10. When in Rome
Sydney was gone for hours. And though I knew she was in no more danger here than any other location, and though I was fairly certain she would come back to me, still it was…unsettling…to wait in that cold apartment for her.
When she did return her ears were red, her cheeks wind-chapped. She didn't bother to knock, opting instead to pick the lock. Another useful tool she found in the coat, I suppose.
It had always amazed me, on missions here in Russia, what she would pull out of the pockets of that ridiculous down jacket. It made her look like a burnt marshmallow. But in the field I had seen her produce guns, knives, a garroting wire, first aid kits, food, water, and once a very black market GPS unit and sat phone from within its bulk.
Her steps carry her past me into the kitchen, where she deposits a large paper bag on the cracked linoleum counter and pulls out a loaf of bread, and what smells like dinner from one of the nearby restaurants. I'm not sure what to say to break the silence. I don't wish to send her running away from me again.
"I got us dinner."
"Thank you, Sydney."
I take this as an invitation to move into the kitchen, and help her unpack the groceries, open the styrofoam containers, and dig out silverware. She pulls a case of Baltika Porter from the bottom of the bag, a strong beer—seven per cent—that she never really liked. Still, I open two bottles for us and we sit at the rickety kitchen table feasting on chicken lapsha and lamb pelmeni. She makes a face as she takes her first sip of beer, and I can't help but laugh.
"What?"
Her tone is rather adversarial.
"You never acquired a taste for that beer."
I get a glare in response, but she keeps drinking it.
"How was your outing?"
She shrugs, and keeps eating. My attempt at starting a civil conversation is falling rather short. This is hard…harder even than I anticipated. After living together for months, even now that her memory of that time is gone, I thought we would be able to get along more easily. That some residual of how she felt towards me would remain.
"Have you decided, about Rome?"
Finally, she meets my eyes. Her ears are back to their normal color, but her cheeks still appear flushed.
"As much as I hate admitting it, it would be better if you came along."
Spoken as if I am a mere accessory to this enterprise, rather than the one holding all the cards. But now is not the time to debate that finer point.
"Good, then. I arranged a flight for tomorrow, if that suits you."
"I need to contact my dad, too. Let him know I'm alright."
"That would be better left for tomorrow, as well. We can stop somewhere along the way to call him."
She nods, takes another gulp of the beer, and tries not to make a face at the bitterness. Despite her obvious distaste for it, she goes on to open a second bottle, and a third. We move to the couch and she sprawls out with her feet across my lap.
"Was I happy?"
"I think you were, yes. After we disappeared together."
"You think I was? You're not sure? God, can you ever actually answer a direct question? You're the only person I can ask."
It might have been said in anger, but the glassy sheen to her eyes told me otherwise.
"You were happy, Sydney. We were happy."
She stems the flow of tears with the back of her hand against her eyelids. It is not the answer she wants to hear, I guess, that the last time—the only time in years—that she was truly happy she cannot even remember. I rest my hands on her scarred shins, and she lets me for a moment.
"I suppose I should thank you…for helping me. Then. Now…"
Not sure how to respond, I say nothing. Her emotional fragility was always vaguely shocking to me. Before we were together she had always seemed a pinnacle of strength. Oh, she was desperate, yes, to save her Agent Vaughn once upon a time, to bring down Sloane, to stand up for puppy dogs and apple pie and children everywhere. But despite that, or because of it, she had always seemed driven rather than overwhelmed.
"My life is so screwed up."
"I'm not exactly a paragon of normalcy, either, Sydney. But this isn't a contest. Normal lives are for normal people. We—" I tightened my grip on her legs, "—are anything but."
At that she nodded, seemed to calm somewhat. Yet she pulled her feet from my legs and walked away to shut herself in the bathroom. There came the sound of running water. I stood at the door, listening, but couldn't hear any sobbing. And so, let her sit in there and brood alone.
Tomorrow, she would need to pull herself back together. Rome would not be the simple sightseeing stopover she thought.
Her lean body was hot against my back when I woke up. Quickly, I disentangled myself from her and from the sheets. She murmured wordlessly and rolled over without waking, dragging half the blankets with her. I showered hastily under the cold stream of water, and set the coffee to brew before venturing back to rouse her from sleep.
