I smirked. I liked Ruggeri. She reminded me of my sisters—Lea in particular. Wouldn’t take shit from anyone.
“So what did they say?” I asked. “Anything good?”
“Eh. Hungarians…” She shrugged, but didn’t finish as she took another sip of her cocktail, as if mere mention of the Hungarians was enough to complete the thought.
I wasn’t following, however. “They didn’t care?” I tried.
“Maybe? I don’t know. They said there was no record of this Kertész entering the country any time close to the death. But who knows? They could be lying. They might think we were lying too. Or they might have been protecting their own. We don’t know that Giuseppe Bianchi was a spy. But we don’t not know that.”
I frowned. I was picking up a lot of strange things surrounding the death of Nina’s professor and the actions of her husband, but spy games wasn’t one of them. If Calvin Gardner was a Hungarian or Russian asset, I was the Pope. More likely was the fact that he got the agent on the black market with the help of all his own low-life associates in Eastern Europe. And that people working in intelligence assumed there was an ulterior motive, even if there wasn’t. It seemed Calvin had anticipated that too.
“Anyway, the case, it is closed. Unsolved, though we did not inform Bianchi’s family of the investigation, only that nothing was found, and Professor Bianchi died of perhaps an overdose.” Ruggeri shrugged.
“And now?” I asked. “What about now?”
Ruggeri squinted. “I don’t see what’s different.”
“What if…if I could tell you where Károly Kertész is right now?”
Ruggeri stared at me. “How would you know that? And how would you know it’s the same man?”
“I’d bet my life savings it’s the same man,” I replied dryly. “It’s a long story. But I’ll give it to you if you want.”
She did. And so, I laid out the rest of the details she was missing from the plot. The fact that Károly Kertész was Hungarian, yes, but had repatriated long ago as a U.S. citizen under a new name: Calvin Gardner. My guess was that by 2009, Gardner had used a fraudulent passport based on his old papers when he came to Italy for the purpose of murdering his wife’s lover so he could keep his mitts on her fortune, and in doing so kept the paper trail that would lead back to him almost perfectly clean.
“Károly Kertész is a gold-digging son of a bitch whose lifetime achievement has been extorting an heiress and running one of the largest human trafficking operations in the American Northeast,” I finished. “From what my team and I gathered, he’s been funneling women from all over Europe into prostitution rings for a decade or more. What’s a little murder on top of that?”
Ruggeri had listened to the story with a quiet satisfaction that people got when they were immersed in a really good novel. “Hmm. Very interesting. Very interesting.”
“Interesting enough that you might want to reopen the investigation? Or call your friends at AISE to see if they’d like to help?” I leaned closer. “Any chance your contact at Hungarian intelligence might remember you?”
Ruggeri smile, her red lips spreading with cool, competent knowledge. “Oh, yes. He liked me very much. My husband was not so much a fan.”
I smirked. Ruggeri was hard, but she wasn’t ugly. Yeah, I could see her using her looks to her advantage when it suited her.
“Well, then,” I said when I sat back in my seat. “I’ve got some friends at the CIA who might be curious about this as well.”
I removed a card and placed it on the table, then hastily scribbled my cell phone number on the back and scratched out my office phone.
“It’s better to reach me here,” I said as I slid it toward Ruggeri.
She examined the card, then tucked it away in her purse before pulling out one of her own and writing her own cell phone number too.
“I think I will be in touch, Mr. Zola,” she said. “Thank you for the drinks. It has been most…illuminating. Tell Marcello I said hello.”
I picked my hat off the table and leaned in to trade farewell kisses to the cheek as I stood. “And you as well, Ms. Ruggeri. I appreciate it more than you know. Ciao.”
Chapter Eighteen
Matthew
I arrived back at the hotel with a skip in my step, eager to relay the news to Nina and hopefully find her waiting for me. In bed. I wanted to celebrate.
