Chapter 2: Dentist.

Ruby POV

I reached across Cesare for the phone one inch at a time.

My elbow caught the edge of the nightstand, and his watch slid off and hit the floorboards with a clack that sounded as loud as a dropped tray. I froze with my arm stretched across his bare back.

He mumbled into the pillow. His shoulders rose and fell under my arm, slow and even, until I was sure he had gone again.

I closed my fingers around the phone and drew it back to my side of the bed.

The message still sat on the lock screen, glowing up at me. When I touched it, the screen asked for a fingerprint.

His right hand lay open on my pillow with the fingers curled in toward the palm. I lifted it by the wrist. His skin was warm and heavy with sleep, and I pressed his thumb against the sensor.

The phone buzzed and refused him.

His fingers twitched against mine. I held completely still, with his hand hanging in the air between us, until his breathing slowed down again. Then I pressed his thumb down a second time, flatter and harder, and the screen opened.

I laid his hand back on the pillow, curled his fingers in toward the palm again, and sat up against the headboard with the phone held close to my chest.

The chat with Dentist was at the top of his messages. I opened it and looked at the number under the name.

I knew that number. I had typed it into my own phone the day my sister turned thirteen and got her first one, and I had called it so many times since then that my thumb knew the shape of it on the keypad.

I started to scroll up.

Last Sunday we had all eaten lunch at Papà’s house, the three of us at the same table, passing the same basket of bread back and forth.

Stop looking at me like that in front of her.

Can’t help it. You wore the green dress on purpose. I’m still hard thinking about it.

I kept scrolling. The dates rolled back through autumn into summer and on through the whole of the year before.

The week we buried Mamma, I slept five nights in my old bedroom at Papà’s, because he could not stand to be alone in that house.

I needed you tonight. Not her.

I’m coming. Leave the side door open.

My hand started to shake. I rested the phone on my knee so that I could keep reading, and my thumb kept moving up the screen without waiting for me to decide.

My twenty fourth birthday was more than two years ago. We held the party at the villa on the hill. That night Cesare fastened a silver moon around my neck and told everyone in the room that he had never been so happy. I went upstairs early with a headache and fell asleep in my dress.

She’s asleep. Kitchen. Now.

God, I miss. Hurry.

Under those two lines was a photo, and I opened it before I could stop my thumb.

It was Vittoria standing in front of the mirror in my old bathroom, the one with the cracked blue tile beside the tap. She had her hair loose around her shoulders, and she was wearing my grey silk robe, the one Mamma gave me the Christmas before she got sick. The belt hung undone at her sides with the robe open all the way down. Her chin was tipped up at the mirror, and she was smiling at herself.

Under the photo she had written a single line.

Do I look better in it than she does?

Under that was his answer.

You look better in everything.

She had answered him a minute later.

Then say it. Who’s going to be Signora Romano?

You are, baby. Just give me time.

I pressed my hand over my mouth so hard that my teeth cut into the inside of my lip, and I tasted blood.

There were more photos below it, dozens of them taken on different nights in different rooms, and some of the rooms were mine. I recognised my own headboard in one of them and the curtains of my old flat in another. Bile climbed into my throat, and I had to sit very still with my eyes shut until it sank back down.

My sister.

Every family dinner for two years, every holiday, every time she had hooked her arm through mine and told people I was her favourite person in the whole world, she had been sending him these.

When she held that forged paper up against the glass, she and Cesare had already been lying to me for more than three years.

Beside me, Cesare sighed and rolled onto his side.

I locked the phone and set it back on the nightstand face down, exactly where it had been. My hand was still in the air above it when his eyes opened.

“Hey.” His voice was thick and rough with sleep. He reached across the sheets and hooked an arm around my waist. “Why’re you sitting up?”

“Couldn’t sleep.”

“C’mere.” He pulled me down against his chest, and the smell of him filled my nose, soap and the red wine from dinner. My stomach turned over so hard that I had to clamp my teeth together.

I made my shoulders go loose and kept my breathing slow, so that he would feel nothing but a sleepy woman settling against him. Under the duvet my skin prickled and tightened everywhere he touched it.

His fingers wandered up my arm and over my shoulder. It was the same hand that had typed You look better in everything than your sister, and I lay still while it moved slowly across my skin.

He tipped my chin up so he could see my face, and the sleepy smile slid off his mouth.

“Babe, you’re shaking.”

“I had a bad dream.”

“Yeah?” He brushed my hair back off my forehead with the same hand I had pressed against the sensor a few minutes earlier. “What about?”

I looked straight into his eyes.

“You killed me,” I said lightly, and let a small laugh follow it.

His mouth curved into the slow, crooked grin I had once waited all day to see. “Did I at least look good doing it?”

“Yes.” I smiled back at him. “You looked great.”

He kissed me, and I kissed him back. When his tongue touched mine, my throat closed, and I had to swallow twice to keep from gagging into his mouth. Under the sheet my right hand closed into a fist so tight that my nails left four crescents in my palm.

The phone buzzed against the nightstand.

Cesare rolled away from me far enough to glance at the screen. He looked at it for a second too long, then turned his face down and settled back against the pillow.

“Work,” he said, and shook his head at the ceiling. “On New Year’s Eve. Can you believe it?”

“That’s terrible,” I said softly. I ran my fingers slowly through his hair so that he would not see them shaking.

Down in the street, the voices that had been singing all evening grew louder, and the whole city seemed to join them from every window and balcony along the harbour.

“Ten! Nine! Eight!”

Cesare smiled against my mouth. “Here we go.”

He had said exactly those words on this exact night, a year and two months ago in my first life, and I had laughed at them.

“Three! Two! One!”

Fireworks burst over the harbour in gold and green. Their light came through the gap in the curtains and slid across the ceiling. He kissed me again, and I let him, swallowing hard against the sour taste rising at the back of my throat.

A window opened in the air in front of my eyes.

It was pale and perfectly square, with plain white letters printed across it, and it hung between my face and his. Cesare was looking straight at me through it, smiling, and nothing in his face changed.

[Welcome back, Ruby Lovato.]

[Time remaining before the Dimming: 84 days.]

The letters faded, and new lines printed themselves underneath, one after another.

[Goal: Secure a building in your own name.]

[Time limit: 14 days]

[Reward: Storage]

[Penalty: Death.]