She startles awake with the briefest touch of my hand on her shoulder. I suppose I should be flattered she is relaxed enough around me to sleep at all.
On the way to the airport we stop at a dismal looking gas station. Huddled against the cold in a phone booth, she places the call to her father. I pump gas into the nearly full tank and try to lip read. I can't tell from here what she says to him, but the conversation is brief.
"He knows that I'm with you," she says, when I start up the car. "He found the ring."
"Oh?"
"He wasn't as angry as I thought he would be. He just said he'd hunt you down and kill you slowly if you hurt me."
"I wouldn't expect anything less from him."
She laughed a little at that, a soft sound. I had known the ruby was a loose end. But I hadn't had time to search her place for it. I had just killed Caldwell and knew it was only a matter of time before Irina found me out.
Three hours in commercial coach, with its requisite screaming children and inattentive parents, and we emerged into the humid air of Rome, twenty degrees warmer than Moscow had been. Carry-on luggage only. Customs may have looked at us askance for that but let us through with our forged passports and a civil benvenuto al Italia.
We caught a taxi to the Via Veneto to check in at the Westin Excelsior, where I had selfishly booked a suite rather than two separate rooms. The Westin because I wanted to show off, perhaps, after her comment on the accommodations in Moscow.
"You don't have a tenement flat in Rome?" she asks, as we enter the suite.
"I always just stayed at your place."
The rooms seemed woefully empty with just our two small bags. I didn't want to take her to the apartment that night, and thankfully she didn't argue. So I took her back to Aurora 10, a bit of sentimentality on my part. Ordered that same bottle of wine and watched over the rim of my glass as she cracked open crab claws and scooped tiny morsels of clam from their shells, smiling up at me intermittently.
Strange, to sleep alone again. As strange as it was to trust someone enough to sleep with them. The doors were shut between us and I couldn't even hear her breathing.
The humidity remained, and it dawned gray and drizzly. We stopped by a small cache for weapons before heading on. As we walked, the heavy foot traffic of the Via Veneto gave way to a less crowded, but no less fashionable, neighborhood of walk-ups and cafes.
Up the creaking stairs of her building, she follows me, watches as I unlock the door to this place in her buried past. Inside it is just as I remember. She wanders into the bedroom, seems to startle as she looks up through the skylight at the nearby church.
"I've seen this before…the angel…I thought they were dreams."
"The skylight is one of the reasons you chose this apartment," I explain, although I'm not sure she is listening.
I never understood why an atheist would want to sleep under the watchful spectre of an angel. And for me, actually raised Catholic until I was old enough to think for myself, making love to her in sight of that church always fell somewhere between sacrilege and high humor.
She opens closets, cupboards, the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, pockets a prescription pill bottle, fingers the black silk of a shirt draped over the desk chair. Lost in reverie, if not memory.
As she turns the corner from the hallway back into the bedroom, a bullet lodges in the plaster, grazing her sleeve and just barely cutting skin. A thin line of blood wells up through the gash in her shirt. Our eyes meet for half a second as we both drop to the floor. I pull the Sig from its holster at my side.
There's blood on the floor now, too, her blood. Another bullet embeds itself in the wood. I slide to where she is, covered by the wall. The shooter must be up on the church roof. It's the perfect vantage, the one I would choose myself.
I risk a quick glance around the corner, up through the broken skylight, fire off a single cover shot.
"Syd, stay here. Fire off a few more shots. I'm going into the church."
I stop to throw her some gauze and antiseptic from the bathroom, then head out into the street, gun at my side, in a low run that takes me quickly across the alley between her building and the church.
Inside, I slow my gait, take greater care to conceal my weapon. We had visited here before, luckily, after hours. Wandered up the stone steps all the way to the bell tower sixty feet up. Had an "assassin's picnic" as Julia jokingly named them—a midnight meal in some centuries old building or church we had broken into—laid out on a red tablecloth under the great iron bell. Steamed mussels with pancetta, squash risotto, pan seared duck, with a bottle of Sangiovese and a decadent chocolate gateau.
