The knight met her gaze in the rearview mirror for a moment.
“I love Italy,” James said by way of reply.
The territories of the Masters’ Admiralty did not follow the lines of the modern countries of Europe. And the names of the territories often had nothing to do with the modern locations that bore the same appellations. The territory of Rome was based on what had been the Holy Roman Empire, and included Italy, Greece, and parts of Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro, Albania and Slovenia—everything that touched the Adriatic Sea.
“The modern city of Rome is…” She had to stop and think of the right word in English. “It is impressive. But this is beauty.” She gestured to the landscape.
“You’re from here,” Tristan said.
She met his gaze in the mirror. “Yes. How did you know?”
“Just a guess.”
“You are perceptive, Cavaliere.” She used the Italian word for knight.
“Thank you, Principessa.”
“You may call me Sophia.”
“Thank you.”
“Can we get back to the dead bodies?” James asked. “Are they contaminating my coins?”
“Yes and no,” she answered. “The coins should be fine. The smell of the…of the bodies is horrific, but not damaging to the coins. However, there are paintings. I cannot say that they will survive.”
“Ugh,” was James’s reply.
“Why did you leave the coins near the bodies?” Tristan asked.
“I will not say more,” she repeated. “I want you to see i
t for yourself.”
“James,” Tristan said to the other man. “If you want, I can go in and bring them out.”
“If the placement of the coins was not important, I could have brought them to England. Or taken pictures.” They crested a low rise, and for a moment she glimpsed the roof of the villa. They were close. “I wish I did not have to ask you to enter this place, but I must ask it. Three people are dead. This is not a mugging or a random murder. My…the man in charge believes that everything at the scene is meant to tell us something. What do you say in English?”
“A clue?” James guessed.
“Everything in there is a clue.” Tristan sounded skeptical.
“Clue, yes. The coins are one of the clues I cannot understand on my own. If I could, I would not have asked you to come here.”
“I understand,” James said.
Sophia turned off the road. The car seemed too big for the narrow driveway lined with mature trees. The narrowness was a sign of age. This driveway had been used long before cars were invented.
The drive rose slowly at first, then more steeply as they approached the villa. They emerged from the flanking rows of trees, and Sophia hid a smile as she watched Tristan and James react to the sight. The Villa Degli Dei was large and grand, made of warm travertine and brown-veined marble. An elegant white statue stood amid the roses in the center of the circular drive. Until Sophia was twenty-one, the statue had been a genuine Roman statue of Apollo.
When she was twenty-one, she’d been at university, studying art and art history, and had come home bristling with the outrage only university students could manage. She’d thrown a fit, demanded the statue be placed in a museum. Her father had agreed, but only if Sophia could provide an exact replica, in marble. She’d taught herself to sculpt marble, and then spent two years working on the statue that was there now. It wasn’t an exact replica by any means. To her trained eye, it looked new, but her father had graciously agreed to let the original statue go to a museum.
She remembered tearing up with love and gratitude. Her replica wasn’t good. She was no master sculptor. Her father had agreed because he loved her and wanted her to be happy, and because he was rewarding all the time and effort she’d put into creating the replica.
Antonio had dismissed her romantic notion, telling her she had to think like Father. That she should try to figure out what he got out of making her sculpt the replica. She’d stubbornly refused, believing the best about her father.
Six months later, her father hosted a grand party at the villa, and the admiral of Rome had announced that his daughter was now a master sculptor, and proceeded to gift her early works—rough busts, failed attempts at sculpting smaller, thirty-centimeter figurines—to those most loyal to him.
The next day, she’d dropped her art major and decided to join the Carabinieri.
Her father had laughed, and reminded her that scarcity only made her art more valuable.
“Damn,” James said. “Now that’s a villa.”
“That statement is entirely accurate.” Sophia did her best to imitate an English accent. Both men looked at her and then started laughing.
Sophia smiled and pulled around the side of the villa, heading for the stables, outbuildings, and the countryside beyond. It was good to make them laugh. They would need to laugh before they saw what was in that cave.
Tristan twisted in his seat to look out the back window at the rear of the villa, with its long balconies, arched windows, and warm stone facades. “The bodies aren’t in the villa?”
They passed the stables and the large temperature- and humidity-controlled garage, where the family’s collection of Italian cars was kept. The drive changed from paved to gravel as they got farther from the buildings. They made a sharp right, away from the manicured gardens and wide, rolling lawns directly behind the house.
The borrowed car scraped against bushes and the occasional tree as she maneuvered it along what had once been the game warden’s path and was now used by security and the gardeners.
“No. They’re on the grounds. That’s how he was able to do this.”
