LOGIN"Weight?""I don't know. Light.""Is she able to swallow?""She drinks a little.""Pulse?"Dante crossed the room and knelt beside the couch. He took her wrist and counted against the clock on his phone. "Fast. A hundred and twenty. More.""Her breathing?""Shallow.""Listen to me carefully," the doctor said. "The medicine won't reach her for some hours. Between now and then, there is a real chance she'll have a seizure. If she does, this is what you do. You move anything hard away from her. You put something soft under her head. You turn her onto her side. You put nothing in her mouth. You do not hold her down. And you time it.""Understood." Dante said. "If it runs past five minutes, or comes back, you call an ambulance. I don't care who you are or who is looking for you. Do you understand that?"Dante looked at Isabella's face, gray against the cushion."Yes," he said."Good. I'll stay on the line.""She hasn't had one yet.""I know," the doctor said. "Stay on the line anyway."..
Mike's mouth twitched. "That's cruel.""It's efficient.""It's both." Mike turned back to the screen. "He'll be proud of it. He'll carry it to Dante like a cat with a bird.""And Dante will believe it, because Luca brought it."Mike worked through the next hour with his head down. Dimitri stayed on the line and didn't interrupt him. Once Mike swore under his breath at a registry page that wouldn't load, and Dimitri said, without looking up from his papers, "Try the older archive." Mike tried it, and it worked.Marco rejoined the call a little after nine, Rome time, which made it just past three in the morning in New York. He turned the camera toward a gray case on the desk and opened it.Two plain white cartons lay inside, unmarked.Mike stopped typing and looked at the screen."That's it?" he asked."That's it," Marco said.He took a single pill from one of the cartons and held it up to the camera. Mike leaned close. It was small and white and perfectly ordinary."That's what's been
Marco let that stand. He knew better than to push at it."There's the offer," he said instead."Yes.""Dante said he'd give you The Covenant. Do you trust it?""No," Dimitri said. "I trust what he wants.""Which is?""The girl alive. A man who wants that badly enough will hand over things he can't take back." Dimitri turned from the window. "But I'm not going to take his word for it. When the time comes, I'll ask him something I already know the answer to. If he lies, I stop.""And if he doesn't?""Then I have what I've wanted for a year, from the one man I never expected to give it to me."Marco looked at him for a long moment. "You don't sound pleased.""I'm not," Dimitri said. "I'm useful to myself. It's not the same thing."He sat back down and pulled the phone across the desk."Call Armani," he said....Marco dialed. It rang four times before it was picked up."Pronto?" The doctor's voice was thin and wary."Dottor Armani," Dimitri said. "It's Dimitri Valentino."There was a lon
POV: DIMITRI / MARCODawn came gray over Rome.Dimitri hadn't slept. He stood at the study window with a cup of coffee that had gone cold in his hand, watching the light move across the rooftops, when Marco knocked once and came in."You're up early," Marco said."I haven't been to bed."Marco glanced at the untouched whiskey glass on the desk, then at Dimitri's face. He set the folder he was carrying down beside it. "Something happened.""Dante called me last night."Marco went still. "On the private line?""On the private line.""Someone sold it," Marco said."Someone did. I want to know who by the end of the day." Dimitri turned from the window. "Sit down."Marco sat. Dimitri told him all of it: the four days without a dose, the tremors, the pill with two layers, the clinic that didn't exist, the three changes of delivery address. He told him that Luca had traced the compound as far as it would go and that Dante had finally said the name aloud. He told him what Dante had offered, a
"You're asking me," Dimitri said."Yes.""Why should I?""Because she was your fiancée."The word sat on the line between them."Betrothed since she was a child," Dante went on. "You were supposed to marry her. For years someone has been poisoning her, and the family you were about to join never noticed. Not her father. Not her mother. Not you. If that means nothing to you, say so, and I'll hang up and find another way. But if it means anything at all, you have a reason to want to know who did this.""That engagement was a signature between two fathers," Dimitri said. "It was never a vow.""I know that.""Then you know it carries no obligation.""I'm not asking you to owe her anything," Dante said. "I'm telling you what she was."Dimitri looked at the dark door that led down the hall to the room where Eve slept. He thought of a girl at the far end of a long dinner table, pale and quiet. He had never wanted her. He had never wanted this for her either."I'll see what I can do," he said
"So you're saying Dimitri might already know Isabella is being poisoned?" Dante asked."I'm saying he probably suspects," Luca said. "And at minimum, he has resources to find answers. Resources you can access if you ask.""I'm not asking Dimitri for anything," Dante said."Then Isabella suffers," Luca said, and his tone was absolute. "Because without Dimitri's resources, we're stuck. The medication source is hidden too well. Prometheus Laboratories is too secretive. We can't find them fast enough with what we have."Dante listened to his second-in-command lay out the logic, and he knew Luca was right."If I call him," Dante said slowly, "he's going to know that I don't have the resources to handle this alone. He's going to know that I'm vulnerable. He's going to see it as weakness.""Or," Luca said, "he's going to see it as a man protecting the woman he loves. And Dimitri understands that. He's doing the same thing with his American woman."Dante considered this."What if he refuses?"







