Venice, Italy

Palazzo Maltese

Mardi Gras

Ten years later

 

There was a woman dressed like that weird Star Wars queen, whatshername? Anakin Skywalker’s wife. Amygdala? No that was a part of the brain. Amidala, that was it.

Though maybe Amygdala wasn’t off the mark, since it was the part of the brain that governed lust and the lady at the masked ball was definitely making eyes at him. She had this enormous headdress, kabuki white makeup and a huge, red velvet cape that was open just enough to show her in a near transparent lace body stocking. She was holding a flute of champagne like everyone else and sipped from it without taking her eyes from his.

Then she blew him a kiss from overblown lips. Those lips were amazing, didn’t even pretend to be natural, but promised a pretty decent blow job.

Nope, not interested.

Cal turned his back and looked out over the ballroom of Palazzo Maltese, where a thousand revelers were getting drunk and partying hard. A deluxe masked ball to celebrate the successful negotiation of the Mediterranean Accords, a multilateral agreement years in the making to establish peace and trade in the Middle East. After war had been tried, again and again, someone thought maybe peace might be worth a shot.

There was giddy jubilation in the air. It appeared that it had suddenly occurred to a lot of people that a brand new market of previously poor but now maybe future well-to-do people was opening up. Not only would there be peace, but there’d be money to be made. A lot of it.

Everyone who wasn’t already drunk was doing his or her best to get there. Cal should be joining them. After years working in the Middle East with no alcohol at all, toiling at establishing desalination plants in desert environments, he deserved to get drunk.

Aside from other considerations, part of the Technical Dossier of the Accords was a contract with his company, Phoenix Enterprises, to provide safe drinking water for everyone, a dream in the desert that was thousands of years old.

And, not incidentally, he was about to become a billionaire. Officially. Not bad for a kid from the South Side. Mega-rich before he was forty. Doing good work, yet. Most billion-dollar fortunes were made trafficking in something or cheating people. Instead, his was going to be made saving lives.

Didn’t get much better than that.

Now someone dressed as a super-sexy shepherdess was making eyes at him. This one dipped her finger in her champagne and ran it across breasts too good to be true. Those breasts were not made by God but by a skilled plastic surgeon .

Nuh uh. Not interested.

The fuck was wrong with him?

He’d worked practically his whole life to get to this point. He was richer than he’d ever dared dream, single after a brief marriage long ago to the she-devil from hell, in the most beautiful city in the world, at a party celebrating the breaking-out of peace, and he was turning down surefire sex? With champagne?

The hell?

Cal suppressed a sigh.

If only Anya — he stopped himself right there. If only Anya had been a constant thought in his life these past ten years. He’d married a banshee demon from hell because she’d looked a little like Anya. He’d turned down perfectly nice women because they didn’t look like Anya.

Anya had left him ten fucking years ago. And she’d left him brutally, too.

He had to stop this, had to shake himself out of this melancholy mood. He was Cal Fucking Burns and he didn’t do melancholy. He ran a hugely successful company with people hand-picked to be extremely competent and good to work with. His company was going to be instrumental in one of the greatest accomplishments in a hundred years, comparable to the signing of the Treaty of Versailles after World War I. An amazing achievement, one for the history books.

He was still young, physically strong, healthy and rich — and soon he was going to be much richer. So rich he wouldn’t be able to spend all his money in a hundred lifetimes.

Shame on him. There was no room for sadness in a life like that.

He was highly sexed and he hadn’t had sex in — he tried to calculate it but couldn’t remember. That had to stop, too. He was in a room full of beautiful women, and most of them looked pretty willing. There had to be someone here he wanted to fuck. Someone who didn’t look like —

No. Not going there.

Huh. There was that redhead dressed in some outlandish rendering of what some might consider Marie Antoinette if Marie Antoinette had a gown cut down to the tops of her nipples.

Well, nothing ventured nothing gained. Cal started off toward the redhead, wondering if she spoke English. Maybe she didn’t. Maybe that would make it better. Just find a place to fuck without talking. Maybe not even take their masks off.

Something grabbed at his sleeve and, annoyed, Cal looked down. A long, slim, pale hand. He followed that hand up to the face and grew even more annoyed.

“Enjoying yourself?” a light, affected voice asked.

Shit, just perfect. To add to his mild depression, he had been caught by the biggest asshole-bore in the world. Tall, slender, blonde hair combed straight back, dressed as a 17^th-century swordsman. A musketeer. Which was rich considering he was a total wimp. Calvin had saved his ass in Cairo and Damascus.