Tristan leaned forward again. “He? Do you know who the killer is?”
“No. I use it because, well, I think it must have been a man.”
“Why?”
“I’m not sure a woman could have done it.”
“Women are just as vicious as men.”
“No, no, no, Cavaliere. Women are far more vicious. But we are not so coarse. So brutal.”
James made a nervous little sound, which was rather comical coming from the big man.
“Do not worry, Mr. Rathmann. I will protect you.” She said it as somberly as possible, hoping to make him smile.
“Thank you, Principessa.” His voice was solemn but his eyes sparkled.
“I thought that was my job,” Tristan said mildly.
“To protect him?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“I thought you were the nanny?” James shifted in his seat, the whole car rocking slightly as he did.
“Nanny?” Sophia asked. That word was familiar but she couldn’t think of the translation.
“Babysitter,” James supplied. “Someone who looks after children.”
She laughed. “Tristan is your bambinaia, James?”
“According to him.”
The rocky path started to rise, and here and there, heavy granite boulders stuck out from the undergrowth. The topsoil was thin in places, and deep enough to support trees in others.
Sophia had come up with a snappy retort, but they were too close to the cave. The words stuck to her tongue. The men must have sensed her change in demeanor, because they fell silent. She slowed to a crawl and looked around, checking the undergrowth for signs as to where to turn. There would be signs of the other vehicles that had come this way since the discovery, and she could follow the trail of broken branches.
She didn’t need to look so hard. Someone had hung a streamer of yellow crime scene tape from a branch as a marker, and the scrubby brush and layer of fallen leaves under that grim pennant was squashed nearly flat, the paths of car tires very obvious.
She followed the tracks into a small clearing. The ground here was mostly rock, with only patches of moss and the occasional pool of soil that had settled into the dips in the rock like water into a tide pool when the tide was out. She parked off to one side, next to three other cars. The white van was in the middle of the clearing, closest to the entrance of the cave.
She shut off the car, then twisted in her seat.
“Mr. Rathmann, I doubt the knight was sent here to be your bambinaia. I am sure your admiral sent him to support you. What you are about to see, it is…it is horrible. If I did not think it essential that you see the coins in place, I would not ask it of you.”
“The bodies are still there?” Tristan said. “Weren’t they found yesterday?”
“They were.”
“Then why are they still there?”
Sophia met Tristan’s gaze. His eyes were beautiful—dark gold. For a moment, her treacherous imagination took over, and she was sure he was not a man, but an avenging angel. Or maybe Apollo, her statue come to life to ravish and worship her.
“You will see, Mr. Knight. Come. We need to prepare.”
They exited the car and she led them over to the van. There was no one inside, but the back doors were open. She jumped in and found sets of white coveralls for herself and Tristan. James tried to put on a set of XL coveralls she’d found in the bottom of the bin, but they were too narrow around his heavily muscled legs. With Tristan’s help, she was able to cobble together coverings out of various disposable smocks and some medical scrubs.
At any other time, it would have been comical, and they would have been laughing.
Right now, however, they weren’t laughing.
When they were ready, Sophia handed each of them a mask and led them to the fissure where two of the huge slabs of rock they stood on met.
The cave had probably been carved by water that had flowed down between the two massive rocks, carving into the stone bit by bit, looking for a way out, a way back to the earth. Then the determined water broke through, finding a pocket of space created by the great rocks, and had continued to slither into that small space. And after a millennium of doing that, the water had created an opening large enough for someone—possibly even one of Sophia’s ancestors—to find the cave within.
She led the way, lowering herself into the crevice, ducking under an overhang created by the uppermost rock, and started down the steps that had been carved into the stone.
There was a muffled curse behind her, and she looked to see James bent nearly double at the waist, one hand on his head.
Their gazes met and she fought down a shiver.
“Are you hurt?”
“No,” he replied. “Am I going to fit?”
“Yes, yes. Of course. Now hurry.” The cold coming off the stones was seeping into her skin and she wanted to get this over with. She hadn’t felt that way when she’d come here last night. Then again, last night, she hadn’t known what waited below.
Chapter Three
Tristan knew that smell. It was the smell of death. He breathed through his mouth, each breath tasting slightly papery due to the mask.
Down they went, into what he now suspected was a cave. He kept an eye on James, in case the other man was claustrophobic. If he fainted, either from the close quarters, the smell, or the sight of the bodies, it would be hell to try to get him back up the steps.
Sophia paused every meter to turn back and look at them. All that was visible of her was her forehead and eyes. Every inch of the rest of her body was covered by the paper coveralls, a mask, and gloves. Tristan wore the same outfit, and though he wasn’t wearing coveralls, James was similarly protected.