We had a little hope at last. I wasn’t entirely sure what to do with the information Ruggeri had provided, but it was all worth knowing. That at one point, multiple governments had been on the lookout for Calvin Gardner under his other name. It was a big fuckin’ deal to be using a Russian chemical agent as a murder weapon. Maybe big enough that it wasn’t something his previous alliances with the Janus society would allow him to pay off. Everyone’s influence had a limit. Maybe this would crack the dam.
Now I had only one thing left on my agenda: use our last night here in Florence to make things right between Nina and me once and for all. We were close. So close.
“You ready for dinner, doll?” I asked as I unlocked the door to the room we’d been sharing. “The landlord said there’s a fantastic trattoria close to the river we can try if—Jesus.”
I found Nina standing in the middle of the room in nothing but a slip, throwing clothes into her trunks like she was a kid throwing rocks into a river.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” I said, holding out my hands like I was approaching a wild animal. The door closed behind me, and I tossed the room key and my hat onto the desk. “What’s going on here?”
Nina hurled a pair of shoes into a trunk with a loud thunk. “Get out.”
“Come again?”
The carnage wasn’t limited to her clothes. There was a broken vase in the corner, and it looked like someone had gone to war with one of the pillows. Feathers were everywhere.
I pulled off my jacket, sensing we were going to stay a while. “Nina, are you okay? What the hell happened here?”
“You happened!” She whirled around, a twister of silk, blonde hair, and fury. Her face was streaked with tears. “I saw you. With her.”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“Maybe fifteen minutes ago. I took a short nap, and then woke up and went for a walk through the city to clear my head. Then I rounded the corner, and I saw you, Matthew! Sitting on the fucking sidewalk, enjoying your drinks, smiling at her with that infuriating smirk of yours!”
I jerked, as much for hearing the word “fuck” come out of Nina’s mouth as for what she was implying. The last time I’d heard her swear like this, she was losing it on Eric and Jane’s rooftop.
“Wait, what?” I asked. “You saw me…oh! Nina, no. That’s not what you think. That was Silvana Ruggeri, she’s a—”
“I don’t want to know her name!” Nina spat like a wildcat. She struggled with a blouse, then threw it backward on the bed with the mess of feathers. “Fuck it. I hate that shirt anyway. It can rot in this godforsaken city with the rest of this mess.”
I took a cautious step forward. It was the day. The stresses of the trip. She was tired and scared—that’s all this was. Right?
“Nina,” I tried again. “I don’t know what you think you saw, baby, but I swear to God, I was just trying to—”
“You kissed her!” she shouted as she turned around and threw another piece of clothing straight at me. It fell to the ground impotently. “Don’t bother denying it, Matthew. I saw it. I saw the entire fucking thing!”
“I kissed her? What the fuck are you talking about?” I was finally losing my patience.
“God, you won’t even admit it? You’ll just lie straight to my face?”
I rubbed a hand over my face. “Jesus fucking Christ, Nina. Emotional is one thing, but this is fuckin’ nuts.”
“Don’t do that. Don’t make me out to be crazy when I know what I saw.” She turned back to her packing in a huff, and picked up another pair of heels to toss into another trunk like hand grenades. “You kissed her, Matt
hew!”
I frowned. “Are you talking about when we said goodbye? We’re in Europe, doll. That’s what everyone does.”
“Oh, that’s a fine excuse!”
The second heel clocked me straight in the forehead.
“Jesus!” I batted the thing to the ground. Fuck this gentle shit. “What the hell has gotten into you?”
“You!” she shouted through mounting tears, even as I charged across the room through a hail of silk and leather. “You’re no different than all of them!”
“Nina. Goddammit, Nina, will you fucking stop?”
I parried a sleek white handbag and managed to grab her arms before she could snatch another round of ammunition off the bed. She was sobbing by this point, pearl-shaped tears welling from her silver eyes, fury etched over her brow.
“Why?” she cried. “Why couldn’t you have been different? I believed in you again, Matthew. I believed you weren’t like the others!”
