CHAPTER THIRTY
I slid the sleeve of my dress back up over my shoulder, but blood continued to seep into the light floral fabric. I fluffed and rearranged my hair to cover it. Hopefully, it would hide the stain long enough to get me back to the yacht without anyone noticing.
"Kirby!" Desirae ran past Youssef on his bike with her phone to her ear. "She's here. She's okay. Take a left after that alley. You'll see us."
She ran up to me and grabbed my arms. My cheeks. I froze. And tried not to wince.
"What happened?" Her eyes searched mine. "Youssef came back to find us, saying some woman was trying to kill you?"
"I'm fine," I laughed and slid her hands down. "She just shoved me into the wall, but she took the phone." I could feel Chaya's eyes on us, peering out from the boarded up shop. "I uhh, didn't see where she went after that. Did you see anyone walking away from here?"
Desirae shook her head. "There are so many alleys and side streets. When he said you were being attacked, I—" She wrapped her arms around my neck. "I didn't know if we would ever find you."
I pushed gently out of her embrace and looked over at Youssef. "Well, fortunately the kid seems to know his way around."
He lowered his head.
Artemisia rounded the corner. Her wide eyes softened when they met mine. She immediately turned to Youssef and began yelling at him, hands angrily flying as fast as her lips. Mostly in Sicilian. A little bit of English. Some Arabic. He pulled out a single banknote from his pocket.
"Ten dinar?" Artemisia snatched it from him. "That woman paid you only ten dinar to steal?" She continued to scold him as I walked over.
"Artie, he's just doing what he has to do." I took the money from her and gave it back to Youssef. "And he came and got you two when he thought I was in trouble. He did the right thing."
"The right thing?" Her anger turned towards me. "He agreed to steal from you. For someone who could have been someone much worse. You never chase a thief down, not here, not Roma, not anywhere."
"You're ridiculous." I tried not to laugh at the irony. "I am a fucking thief, Artemisia."
"Not like him. Not like that woman he stole for."
"I am no different from him." My eyes wandered past Artemisia towards the shop. "And no different from that woman either. I just had you." I turned back to Desirae. "And you. Tell her she's overreacting, Des." But I was obviously losing this one. My shoulder began to sting like needles. I needed to switch up my strategy and get us back to the boat. "Nevermind, let's just get outta here."
Desirae's eyes narrowed on me before she looked down at Youssef. She asked him a question, but he shrugged his shoulders. He answered back with a few words while pointing to his eyes.
"He said he could only see her eyes." Desirae asked him a few more questions. They went back and forth then Artemisia cut in. She held out her arm, then pointed between me and Desirae.
Youssef tapped his finger against Artemisia's arm, then pointed at Desirae.
"Darker skin than Artemisia, but not as dark as me, brown eyes, with a funny accent," Desirae summed up her interrogation for me. "She told him to target the dumb white woman playing on her expensive phone and to meet her here with it for ten dinars."
I sucked my teeth. "Well, sounds about right. But from one thief to another, tell him he's gotta up his commission next time."
Desirae didn't appreciate my humor.
"We are not telling him that." Artemisia kneeled down and looked him in the eye this time.
I wasn't sure what she was saying, but her tone was much softer now. It was strange, but heartwarming to see this maternal side of her. I always wondered what she would be like as a mother. But she never wanted kids because of her own parents. Still, I'd always hoped she might change her mind.
She stood up and gave his cat a scratch behind its ear before turning back to us. "We need to go."
I looked down at Youssef and held out my fist. "No hard feelings." He bumped me back with a gappy toothed smile. "Good luck, kid."
Desirae led us out of the medina, backtracking every step and turn perfectly. But despite our quick pace, the walk back to the harbor seemed longer than the one earlier. Artemisia barely even turned her head to look at the shops along the way. The silence between all of us felt heavy. I worried they could sense my guilt.
I didn't like keeping secrets from either of them, but it would only worry them more if they knew it had been Chaya. Something in my gut told me when she said we were good, she meant it. Even among assassins, they had some kind of code. And keeping the truth from me about that night more than satisfied her.
At least, until she needed something.
Power over someone was more lethal than anything. I had learned that well in the last couple days.
But to fall victim to my own vice on the streets here, I was just as foolish as Lucia.
My stomach flipped as I climbed up the steps to the aft deck and into the yacht's wheelhouse.
If Chaya was alive, that likely meant Lucia wasn't.
The memory of the sword's weight in my own hands pressed against my throat. Maybe she had found another way to get the necklace off.
"You look pale, amuri." Artemisia studied my face. "Do you need me to drive?"
I pressed my lips into a smile to try to hide any concern. "Depends on where you're gonna take us on our next detour? Some secret lesbian bath house in Istanbul's cisterns beneath the city?"
She still didn't seem in the mood for any jokes. "Marsala, for real this time. We have to be to Nanna's by tomorrow afternoon."
"What's tomorrow? Her birthday?" I tried to recall it, but I didn't even know what day it was anymore.
"No, not a birthday." She sat down in the captain's chair and flipped the blowers on. "But a promise. That is all."
"Was that who you were talking to on the phone? You should have told me, I would have said hi to her."
"It will be a nice surprise for her, to have us all together finally."
I nodded fondly.
Artemisia reached up to my face. Her thumb rubbed against my chin, soft at first, then her nail scraped my skin. As I went to grab her wrist, pain shot through my shoulder and I winced.
"You have a little blood on your chin." Her hand slid down to my collar bone and moved my hair to the side. "Better go take care of that, cicchitedda."
"Artie, I—"
"I will be fine getting us out." She covered the bloodstain back up with my hair. "Go, she already suspects something."