Ashley Morris, in the flesh, come to pester Cal. What was he doing here anyway? Ash worked for the CIA, which just showed how low their standards had fallen. Ash and the CIA had done their best to assist the negotiation of the Accords by fucking things up more than once.

“How are you doing? I heard Phoenix cleaned up, landed a huge contract. How does it feel to be mega-rich?” Ash asked.

So — they were playing catch-up?

“Pretty good,” Cal said mildly. He was technically already a billionaire now if you counted his stock in Phoenix and he would be a bi-billionaire very soon. Ash wouldn’t care. He was a trustafarian from old money and had joined the CIA because he thought it made him look dashing. It didn’t. He just looked like a moron, playing out of his weight class. He still looked like a kid. “And you? What are you doing here?”

“Well.” Ash drew himself up, putting a hand on the hilt of his sword. He gave a smug smile. “I played a small part in the accords,” he said, shrugging his shoulders, humblebragging. His tone suggested that the multilateral negotiations, a major historical breakthrough in diplomacy, wouldn’t have happened without him.

“Good for you.” Cal snagged another glass of champagne from a passing waiter in livery, drank it in three long gulps. He needed fortification if he had to talk to Ash.

“Yes.” Ash pursed his lips. “We … facilitated backdoor talks. Enormous geopolitical considerations. It wasn’t all as straightforward and simple as landing an engineering contract.”

Cal placed the empty flute on another passing waiter’s tray and turned his head to look at Ash who was still babbling.

What Cal and his company had done was the private sector equivalent to the moonshot on an accelerated schedule. He and his team had worked tirelessly under conditions of extreme privation, solving one thorny, impossible technical problem after another. They’d built a demo desalination plant in Yemen on time and under budget before the ceasefire, under mortar attack and with constant attempts at sabotage. Though Cal had arranged tight security, he’d lost two engineers to an IED.

But every engineer in the company insisted on seeing the project through to the end, and they’d landed the big contract to provide safe and clean drinking water throughout the Middle East.

They’d created a fucking miracle that was going to save hundreds of thousands of lives, maybe millions of lives, and it hadn’t been straightforward and it hadn’t been simple. Cal and his team had worked like dogs, in 120° heat, eating goat meat when they were lucky, dodging bullets when they weren’t.

And Ash probably sat the whole thing out in some air-conditioned office playing with his tiny dick.

Something in Cal’s face made Ash flinch. “Yeah. So.” He huffed out a breath, looked around casually over Cal’s shoulder. Great. Ash was one of those cocktail party people who looked over your shoulder for someone more interesting to talk to while talking to you.

Cal could solve that problem for him, easy.

“Well.” He plastered a smile on his face. “Great catching up with you, Ash. I think I’ll —”

His arm was caught in a weak grip. Cal looked at the hand and at Ash’s face. Ash dropped his hand but stepped closer, right into what Cal considered his personal space. He didn’t like it when the wrong people stepped into his personal space.

Ash definitely qualified.

It took a lot of self control not to deck the fuckhead. The fact that it would be all too easy to flatten him kept him still but, man, was he tempted.

“Anya.” Ash had been talking and Cal hadn’t been paying any attention to him, but that word made him stiffen. Had he heard right?

“What? What did you say?”

Ash sighed. “I said have you seen Anya Voronova anywhere?”

Cal’s neurons stopped firing. It was like hearing someone talking from far away. “What?”

“Anya. Voronova.” Ash’s voice was exasperated. “Anya. Come on, I know you know her. Didn’t you guys date, like, a billion years ago?”

Cal’s lips felt stiff, wooden. He formed words with difficulty. “Anya is here?”

Ash’s eyes were moving restlessly over the crowd. But now they honed in on his face. “Why shouldn’t she be? She’s deputy director of Peace and Jobs. Of course she’s here.”

Peace and Jobs was one of a number of NGOs that had worked hard to secure the Accords, working under the umbrella Diplomatic Dossier. Peace and Jobs worked in the background, an organization with a sterling reputation. Cal had never had dealings with Peace and Jobs but he’d certainly heard of them.

Anya was deputy director?

“I only met her once back in the day,” Ash said. “Wouldn’t recognize her now. And all I have is this.” He held out his cell that showed an ID. Cal’s heart gave a painful kick in his chest. Oh fuck. There she was.

Ten years older and about a million times more beautiful even though it was a work ID, face full on, harsh lighting, no makeup, hair drawn back from her face. Anya’s face was no longer girlish. It was a woman’s face — intelligent and determined.

Cal stared at the photo, soaking in every pixel. In all these years he deliberately hadn’t looked for her, hadn’t tried to keep up, hadn’t Googled her, ever. Once he started, he’d never stop. His heart was already broken, no point in smashing it to bits.

