Page 58 of Fastest Kill

She made a sound that wasn't quite a laugh. "You make it sound like a good thing, but really, I'm too much. I'm all of their extreme qualities and none of their good ones."

"Your father loves your mother partly because she contains a contradiction that turns him on," Dario continued. "She is deadly under the softness. That's what he loves about her. You gave yourself the worst possible rubric to measure yourself by with those two because they both love each other's secret sides. You know what I see when I look at you?"

He shifted, tilting his chin to see the top of her head. "Someone who thinks too much is a bad thing because you can't be them. I've been doing the same thing my whole life, but in the other direction. I was never enough for my mother, no matter what I did or how hard I tried. My father died, and I could never measure up to the memory of him. Both of us have been building these bullshit ideas about ourselves and calling them self-knowledge."

"That's uncomfortably perceptive of you," Frederica said, into his chest.

Dario grinned. "I have my moments."

"Sadly for you, you're going to have your job cut out for you to make me believe you are actually like the way I look and act. Guys like you always go for the soft, little, pretty type, the ones that need you to protect them."

"Firstly, I don't have a type. I'm all hearts and not parts." Dario couldn't stop the laughter from bubbling up out of his chest. "And secondly, I fucking love that you can protect yourself. Mio Dio, it's such a fucking relief to know you can handle any situation you walk into and protect your own ass and mine while you are at it. The day we were besieged in Italy? It was amazing to have you fight by my side."

He kissed her forehead, and she didn't move away, which for Frederica was the equivalent of most other people clinging to him with both arms.

"The woman Agrippa knew," she said quietly. She wasn't letting it go, but he hadn't expected her to. A mind like hers hated a mystery. "The way he said gifted is driving me crazy."

"You think she was gifted as in a present to him, like a slave? Or something to do with magic?"

"I don't know. Maybe both? I think Altun has always taken an interest in me that goes beyond professional courtesy, and people would always go to my father and mother to find magical shit." She paused, her fingers moving over his chest in thoughtful circles.

"You think there's some magic ability in the family that you don't know about?"

"I'm not frightened of it if there is," she replied firmly. "I just want to know why he fucking said that. Magic runs in many families, and most of the time, people have no idea. I don't like this being something I don't know because I hate not knowing what I'm actually walking into when it comes to a job."

"He might have said it just to fuck with you, but we can dig into your family tree tomorrow if it will help clear your head." He ran his hand up her spine, and she softened into him. "Try to sleep. We've got a bunch of shit we will have to do tomorrow to deal with the fallout of this."

Frederica groaned into his chest. "Why are you already thinking about tomorrow?"

"Because one of us has to."

"Annoying," she said, but she settled against his side. "You go to sleep too."

Dario closed his eyes and tried not to think about how gone he was for her. He had been ever since Treviso when they'd stood, laughing over dead bodies. Seeing her pissed off, drunken glare in Crete had been the last nail in his coffin.

Every day it got worse, but he kept his mouth firmly shut. They had bigger things to worry about than the feelings he had caught.

Dario kissed the top of her head, listened to her breathing even out as she fell asleep, and let himself be content with what he had.

25

Dario's phone rang at seven a.m. He cursed, fumbled for his pants where he had left them, and answered on the second ring.

"What?" he answered drowsily.

"I need to tell you something I should have thought of sooner, but I got distracted and forgot about it," Serapis said without preamble. He sounded buzzed, like he had been awake for hours.

"That's a promising start," Dario replied with a yawn.

"Your father was keeping something for me," Serapis continued, ignoring the sarcasm. "It was an artifact. Something with enough protective power to be used against Agrippa or another sorcerer directly, or at a minimum, to slow them down. Niccolò offered to hold it for me after he became my apprentice. He understood why I couldn't keep it myself."

"Why couldn't you?" Dario asked, rubbing at his face. He wasn't awake enough for riddles.

"Because if Agrippa were ever to capture me, I couldn't be trusted not to give up the location under sufficient pressure. Even under magical compulsion or things worse than magic. So Niccolò took it, and he hid it somewhere in the Foscari house, and he told me only that it was safe," Serapis replied.

Dario moved out of the bedroom and shut the door gently behind him. Frederica was still snoring softly, and he didn't want to wake her.

"You're telling me there has been a weapon against Agrippa sitting in my family home for years?" he asked, putting the kettle on to boil.