Page 2 of Honey Cut
She didn’t answer, just looked at him with steady blue-green eyes. She was so contained, her face betraying nothing. Nothing but pink skin across the bridge of her finely shaped nose.
Locals didn’t have sunburns.
“You don’t work here,” Stitt said stupidly.
She nodded.
“Did Cashel send you?”
Could he already have discovered what Stitt knew? Stitt trusted his informant, but loyalty was cheap in Rome. Perhaps Cashel or one of his camp had already turned his source. Maybe they’d done something worse.
“God sent me,” the young woman corrected. She had the look of a zealot now, young and fiery-eyed. Practically vibrating with intensity.
“Nonsense. Was it Cashel or someone else?” he managed to ask.
“Nebraska,” she said, ignoring his question. “Nineteen years ago. I’m sure you remember.”
The skipping in his chest was a jumping now, a lurching. “It’s in the past,” he said. Wheezed.
“Our God is the god of the past as well as the present.”
She moved toward him. He had just enough energy left to flinch, but she didn’t strike him or even touch him at all. Instead, she took the used washcloth and coffee cup from his table and carried them to the bathroom. He heard the splash of the coffee down the drain and then the running of the sink from its gold taps.
For the first time in a very long time, Stitt found himself embarrassed. Of the palatial bathroom, with its marble floors and clusters of fresh flowers and the hydrotherapy tub large enough that a grown man could lie down flat and never touch the sides. Of the canopy bed, fit for a king; the suite itself, high and spacious and filled with every luxury. When he’d started his climb toward the Apostolic Palace, it had been normal for princes of the Church to live sumptuously; it had been expected. They’d had a proper pope then, one who understood the history and the power of the Church. But this new pope had sown a harvest of austerity—had shunned the opulent papal apartments and the plentitude that was his by right—and now the world seemed to expect the same of everyone else.
Stitt had refused, of course. Not unreasonably, because what was a Church that couldn’t reflect the grandeur of its own god? What was a Church that recalled sandals and sawdust rather than the glory of the prince of kings?
But as the young woman returned, the coffee cup empty and being slipped into a plastic bag along with the washcloth, he saw the judgment reflected in her eyes, andhe was embarrassed.
Why? Because she knew about Nebraska?
“I did the best I could,” he tried again. The words came out in a whisper. “It would have hurt the Church.”
“You did what was best for your career,” she said. “And God has not forgotten.”
He was sick to his stomach now and clammy. “So this isn’t about Ys?”
He didn’t think he invented the confusion that flickered through her expression, but it was gone as soon as he saw it, replaced again by that eerily impassive expression, paired so incongruously with those fervent eyes.
“No,” she said after a moment. She sealed the plastic bag and then bent over to pull something from her ankle. A knife, sheathed there. Stitt saw a single silver-blond loop of hair trapped against her neck. She must have missed it while tucking her hair into her wig.
When she stood, the knife was in her hand, its handle inset with rubies and gold. It looked almost liturgical.
A thing for sacrifice.
Stitt’s stomach twisted up into his chest. “You’re going to kill me,” he rasped.
“I already have, Your Grace,” she said, and there was something else in her voice now, a sadness. She found a small bag she’d stashed near a chair and put the plastic-wrapped coffee cup inside. Then she produced an identical cup and set it on the table next to him. He watched dizzily as she poured coffee into it and then sloshed it over the rim and onto the table. Intentionally. As if the cup had been held by a man who’d abruptly felt weak and needed to sit.
She stood in front of him when she was finished. She was petite, slender. Aside from the sunburned nose and cheap wig, she was altogether lovely. An angel of death.
“You took too much of your heart medicine today,” she explained, and her voice was inflectionless once again. “An easy mistake for someone who’s so disorganized with their medications.”
“I’m not—” He stopped. She’d already been here when he walked in; she’d had the coffee and the tainted cup waiting. Of course she would have staged his medications, made it look accidental. A tragedy brought about by a busy man’s haphazard habits.
He stared at her and she stared back, the understanding crystalizing between them. It didn’t matter what he’d learned about Ys, about Cashel. It didn’t matter that he was going to be the next American cardinal, that the only thing between him and the papacy was gap-toothed Cashel with his amiable grin and mismatched eyes.
Nothing mattered because he was going to die. Hewasdying.