In his head, he’d convinced himself she’d left because he’d never have been able to give her the lifestyle she’d been born to, even though that was insane. Anya had never given any sign of caring that he had no money. But how else to understand what had happened in his miserable hovel on a snowy afternoon? The love of his life just walking out on him.

In his head, he’d convinced himself that she was bound to marry some fourth generation rich guy and lead a pampered life. But the face he was looking at wasn’t pampered, wasn’t botoxed or surgically enhanced. It had lines and the hint of shadows under her eyes, as if she’d been working too hard.

Well, yeah. If she was Deputy Director of Peace and Jobs she’d been working nonstop for years.

Ash bobbed his head to indicate the crowd. There wasn’t a woman there who didn’t have a mask and wasn’t wearing a costume, most very elaborate. Some were completely hidden behind the classic Venetian porcelain masks. Ash tapped his cell screen. “My facial recognition app won’t work here. Not enough identifying data points.”

Ash’s face tightened and he finally looked adult. A nasty adult, thoroughly grown up.

Cal nearly did a double take. “Why are you looking for Anya? Is anything wrong?”

Ash shrugged. “I came into some information today that she absolutely needs to know. Don’t know her cell number, the offices of Peace and Jobs aren’t picking up, she’s not answering email. But I know she’s here. She has to be. Larry Silver, her boss, is apparently out of town, won’t get here until the signing ceremony tomorrow, and she has to be here, to represent Peace and Jobs.” His eyes slid to Cal’s. “It’s really important. Think you can find her for me?”

Could he find Anya in a crowd of strangers? Hell yeah. He could recognize Anya anywhere, even at a hundred paces, even after a hundred years, even dressed in a burqa. Though he’d tried to uproot her, cast her out, she was buried deep in his heart and he was sure there would be an instant recognition if he ever saw her again. Cal hated it, but his heart was beating triple time at the thought of seeing Anya again.

Even more, he hated to admit to himself that any time he’d been Stateside in the past five years, he’d unconsciously searched every crowd for a cap of shiny gold hair and piercing blue eyes. He hated crowds and that was one of the main reasons.

Because Anya was never there.

Though he never knew what he’d do if by some miracle she actually was in that crowd. It had taken him years before he could think of her without a stab to the heart. And further years before a day or sometimes even two would go by without her popping up in his head.

As a matter of fact, he’d welcomed these past five years of brutal, unremitting, dangerous work in Yemen, then a desolate part of Morocco, then Iraq and Syria. Getting up before sunrise and collapsing onto a cot long after the sun went down, falling unconscious rather than falling asleep. The work — physically and mentally strenuous — had scrubbed her at least partially from his heart.

He wasn’t over her and he imagined that maybe he’d never be over her. He could see himself in some hospital in extreme old age, dying, and wondering whether she was in the same hospital.

Sometimes Cal wondered whether his DNA had been changed by falling so deeply in love at such a young age. Whether his heart became a lock and only Anya had the key.

And she’d thrown it away.

He’d tried his best to think of her as little as possible, because at first a deep black pall and then years later a gray pall descended on him whenever he pictured her. He had wonderful memories of their time together. They’d done everything a young couple in love could do when there was no money. Well, Anya had had money, true, but Cal wouldn’t let her pay for anything. So it was long walks in the park and picnics on the Common and a lot of sex at his place. But what always popped up was the memory of that terrible day when she left. When she shattered his heart and he hadn’t understood why.

He still didn’t understand why.

But now — well now it looked like for the first time since that day, he was in the same building as Anya. Breathing the same air she was. Cal walked forward, aware that he’d been scanning the crowd since the moment Ash mentioned her name. Head on a swivel, Cal made his way through the crowd.

All his senses were assaulted. There were three huge chandeliers casting a light almost as bright as the sun. Thousands of people were talking excitedly, vying with the small chamber orchestra set up on a podium at the far end of the ballroom. The perfume and sweat of a thousand people mixed with the scents of food on platters being circulated together with champagne. All the costumes were brightly colored, as were many of the masks.

The entire reception was a riot of sound and color and smells and looking for one person in this crowd seemed like an impossibility. But Anya was somewhere here and he wasn’t leaving before seeing her, talking to her.

If this had been anything but a party and he was looking for an object in a big space full of objects, he’d have divided the room into a grid and searched it systematically. But the place was crowded and people moved constantly in a speeded-up Brownian motion. Everyone seemed to be on the make, looking for another drink, another bite to eat, another person other than the one they were talking to.