Smashed our empty glasses down to the street below because we were drunk and happy, and almost ready to reverse what had been done to her.
Julia lit a candle for herself on our way out, mockingly. Though she did leave a small donation: a crumpled wad of Japanese yen left in her purse from a recent assignment. She commented on the blood red glass holders for the votives: how they were such an appropriate color both for us and for the church.
We didn't even make it to the bedroom back in her flat, losing our clothes between the front door and the couch. Afterwards ending entwined on a leather armchair, with her hands curled against my chest.
Now the church is crowded with a mixture of pious locals and tourists come to admire the elaborate statuary and precise architecture. I slow my pace, as if to view the magnificent artwork, when I would much rather take the belfry stairs at a sprint.
A velvet rope cordons off the staircase. I duck under nonchalantly—if you act like you belong, people tend to believe that you do—and walk until I am out of view of the main cathedral before taking off at a run. He's there, stretched out across the stone floor with a sniper rifle propped in front of him.
This is appallingly easy. He only just notices my presence before I lodge a bullet in his brain. I search the body, finding no identification, no clues except keys to a Toyota on a fob stamped with OmniFam's logo.
Her arm is bandaged by the time I get back, and she's pulling the black knit shirt over her head, wincing as it scrapes across the wound. I toss the key chain to her, and her face contorts in a murderous rage.
"You should've killed that bastard in Japan."
I can't say I entirely disagree. But if not for him, we may never have met.
"I think it's time we had a chat with Sloane."
We stay in the suite for the evening. Her shoulder wound is nothing more than a scratch, but she seems in a poor mood at the thought of confronting her former employer, her would-be murderer.
While she's in the shower I order room service. It arrives under silvered domes; I tip the maid and open the bottle of bordeaux myself.
Sydney re-emerges in a luxurious robe much too big for her small frame. I offer her a glass of the dusty red, and she accepts, taking a few sips before setting her glass on the coffee table. There's a flush on her cheeks, from the wine, or the shower, or something else entirely. She moves to stand between my legs, leans over to kiss me, and I can see the swell of her breast where the robe gaps open.
She tastes like berries, licorice, the dust and bright tannins of the wine. Her mouth is urgent against my own: she kisses not like a new lover but as if drowning in the inexorable tide that pulls us together. Though it pains me, I took her gently by the shoulders, taking care to avoid her new wound, and push her away.
"At the risk of being a perfect git, I won't have you for just one night. I'm used to having all of you. I won't settle for less."
"I know, Sark."
It's neither agreement nor rebuttal. But I'm not strong enough a man to deny her when she slants her lips across my jaw, strokes her strong hands down my sides. She is a deluge, a monsoon of passion unleashed against my own. I slide the shoulders of the robe down her arms, scrape my teeth against her collarbone, her pulse point.
Somewhere between the sitting room and the bedroom she strips me of my shirt and pants. Our coming together is tidal, fierce and slow, raw and painfully euphoric. The gash on her arm has bled through the bandages with our lovemaking, but she continues to move against me, eyes dark, body tensed as she nears her release. Then she shatters, draws me along with her over that precipice.
She stretches out alongside me, body lax, eyes half closed. Her hair is a mane of chocolate and cinnabar, damp from the shower and our own exertions. Soon, she is asleep, with her head tucked against my chest. If I am worried about what the morrow will bring, it fades with the feeling of her slender rib cage rising and falling under my hand.
I will kill Sloane. I will kill anyone and everyone who was involved in ever taking her from me. This murderous rage is new, a black pit inside my chest that demands I take blood for blood, an eye for an eye. Rage that cries for me to level empires to ashes, to render my enemies unto utter destruction. Until now, killing has always been a mere tool, nothing personal, neither particularly enjoyed nor despised. But for Sydney, I would paint a swath of blood across the globe. And revel in the carnage.
A/N: I looked for awhile, and I'm fairly sure the angel they show over Sydney's apartment in Rome is actually a statue from the Bridge of Angels, not a church at all, and certainly not overlooking any residential buildings, if that shot is even from Rome. Maybe someone can identify it for me?