Keeping hold of one of her shoulders with one hand, I fumbled in my pocket, took out Ruggeri’s card and pressed it into her palm. Her chest heaved as she sucked in labored breaths. But eventually, she managed to look at it.
“What is this?” she croaked.
“The business card of the woman you saw,” I said, releasing her only when I was sure I wouldn’t get smacked. “Her name is Silvana Ruggeri. She’s a prosecutor here in Florence, and she was the one who looked into Giuseppe’s death. I traded kisses with her on the cheek when I said goodbye. So I could come find you and tell you what I found.”
Nina swallowed. “So she…you didn’t know her before? When you were here, I mean?”
I sucked in another impatient breath. “After Rosina’s story, I figured I’d look into it a little while you took a rest. As it happens, my cousin knows Ruggeri, put us in touch, and we talked about the case over a cocktail, all right? It was nothing, Nina, I swear.” Cautiously, I slipped a finger under her chin, asking her to look up at me. “Tell me you believe me.”
She swallowed thickly. “I—” She closed her eyes, heavy with shame. “Yes, I believe you.”
I let out a breath I hadn’t known I was holding. “Good. Now sit down and tell me what else is really bothering you. Because I know it wasn’t catching me having a harmless drink and a polite farewell.”
She sighed and sank to the edge of the mattress. I pushed aside more of her clothes so I could sit next to her. I wanted to take her hand, but sensed she didn’t want the contact. Not yet.
“I felt sick on the way back from the farm,” she said. “I kept thinking the same thing again and again. The girls knew. Their mother knew. I was the only one who didn’t know.”
“Didn’t know what?” I asked as gently as I could.
“That I wasn’t special to him,” she whispered, looking down at her hands, which were splayed over her knees. “I thought I was. I really, truly did, Matthew. But instead, he used me, just like he used other women too.” She looked up. “And when I saw you with that woman…all I could think about was that night at the opera when we saw Caitlyn. How I felt then. Like I wasn’t special to you either.”
Ah. So that was it. I knew something was bothering her on the way back from Siena, but I had thought it was just the shock of meeting Olivia’s half sisters and confronting her own guilt. This was something else entirely. This time the shame was mine. Not just for how Nina had felt that night, misguided though it was. And not for Caitlyn either—not after the things she had done.
Right now I felt for every woman I had treated poorly over the course of my sad, pathetic life. Maybe they had used me back, but that didn’t really matter now. If my past with any one of them could make Nina feel like she was less than everything to me…I’d take it all back in a heartbeat.
“I thought he loved me,” Nina said softly. “And it cost him his life.” When she looked up, her beautiful gray eyes were as wide as a cloudy sky. “I know you don’t want to hear about this. You don’t want to hear about when I loved another man.”
She was right. I didn’t. But I cared a whole lot more about her than my own stupid pride.
“You have to let it out,” I said. “I’m not going to hold your first love against you, doll. And what he did…it’s not your fault either. Any more than it’s your fault that Calvin talked you into going along with his businesses and everything else.”
She stilled. “How does that work? I was an adult.”
“You were nineteen, twenty. An adult at that age in the eyes of law, sure. But you weren’t completely grown either. These men saw that. They saw your vulnerability and groomed you to fit their agendas.”
I shook my head to myself. I’d seen enough tabloid pictures of Nina around that age to know just how young she had really been. Doe-eyed, innocent, completely untouched.
Did she need to hear this right now?
Shame curved her body into a crescent.
Yeah, she definitely needed to hear it.
“You were too young,” I said to her. “Barely more than a child. There are people who look for women like that. Young enough to mold them into whatever they want. Vulnerable enough that they’ll never say no. Maybe your Giuseppe was like that, maybe he wasn’t. But the next one definitely was. Calvin manipulated you and coerced you for ten years, baby. But now you’re free. Do you understand? With me, you’ll always be free.”
She looked at me for a long time, like she was digesting my words one at a time. Then with a slow curving fall, like a birch tree felled by a storm, she collapsed onto my shoulder and buried her face in my shirt with exhaustion.