Everyone was restless, agitated, hyped up. It was an historic occasion and if you weren’t drunk on the champagne you were drunk on the moment.

There was no way to search systematically so he just bulled his way from one end to the other, head on a swivel, watching carefully to his left and right. The costumes were amazing, mostly a reproduction of what he understood to be Venice’s heyday, the 17^th century. So there were a lot of shepherdesses and elaborate ballroom gowns and men in livery. But there was a lot of cosplay, too. He saw several Wonder Women, two Batmen and a couple of T’Challas, the Black Panther.

And that was just by the drinks station.

God, how would she be dressed? What would Anya choose as a costume? When they’d been together, Cal could have confidently come up with a couple of ideas she might have, but now? It was ten years later. People changed a lot in ten years.

He only hoped she wasn’t wearing one of those porcelain masks that completely covered the face except for the eyes. Her eyes were immediately recognizable but if she was wearing the porcelain mask and contact lenses …

Never mind. He’d recognize her by her stance, by her perfume, by the aura around her.

He was dressed in the least costume-y thing he could come up with — as the Phantom of the Opera. He was wearing one of his designer tuxes and one of his engineers had 3-D laser printed the Phantom half mask that fit his face perfectly.

Nobody gave him a second look as he scoured the ground floor of the immense Palazzo. He made his way across the enormous space once then back, like wading through a huge lake of costumed humans.

She wasn’t here. But there were three other floors, a ballroom, and a bridge thirty feet in the air over a side canal led to another palazzo.

It seemed like everyone who’d ever been involved in the multiparty, multistate Accords, thousands of people over the years, was here, ready to party.

Well, if Anya was here, Cal was going to find her. He’d stayed out of her orbit — never dreaming over the past years that they had been working on the same project, though far apart — but if she was here already, he couldn’t be accused of stalking her.

Because fuck, he’d wanted to. He’d moved cross-country only because he’d had to, and almost every single fucking day for years, particularly after he started earning serious money, he’d wanted to board a plane and seek her out. Which would have been a disaster. He’d avoided Boston, he’d avoided the whole fucking east coast, as a result. He’d gone from Stanford, to Benford Labs, to founding his own company in California, to the Middle East, without ever setting foot in New England because if he had, the temptation to seek her out would have been too strong.

And he’d stayed off the internet. He was good with computers and he’d written a little program that created static whenever he typed Anya Voronova in any search engine. Otherwise he’d have followed her every move and driven himself crazy.

But hell. She was here, right now. And he had a reason to seek her out, a legitimate one, even if the reason was that asshole Ash.

He started up the curving monumental staircase, with marble steps and polished teak balustrade, halting halfway up to look down on the revelers. From this vantage point he could see every corner of the huge hall. He was used to measuring, surveying, so he pulled up a mental grid of the room and quartered it, fast.

No Anya.

On up.

The monumental staircase gave onto huge glass doors. He pushed through them into a large frescoed room. He could see another set of doors across the room. There were slightly fewer people on the second floor, though it was still crowded. He’d refined his search parameters and could literally not see the people outside them. Men — eliminated from his scan. Too short and too tall women — the same. There were still a lot of potential Anyas but fewer.

Cal was tunnel-visioning now, barely seeing waiters holding out silver trays of food and champagne, noticing the string quartet at the end of the long hallway only glancingly.

He powered his way across the room and pushed open the doors into what looked like a fantasy land. It was a large hallway with an arcade, ringed by torches, elaborate frescoes covering every inch. Cherubs and shepherds and shepherdesses and goddesses. Huge, antique, enameled vases lined the marble-tiled floor, planted with tall palms interspersed with flowering shrubs, deeply scented. The arcade gave out onto an inner courtyard where another string quartet was playing and the sounds of Vivaldi drifted up, as in a dream.

There were fewer people in this room and Cal could see right down to the end. Nothing. Except …

There was a hidden alcove to the right. Someone had been standing in the alcove and now emerged into the hallway. A woman, dressed as a 1920s flapper. A dress with jet beads, just above her knees. Black hair in a short bob, a velvet hat with a net veil covering her face. Anya didn’t have black hair, her hair was honey blonde, but …

There was something about the way this woman moved.

There was something in the air in this corridor. It was charged, electric. There was a scent in the air, a mix of lavender and citrus, fresh and sultry at the same time. A scent that intoxicated.

Cal found himself moving faster and faster down the hallway. He’d worked in very dangerous places over the course of the years and he’d learned to move swiftly and very silently. It was second nature by now.

He was more than halfway down when the woman turned and he saw the sky blue eyes that glowed beneath the black lace veil.

His heart thundered and his breath grew short.

Anya.