Those shots in the air aren’t the end. I don’t die. None of us do.
Instead, after a moment of silence where Connor’s fully on top of me like we’re about to get busy, he pushes himself up on his elbows and looks down. “Now do you believe me?”
“Get off me!” I say as I give him a push.
He rolls sideways, landing on his back, a satisfying oof! escaping from his mouth.
It was satisfying to me, anyway. It probably hurt for him.
I check around me. Harper’s still casually eating her ice cream as if nothing unusual happened. I sit up slowly. My back feels wet and sticky. I landed in my melted gelato. Because of course I did.
“Why did you do that?”
“I was saving your life, thank you very much.” Connor pushes himself up and looks around quickly. There’s a small circle of people staring at us with curiosity while the rest of the tourists go about their day.
“It was a car backfiring, you dumbass.” I stand up and glare at Harper. “You enjoying this?”
Harper gives a small shrug. “Kind of?”
I reach around my back to the wet patch. It’s right between my shoulder blades. “Can you hand me a Kleenex?”
Harper makes a spinning motion with her finger and I turn around. She pats at me with a Kleenex for a moment, then stops. “That will have to do.”
“No time to go back to the hotel?”
“Sorry, no.”
“But I’m all sticky.”
“You want to switch dresses?”
“It’s fine.”
I mean, I do, but there’s a schedule to keep. I can suck it up.
“Is Connor still on the ground?” I ask.
Harper checks over my shoulder. “He’s standing now.”
“Which way to the Colosseum?”
“Hey! You can’t just ignore me,” Connor says.
I roll my eyes as I turn to face him. He doesn’t look any worse for wear from our tumble. I’m the only one suffering the consequences of his actions, as per usual.
“You said you were going to help me,” he says.
“Did I?”
“It was implied.”
“This is how you repay me? Throwing me to the ground and jumping on top of me?”
“I thought someone was shooting at us.”
I put my hands on my hips. “In the middle of a crowd? In the middle of the day? In the middle of Rome?”
“You think assassinations don’t happen in daylight?”
“No one’s trying to kill you.”
Connor stoops and picks up his fedora. He puts it on his head at a rakish angle. “You think this is all in my head? That I’m just some massive narcissist?”
“If the shoe fits.”
“I’m telling the truth.”
“Fine. But if you want me to believe that, you’re going to have to give me more to go on.”
He works his jaw for a moment, then gives in. “I think I know who it is.”
I knew it.
“Who?”
He checks our surroundings. No one’s paying attention to us anymore. “Someone’s been blackmailing me.”
Oh, the irony.
“You’re joking. About what?”
He glances at Harper again and a nervous knot forms in my stomach. Connor has a million secrets, but I have just the one.21 If this has something to do with that, then I truly am going to end him.
“I got involved in something financial last year,” Connor says.
“Something shady,” I guess.
“It was a good opportunity. But then it went south, and, well, I…”
“You covered it up?” Harper says.
Connor cocks his head to the side. “In a manner of speaking.”
“But someone found out?” I say. “And that person started blackmailing you?”
“Yes.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
Connor’s eyes flash with annoyance. “People do get blackmailed, El.”
“You think I don’t know that?”
We stare at each other, a contest of wills, which I win for once because it’s Connor who speaks first. “Why did you say it doesn’t make sense, then?”
“You paid this money?”
“Yes.”
“How much?”
“I wouldn’t want to say.”
I grit my teeth, but I’ll circle back to that later. Who cares how much it is? Only there would be some poetic justice in him losing everything he took from me.
“Why would the blackmailer kill you, then?”
“He told them he wouldn’t pay anymore,” Harper guesses because she’s always been the smart one. “Right?”
“Yes,” Connor says.
“How did they react to that?” I ask.22
“They said something about making me pay for it.”
Good Lord, who’s writing this person’s dialogue? Were they twirling their black mustache at the same time?
“When was this?”
“A couple of days before the car accident.”
“So, your brakes failed right after someone threatened you, and you didn’t think the two were related?”
He doesn’t say anything, just scowls for an answer.
“Did they contact you afterward?”
“No.”
“Hmmm.” I touch the back of my dress. The gelato is half dried and has hardened into some new substance. “And what about after yesterday?”
“I haven’t heard anything from them since that last message.”
“Which you received how?”
“Through encrypted text.”
“Unsigned, I assume?” He nods. “Do you still have them?”
“They disappear after you read them.”
“No screenshots?”
“No.”
I put my hands on my hips. “Didn’t you used to be a private detective?”
“No need to mock me.”
“Right, sorry. I’m just … surprised.”
“At?”
“All of it, frankly. I wouldn’t have thought you’d cave to blackmail.”
His face changes to that vulnerable look again.
He’s going to have to stop doing that.
“I don’t want to go to prison. You understand that, surely.”
Oh, I understand. “How long would you get?”