“How could he?” she mumbled into my shoulder. “How could he do that to those girls? How could he do that to me?”
I didn’t have to ask what she meant. Giuseppe Bianchi had been dead for ten years, but the scars from his actions still remained. Nina didn’t just see his ghost in his older daughters, but in her own too. Her guilt was eating her up. It was making her crazy.
“Hey,” I said as I stroked her hair. “When you calm down, I need to say something else. I think it’s my turn.”
She huffed and shuddered again, but eventually, she lifted her head to look at me. “Okay.”
“Do you really think I would do that to you?” I asked, looking straight on. “I know I’m not an angel, Nina, but do you really think I would do that to you of all people? To my own daughters, if I ever have them, God willing?”
She sniffed. “So many do.”
“I’m no saint, baby, but I’d like to think I’m not ‘many’ people either. Especially when it comes to you.”
Her eyes shone like soft gray stars in the outer stretches of the universe. The remnants of her tears clung to her lashes like diamonds. “No,” she said softly. “You’re definitely not.”
“Well, then. How about a little trust now? I think it’s time.”
“I’m so scared,” she whispered. “Signora Marradi, Matthew. Did you see her? So hard. So empty. If you…if you ever did to me what he did to her…it would ruin me, don’t you see? And yet, every moment I spend with you, I just fall that much more in love. You own me, Matthew. You t-truly do.”
With that, she started to cry all over again. The confession hurt her more than she wanted to show.
I pulled her close again, hushing her sobs, letting her shake into my arms.
“I don’t own you, Nina,” I said as I stroked her hair. “And I never will. But we belong to each other just the same. Remember what you said? About making each other soar? That’s all I want, Nina. That’s all I’ve ever wanted since I met you.”
“How do I know?” she whimpered. “How do I know that’s really true?”
Her hair was silk under my rough hands. I could have held her like this forever. But instead, I gently nudged her up so I could cradle her face, splotched though it was with tearstains and emotion, between my hands.
“You don’t,” I admitted. “Until I can show you, every day until our lives are done. That’s why it’s called faith, baby.
You have to believe.”
She closed her eyes, like she was praying herself. And then, slowly, she nodded.
“Okay,” she said. “I understand.”
Slowly, I leaned forward and kissed her. It was a slow kiss. Gentle. And it was possible I needed it more than she did. But she opened to me like the petals of a flower, and we took solace from each other’s touch for several long minutes until she had stopped shaking and I could no longer feel repressed sobs vibrating through her body.
I sat back, still cradling her face between my hands. “Better?”
Shyly, she nodded. “Yes. Better.” She bit her lip and shifted slightly as her eyes dropped to my mouth.
Suddenly, I was very conscious of the fact that she was sitting in front of me in just a flimsy piece of silk. And, if the temperature of the room was any indicator, nothing more than that.
With both hands, I traced the path of her cheekbones from nose to temple, then drifted my hands over her jaw, down her neck and to her waist. Then, with a sudden move, I pulled her firmly onto my lap so she was straddling me with her long legs, giving me clear access to her graceful neck and smooth chest. God, she was magnificent, even in barely more than scraps. More regal than she could possibly know.
I licked the side of her neck, eager to taste her perfection. Nina shivered, her hands digging into my shoulders, but keeping me close.
“How about,” I said after I did it again, “you let me show you how true it is, Nina? Let me show you how I feel.”
She shivered again as my teeth grazed her skin.
“And then?” she asked. “When you’re gone again, and I’m overtaken with worry and fear? What will you do then?”
“The same thing,” I said as I continued my progression of licks and nips over her shoulder so I could push aside the flimsy strap with my nose. “Again and again, Nina. Don’t you understand, baby?” I sat up straight so I could look her in the eye. “I’ll never stop wanting to love you. I’ll show you again and again, for the rest of my life if you let me.”
The Honest Affair (Rose Gold Book 3) Page 19
