The first man Elena Voss killed died at 11:47 on a Thursday night.
For the next thirteen minutes, she believed he had deserved it.
After that, she wasn't so sure.
Rain hammered the windshield hard enough to erase the road.
Elena drove with both hands wrapped around the steering wheel, leaning forward as though another six inches would somehow let her see through the darkness. The headlights illuminated a narrow strip of asphalt, the silver needles of the rain, and occasionally the pale stone wall running beside the road.
Somewhere below it, the Mediterranean was throwing itself against the cliffs.
She could hear it whenever the wind changed.
Her phone had stopped working twenty minutes ago.
The navigation had died before that.
There had been a sign at the last junction—PORTO SAN VERO, twelve kilometers—but she hadn't seen another building since.
Her left hand was bleeding again.
The car drifted toward the stone wall.
She jerked the wheel and corrected it.
Her voice sounded strangely small inside the car.
Blood had soaked through the handkerchief wrapped around her palm. There was more on the sleeve of her cream blouse, although not all of that belonged to her.
She tried not to think about whose it was.
A parking garage beneath an apartment building in Naples.
A hand around her throat.
The flash of something metallic.
Her own hand finding the tire iron in the open trunk.
She tightened her grip on the wheel.
Think about surviving the next five minutes.
Everything else could wait.
She hadn't expected that.
The directions she had memorized showed the hotel near the northern cliffs, but the map had made the island look almost flat.
San Verano rose violently from the sea, a black mass of volcanic rock barely six kilometers from one end to the other. There was one village, one harbor, an abandoned monastery, and—at the highest point of the island—the Hotel Belladonna.
Elena had written about it once.
Belladonna. Built 1891. Purchased through shell company in 2007. Closed every November–March. Current beneficial ownership unclear.
Unclear had been an understatement.
Everything connected to the Moretti family eventually became unclear.
Companies owned companies that owned trusts that paid foundations that purchased buildings where men without official titles met politicians who later claimed they had never met them.
Elena had spent two years following those threads.
Tonight, one of them had tried to strangle her.
She touched the bruise forming beneath her jaw.
Pain meant she was awake.
Another stretch of darkness.
And then she saw the gates.
They emerged from the storm without warning.
Two enormous pillars of black stone stood on either side of the road. Between them, wrought-iron gates had been left open.
Beyond them, at the end of a long avenue of cypress trees, lights burned in the windows of the Belladonna.
For several seconds she simply sat there, listening to the engine idle.
The hotel was supposed to be closed.
She had been given the address because nobody was meant to be here.
She looked at the passenger seat.
Inside it were two shirts, underwear, a toothbrush, €8,400 in cash, three passports—only one of which was actually hers—and a black encrypted drive smaller than her thumb.
She had killed a man for that drive.
Or perhaps a man had died because of it.
She wasn't certain it mattered.
Her source had been very specific.
If anything happens, go to Belladonna.
Don't trust anyone who knows you're there.
At the time Elena had laughed.
"You've been watching too many films."
Her source hadn't laughed.
At least she thought he was.
She reached into the glove compartment and removed the pistol.
It was small. Italian. Illegal.
She checked the magazine anyway.
She slipped it into the waistband at the back of her trousers and pulled her jacket over it.
Then she drove through the gates.
The Belladonna had been designed by a man who clearly believed architecture should make human beings feel insignificant.
Five stories of pale stone rose directly from the cliff. Narrow windows glowed amber against the storm. Columns supported balconies darkened by rain, and stone saints stood in niches along the façade, their faces worn smooth by a century of salt wind.
Elena parked beneath the portico.
For a moment she didn't move.
The building looked less like a hotel than a cathedral that had forgotten its god.
She liked it immediately.
She took the bag, opened the car door, and stepped into the storm.
The wind nearly knocked her sideways.
By the time she reached the entrance, her hair was plastered across her face and her clothes clung coldly to her skin.
Black-and-white marble stretched toward a sweeping staircase. Brass lamps cast islands of amber light across dark wood and faded red carpets. Behind the reception desk hung perhaps two hundred small brass keys.
Elena closed the door behind her.
Her voice traveled upward.
Water dripped from her jacket onto the marble.
Then she noticed the fire.
At the far end of the lobby, beyond two velvet chairs and a low table, flames burned inside a stone fireplace.
Someone had lit it recently.
Her hand moved toward the pistol.
A sound came from somewhere behind her.
A man stood on the staircase.
She had not heard him approach.
That frightened her more than the gun in his hand.
He was perhaps forty. Tall. Dark trousers. White shirt with the sleeves folded neatly to his forearms. No jacket, despite the cold.
His hair was almost black.
So were his eyes from this distance.
The pistol was pointed at the floor.
Somehow that didn't make it less threatening.
He studied Elena for several seconds.
His gaze moved from her face to the blood on her sleeve, then to her injured hand.
Finally to the place beneath her jacket where she had hidden her weapon.
"You should take your hand away from the gun," he said.
The Italian accent underneath it was not heavy, but it was there.
He looked at his own weapon.
Then placed it on a small table beside the stairs.
"You're bleeding on a nineteenth-century carpet."
It slid across the marble and disappeared beneath a chair.
Elena removed her pistol.
She pointed it at his chest.
The stranger looked at it.
He descended another step.
The distance between them was perhaps eight meters.
"Who are you?" she repeated.
The man put his hands loosely at his sides.
Something inside Elena went very still.
She knew before he said it.
The gun suddenly felt much heavier.
There were photographs of Lucian Moretti in Elena's files.
A young man entering a courthouse in Palermo.
