“If you’re worried about targets, do you really think it’s a good idea to have all of us here in here together?” I challenged him loudly enough for everyone to hear. “What if there’s a bomb?”
I got exactly the reaction I was looking for.
Alessandra and Bianca both gasped.
“Could there be?!” Bianca cried out.
“No!” Niccolo said in exasperation.
“Get him the fuck out of here!” Adriano roared.
Dario just gave me a reproachful look.
Niccolo glared at me and hissed, “After this is all over, you and I are going to have a serious talk.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said dismissively as I bolted out of the panic room.
I sprinted for the armory – another stone room with a locked steel door – and picked up an AR-15.
Then I ran outside to join the foot soldiers.
I headed for the nearest group walking into the olive groves. They were surprised when they saw me running towards them, but I noticed a couple of guys give approving glances at each other, likeNot bad.
A guy named Araldo said, “Sir, you should go back to the house.”
“Fuck that,” I snapped. “Are you looking for the shooter?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then I’m coming with you.”
And that was that.
21
We didn’t find him.
Lars came back empty-handed, but he confessed to something pretty shocking:
He thought the sniper was a woman.
Even weirder than that, he thought it was a woman he used todate.
As soon as I was alone with Niccolo, I said, “And you thought me sleeping with Caterina was a problem.”
“Ha ha,” Niccolo said without laughing.
After Lars’s big revelation, though, Nic and I never did have that ‘serious talk’ he’d mentioned.
I went and looked for Caterina in the room where I’d hidden her, but she wasn’t there.
After a brief search, I found her with 20 other servants in a windowless room being guarded by foot soldiers. They’d apparently moved her in with everybody else.
I pulled her out of the room and embraced her. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine – areyouokay?!”
“I’m fine now that I know you’re safe,” I said, and kissed the top of her head.