Arcadia Burns Read Free

his lips and moved it gently down to his chin. “How many times a week do we see each other? Three? And not always even that much. I’ll only be gone a few days. You won’t even notice it.”
    “That’s not fair.”
    Of course it wasn’t fair. But much as she, too, longed to be near him when he wasn’t in the same room—and even more so when he was —she didn’t want him on this flight with her today. Not on her way to New York. On her way to see her mother.
    “I could cancel a few meetings,” he added. “I’m still their capo , whether they like it or not.”
    “That’s nonsense; you know it is. They’d like to be rid of you yesterday.” Rosa held his glance, marveling at the intense, bright green of his eyes. “What would they say if you flew off on vacation with an Alcantara, with things here the way they are?”
    When Zoe was dying in her sister’s arms, she had made Rosa promise something: to find out what linked their dead father to TABULA, the mysterious organization secretly at war with theArcadian dynasties. It was Rosa’s bad luck that she could think of only one place to begin, only one person who could tell her more about their father, and that was their mother.
    There was no one in the world Rosa wanted to see less. Not after all that had happened. Not after Gemma had refused to come to Sicily even for Zoe’s funeral. Bitch.
    Alessandro sighed. “I wanted to be in charge of my family, and now it’s in charge of me.”
    “Well,” she said with a glance of wide-eyed innocence—she’d worked hard on perfecting that—“you should have thought of that before, right?”
    A voice over a loudspeaker announced that her flight was now boarding.
    “I’ll probably dream of you every night,” he said. “And when I wake up, I’ll know that the best part of the day is already over.”
    “You read that somewhere.”
    “Did not.”
    She kissed him again, a long kiss, and very tender. He still tasted of another world. The snake began to stir once more as he put his arms around her.
    “Hey!” she said, laughing. “My flight. The gate. I have to—”
    “What we have won’t ever end,” he whispered.
    She ran her fingers through his unruly hair. “Never.”
    Then she freed herself from his embrace, picked up her bag, and hurried to the exit.

NEW YORK
    W HAT R OSA FOUND THAT evening was not her own New York, but the New York of tourists and theatergoers, the glittering madhouse of Broadway.
    It was almost thirty degrees colder than in Sicily. Her jacket was too thin, her nose was running, and she’d packed only one of a pair of gloves in her suitcase. Home, sweet home.
    Wearily, she left the lobby of the Millennium Broadway Hotel, trudged through the snow around the candy-colored corner facade of Toys “R” Us, and was in Times Square surrounded by milling crowds of people, bright billboards, and walls of video ads.
    She had spent almost her whole life in New York, although admittedly on the other side of the East River. She knew what went on between Wall Street and the Bronx more from TV than from her own experience.
    Rosa had grown up in Brooklyn, in one of those down-at-the-heel neighborhoods that didn’t have views of the Manhattan skyline. Home had been a dump of a building with too many tenants in apartments too cramped for them. With graffiti in the stairwell, busted central heating, drafty windows, clattering fire escapes that drove you crazy with the noise they made during storms. Cats had their kittens next todead rats on the ledges outside the basement windows, and Rosa could remember more than one cockroach plague of biblical proportions.
    All around there were endless rows of apartment buildings like hers, basketball courts surrounded by high fences, grubby playgrounds where young mothers stared vacantly at sandboxes during the day and speakers played at full volume in the evenings. Traffic lights dangled from cables above the streets. Photocopied faces of missing children,