A blurred figure stepping from a Mercedes in Vienna.
Security footage from a hotel in Geneva.
The last verified photograph had been taken seven years ago.
There were three theories.
The first was that Lucian Moretti had been murdered by his own family.
The second was that he had entered witness protection.
The third was that he had been responsible for fourteen killings across six countries and had simply become very, very good at disappearing.
Elena had privately favored the third.
Now he stood twenty feet away from her in a white shirt.
"I've found that useful."
Her finger rested beside the trigger.
The way he said her name made something cold travel along her spine.
Not because it was intimate.
As though he had said it before.
"How do you know my name?"
Lucian looked toward the windows.
Lightning briefly turned the lobby white.
A second later thunder rolled across the island.
"We should discuss that."
"After I look at your hand."
"I'm pointing a gun at you."
"And you're worried about my hand?"
"What are you worried about later?"
His gaze returned to hers.
Elena forgot about the pain.
Lucian's expression changed very slightly.
He walked toward one of the windows.
"I told you not to move."
"If I intended to hurt you, Elena, you would not have made it through the door."
She hated even more that she believed him.
Lucian stopped at the window and looked through the rain.
"The ferry you took from Naples wasn't the last boat to leave the mainland."
"How do you know which ferry I took?"
"A fishing vessel left forty minutes later. Three men aboard. No fishing equipment."
"That doesn't mean they're following me."
The storm filled the silence between them.
Elena lowered the gun perhaps an inch.
"If they can make the northern landing in this weather? An hour. Perhaps less."
"There are two officers on San Verano."
She backed toward her bag.
"The southern road is flooded."
"I'll take the eastern road."
"They'll arrive there first."
"Then I'll steal a boat."
"Have you sailed alone in a Mediterranean storm?"
"Then you'd save them the trouble of killing you."
"I suppose you have a suggestion."
There was no humor in it.
"The man I've spent eighteen months investigating."
Her fingers tightened around the pistol.
"You've been investigating me for twenty-three months. You opened the first file on March fourteenth, two years ago."
For the first time since entering the hotel, Elena was genuinely afraid.
Not the hot fear of the parking garage.
Elena lifted the gun again.
"Because you've been looking for me."
His voice was almost gentle.
"And I've been watching you look."
The first shot shattered the western window.
Lucian moved before Elena understood what had happened.
One moment he was standing near the staircase.
The next his body slammed into hers.
They hit the marble together.
Glass exploded across the lobby.
A second shot struck the wall above them.
Elena felt Lucian's hand close around the back of her head.
They were suddenly very close.
Closer than they had any right to be.
His face was inches from hers.
There was a faint scar crossing his left eyebrow.
She had never seen it in the photographs.
His hand was still behind her head.
His body covered hers almost completely.
Something changed in his eyes.
The civilized man vanished.
This was something far worse.
"How many?" she whispered.
His gaze flicked toward her mouth for half a second.
Or perhaps she imagined it.
The parking garage flashed behind her eyes.
He crawled toward the chair, retrieved his pistol, then disappeared behind one of the marble columns.
For the first time, Lucian smiled.
Another bullet struck the reception desk.
Somewhere outside, a man screamed.
Lucian turned toward her.
She should have been horrified.
Instead she remembered the fingers tightening around her throat in the parking garage.
The man whispering into her ear.
"There's something you should know."
"This seems an inconvenient moment."
"The man who attacked me in Naples."
Lucian went completely still.
"Then you probably killed him."
"Thank you for the medical opinion."
The question was so quiet she almost missed it.
His gaze moved to the bruising around her throat.
Elena suddenly understood.
And despite everything—the blood, the storm, the gunfire—something almost electric passed through her.
"Because if he's alive, I need to know."
He looked toward the broken window.
Rain blew across the marble.
Then he looked at her again.
"So I don't kill the wrong man."
Elena should have stepped away.
Instead she held his gaze.
"I've been called worse."
A noise came from the corridor behind them.
Lucian moved instantly, turning and raising his weapon.
But there was nobody there.
"Of course there's something below the hotel."
"They connect the old monastery to the northern cliffs."
"And you expect me to follow you into underground tunnels."
"After telling me you've been watching me for two years."
There was blood on his shirt now.
"You have two choices, Elena."
"I dislike men who give me choices."
As though he had catalogued her.
She felt suddenly naked despite the wet clothes clinging to her body.
"Choice one," he continued, "you walk back into that storm and discover whether the men outside are better shots at close range."
Scarred across the knuckles.
A hand that had almost certainly killed people.
She thought of her source.
*Don't trust anyone who knows you're there.*
Lucian had known before she arrived.
Every instinct she possessed told her to run.
But instinct had also brought her here.
Outside, thunder rolled over the island.
Somewhere beyond the shattered window, another man was hunting her.
Elena put the pistol into her waistband.
Then she took Lucian Moretti's hand.
His fingers closed around hers.
Possessive enough that she noticed.
Not enough that she pulled away.
"If you lie to me, I'll kill you."
Lucian looked down at her.
There was something unreadable in his face.
Then he brought her injured hand toward him and turned it gently beneath the light.
Blood had soaked through the handkerchief again.
His thumb moved once across the inside of her wrist.
The touch was unexpectedly careful.
"When this night is over, you're going to discover there are much better reasons to want me dead."
Then he picked up her bag.
He led her toward the darkness beyond the staircase.
She would remember that later.
She would remember that she had followed him willingly.
Because that was the first mistake.
The second was believing Lucian Moretti intended to save her.
The third was wanting him to.