A fantasy montage is running through my mind. Connor in an orange jumpsuit holding some scratchy towel and those slipper shoes they make prisoners wear. His thick hair growing lank and gray.
No one’s ever said I lack imagination.
Connor grimaces. “I understand the sentence for being an accessory is lengthy.”
We lock eyes again and we’re having two conversations. The things we say out loud and the things that are simply understood between us.
“As interesting as this is, we need to go,” Harper says. “We’re already late.”
“To be continued,” I say to Connor.
He puts his hands on his hips. “Is this not more important?”
“There’s nothing we can do about it now. Let’s do the tour, and we’ll discuss it afterward.”
He doesn’t like it, but he doesn’t have much choice. “All right. And, um, thank you.”
This stops me. I’ve never heard Connor thank anyone before. Certainly not me.
“Tick tock,” Harper says, tapping her foot.
“Yes, coming.”
I link my arm through Harper’s, and we walk down the street with Connor following behind. We’re only a few minutes from the Colosseum, so we won’t be too late. It’s something Harper’s always bugging me about—my tardiness. Harper’s never late for anything.
“What do you make of that?” Harper says once we’ve turned off the side street and are in the middle of a crowd on the Piazza del Colosseo. The sky is a perfect, icy blue above the Arch of Constantine—a tall marble structure with three arches in it.
“I don’t know yet.”
“I bet he knows who’s blackmailing him.”
“Agreed. Or a list of suspects at least.”
“Wonder why he didn’t tell you?”
“That’s how Connor operates. On a need-to-know basis.”
“True. This way.”
We cross the street to the courtyard outside the Colosseum. Doing this in Rome always feels like taking your life into your hands,23 and today is no exception. Pushing someone into traffic would be a good way to get rid of someone. People must get run over by cars in this city all the time.24
We make it safely across, and now we’re directly in front of the Colosseum. Its faded marble contours rise above us, looming over the throngs of tourists wearing small yellow transmitters on black lanyards, and tour guides yelling out the prices of their tours.
I did this tour ten years ago with Connor. He’d dazzled me with his knowledge of Roman history. Then he’d taken me out for one of the best meals I’ve ever had at this little tucked-away restaurant and kissed me until my knees were weak on the Ponte Fabricio.25 Early the next morning, a bank was burglarized while half the city was at the Festa de’ Noantri.26 I’d been instantly fascinated with the robberies, and Connor was, too. Soon after, he was hired to investigate them and we figured out that we made a good team.27 It felt like a confirmation of the feelings I had for him, but then …
I push away the dark thoughts trying to crowd their way in. All this talk of murder—real and imagined—coupled with being back in this city with Connor has left me feeling unsettled. The day may be sunny, but there’s a shadow across it.28
“Where are we supposed to be meeting the guide?” I ask.
“Over there, I think.” Harper points to a group of twenty middle-aged women standing in a tight-knit circle. They’re all wearing the same T-shirt, and it takes me a minute to realize the design on the front is When in Rome’s book cover.
My heart sinks. “This is a fan event?”
“Did you not read the itinerary?”
I didn’t read the itinerary. I never do. Reading about the details of travel exhausts me. Instead, I’d opened the email so it was marked as “read” and forgot about it.
“Some of it?”
“You’re the worst.”
I glance over my shoulder. Connor’s looking at the pack of fans with mild amusement, his distress from a few minutes ago erased. “Pretty sure I’m not.”
“Yes,” Harper says. “It’s a fan event.”
“And these fans are?”
“The BookFace Ladies.”
“The what now?”
“You know, BookFace? That thing they do on Instagram where they hold up the book to their face to match the image?”
The cover for When in Rome is half a woman’s face with the Roman skyline in silhouette behind it. The women’s T-shirts all have some variation of a woman holding the book to one side of their face so the face on the book makes up the other half.
BookFace. I get it.
“Why’s it on their T-shirts?”
“That’s how they got here. The contest? Please do not tell me you forgot the contest.”
“Of course not.”
Only I have. Because there’s no way in hell I’d agree to do a book tour with Connor and a bunch of fans. I love my fans, I do, but some of them are nuts.
Why else would they want to sleep with Connor and make “jokes” in endless emails to me about how they’re going to “take me out” so they have a chance with him?29
Oh! Maybe it’s a fan who’s trying to kill Connor?
Only, wait, that doesn’t work. It’s me they want to kill, not him.
“Remind me of the details again?” I say to Harper.
“They posted their BookFaces on Instagram, and twenty of them won an all-expenses-paid ticket to Rome.”
“Right, right.”
“There were twenty thousand entries.”
“Wow…” I clear my throat. “And the parts of the tour that are with me?”
“Today at the Colosseum and then the lunch tomorrow in Pompeii. Some stuff later.”
“The lunch.”
“There will be alcohol.”
“There better be. Any other surprises in store for me?”
She gives me a sideways grin. “Shoulda read the itinerary!”