"I should tell her." I glanced back at Desirae through the glass of the saloon. She was cutting up a fruit tray for us. "I'm going to tell her, Artie."
"We all have our secrets, amuri. Some good, some bad, dangerous maybe. Some we keep hidden to keep others safe. Maybe in dark catacombs beneath a city that is not ready to accept the truth. Others, we keep hidden in a dusty studio corner until the right archbishop comes along."
She was confirming that painting to be the original, stolen Caravaggio. "I knew it."
"Are you safe?" she asked.
Chaya's parting words replayed through my head. "I think so."
"And are we safe?"
If I had learned anything from the last couple days, whether I knew what was on that footage or not, I knew I would do whatever it took to keep them both safe, just as they would for me. Maybe that was all that mattered in the end.
"Yes," I answered.
"Then we go home."
As Artemisia navigated the yacht past the docked cargo ships, Youssef waved from the pier. I waved back, watching him grow smaller with distance. Ahead of us, the sun snuck up above the horizon. We would be back in Sicily by tomorrow's sunrise. I just hoped the police wouldn't be waiting for me at the marina.
I looked back at Desirae, catching her eye through the glass before slinking down into the cabin area and straight into the master bath.
The fabric of the dress clung to my wound where the blood had spread. I braced myself as I peeled the whole thing off and crumpled it into a ball in the corner.
With a towel, I tried to clean the wound out again as best I could. The stitches had ripped, doing little to hold the flap of skin closed. It'd be better to let it heal on its own at this point than risk infection. I took a deep breath and pulled out a loose stitch. Then the next. And the next.
The sound of footsteps in the bedroom made me turn my head.
Desirae knocked at the bathroom door. "Are you getting in the shower?"
I pulled the last stitch out and scooped the pile into the trash. My eyes darted around for a bath towel to try to hide the raw wound, but she'd eventually see it anyway. And I didn't want to keep hiding from her.
Hopping my bare ass onto the vanity, I nudged the door open with my foot. "Did you wanna join me?"
She leaned against the door frame, eyes tracing up my legs over my body. But her soft smile twisted to a frown. "That looks awful, Kirby. We need to get you to a doctor before it gets infected."
"I uhh, think it just needs to air out some."
"It's definitely going to leave an interesting scar." She looked back up at me. "Are you okay?"
"It doesn't even hurt that much anymore, honestly."
"I mean are you okay? Everytime it seems we get a moment to catch our breath, something knocks it out of us."
"Or someone," I mumbled. "But I'm okay. I promise."
She looked skeptical. "With how the whole thing played out, the timing of everything with Youssef stealing the phone, I almost thought you were..." She shook her head.
"I was what?"
She looked up at me through knotted brows. Worry replaced her skepticism. "Running away. You're a runner. I thought maybe you had planned it, him stealing the phone. It's crazy, I know," she laughed. "You make me crazy though."
"Really? Who would've helped—"
"Soraya."
She already had that name loaded on her tongue. "Hmm..."
"You snuck out of bed and were wearing her harness when you came back."
"After I apparently bludgeoned Charlene to death."
Desirae shook her head. "You still had your heels on. I don't buy it."
"What do you mean? What about my heels?"
"I saw her body, Kirby. I saw where she was hit in the back of the head. It was low. You're almost as tall as me, and Charlene was about the same. Even in your barefeet, you would have struck her higher, near the top of the head."
"So you think I was framed? Again? But I had blood all over my chest. Artemisia lied, it wasn't from my stitches."
"I think you helped someone move her body."
"Who—"
"Soraya."
She clearly had found some time to think about this.
"Why..." But Lucia had said Soraya was one of Mikhailov's girls. From what I gathered, Charlene was trading them out with Lucia. Soraya had more motive than anyone else. She was also apparently a spy according to Artemisia. "Did you figure out who she's working for?"
"There are so many new intelligence groups popping up everywhere, all trying to sell information to the highest bidder. I was going to have my team look into Soraya further, but I wanted to make sure your red notice was taken care of before we gave anyone any more information."
"Well, I fucked that one up. As usual." But my mind went back to what Chaya had said. "So were you planning on selling the information on his phone?"
Desirae seemed to carefully consider her words. "The phone would have been nice to have, but all I cared about was you."
"Something tells me your agency is a little less compassionate. Are they gonna have me arrested now that I don't have Georgiy's phone as leverage?"
Desirae stepped farther into the bathroom and pulled the door shut behind her. Her eyes shifted over mine. She was quiet for a moment. "Are you sure you didn't recognize the woman?"
I swallowed back my guilt. "It wasn't Soraya, if that's what you're thinking."
Desirae nodded. "As we were leaving the mansion in Malta, I heard Artemisia say something about Sousse to her. They didn't know I understood Arabic. She was telling her where we were going."
I sat with that for a moment, trying to sort through everything. The last I saw of Soraya was her walking into Lucia's room.
"It was Chaya," I confessed. "I didn't want to tell you because I thought it was just personal. And it was. To her, I mean, but—"
"They're working together." Desirae leaned back against the door. I could see her mind racing. "So she did survive?"
"She fingerfucked my gunshot wound." My hand rubbed at the spot. "Kinda turned me on in hindsight."
"You definitely need to see a doctor. And a therapist," she mumbled. "But I still don't understand why..." Desirae's arms crossed over her body. She stared straight into me. "But she didn't know. She didn't know until I told her..."
"What? Who?"
"Artemisia. She thought the phone would incriminate you. But it didn't matter at that point."
I couldn't make sense of her fragmented thoughts. "Des, complete thoughts please."
"That's why I tried to stop you from chasing Youssef down. The red notice was already lifted, Kirby."
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