Not Juliet Read Free Page B

thinking. She may have moved out of the gypsy camp
and into a house more appropriate for a gadji, but she still
followed Romanipen, the traditional code of her people. And that
meant she was still a virgin. It was the most valuable thing she
had; she would gladly exchange that for the promise from the
Italian rom baro that her father would be allowed to die in
peace.
    Failing that,
she would kill the bastard.
*
    Two hours of walking
across town to locate the address given to her by the people at the
Roma campsite, and she knew she wouldn’t meet Cosimo Anziano that
day either. There was nothing she could do about it until she
returned to Rome, so she decided to make the most of her trip and
visit one or two of the eighty or so museums in the home of the
European Renaissance.
    Florence was
indeed a spectacular city. A small smile on her face, Riella
skipped towards the Uffizi Gallery, choosing a route that took her
through Mercato Nuovo. She passed a restaurant on her right, and
hurried along the cobbles of the pedestrianized narrow lane that
led to the market.
    The market
itself was not big, but it was chock-full of tourist souvenirs and
she couldn’t resist picking up a few to add to her collection. She
placed the smaller items in her backpack, but the beautiful,
hand-painted carnival mask, she kept in her hand.
    She was just
placing a coin in the bronze wild boar’s mouth, the Porcellino,
making a silent wish to return to Florence one day, when she caught
sight of a face she knew.
    “Zamir,” she
whispered to no one in particular. What is he doing here ,
she wondered. Zamir was one of the six trusted advisers one could
always expect to see around Goliath Petulengro, and one of her
father’s oldest friends.
    She blinked and
he was gone.
    Strange. He’d
looked directly at her, so why wouldn’t he come over and greet
her?
    Putting the
matter from her mind, she turned away and took a shortcut down
another narrow alley she was hoping would lead her to the Piazza
della Signoria. A few steps down, the houses on either side closed
in, and she realized she was walking along an access lane only used
by residents. All she saw were stone and brick walls and back doors
of houses.
    She was about
half-way through, when she felt a sharp air current blast through
her hair. A moment later, the sound of a shot rang out in the
mid-afternoon sunshine. Her eyes were drawn to the puff of
shattered stone the bullet had hit, before it ricocheted off and
rattled down the alleyway.
    Thunderstruck,
she froze, then her body did what her brain hadn’t caught up to
yet. She sprinted to the nearest doorway for shelter and reached it
just as two other shots, of a different timbre to the first,
reverberated down the lane, but nowhere near her. Relieved, she
slumped to the stone step, and at the same time a brick in the wall
behind her shattered, just where, a split second before, her head
had been.
    Still unable to
comprehend how someone could be engaging in a shooting match in the
middle of the day in busy Florence, Riella’s mind fixed on the
crucial detail that someone might be shooting at her. A protective
part of her brain evaluated the circumstances and issued an
alternative explanation: she was simply in the wrong place at the
wrong time, caught in some gang feud completely unrelated to her
visit.
    Whichever way,
she wasn’t going to stay and find out.
    Completely
spooked and feeling like a trapped animal, Riella dropped her
carnival mask and did the only thing a sane person short on
alternatives would have done to stay alive. She fled for the
busiest place she knew: the Signoria and Palazzo Vecchio. The place
would be full of tourists, and crowds meant safety.
    Fingers
clenched around the straps of her backpack, she bent over and
bolted from the relative protection of the stone doorway, running
as fast as she could, the pack thumping up and down her back and
tripping her, throwing her off balance. But she didn’t stop and she
didn’t