Chapter 8
Sienna swallowed. "Lockdown?"
"The gates are magnetized. The terrace shutters are down. Dario has six men stationed on the perimeter and four in the inner corridors." He brought her hand up to his mouth, kissing the inside of her wrist, right over her galloping pulse. "No one enters. No one leaves. You stay in the suite, Sienna. I cannot protect you if you wander."
"Tazio, I feel like a prisoner in this room." She let just enough frustration bleed into her voice to sound natural. "Can't I at least walk to the library?"
"No," he said, his tone leaving no room for negotiation, even as his lips brushed her knuckles with tender adoration. "Donato’s spotters are watching the cliffs with long-range optics. If they see your face through a gallery window, they will know you survived the wreck without syndicate clearance. I will not risk you."
He stood up, retrieving his jacket from the valet stand.
"Dario has the override codes. If there is an emergency, he will move you to the reinforced bunker beneath the wine cellar." He paused at the door, turning back to look at her one last time. The shadows from the misty morning fell across his scarred brow, making him look ancient, majestic, and utterly lethal. "Rest, Sienna. When I return, this mess with Donato will be over. And you and I will sail south. Just the two of us."
"Be careful," she whispered.
A rare, genuine smile touched the corner of his lips. "Always, my brave girl."
The door swung shut.
*Clack. Clack.*
The magnetic deadbolts engaged. A moment later, the distant rumble of three armored SUVs echoed up through the cliff face, fading as the convoy descended the winding serpentine road toward the highway.
He was gone.
***
Sienna didn't waste a second.
The moment the engine noise dissolved into the rhythmic crash of the waves, she threw the duvet aside. She moved swiftly, silently, her bare feet padding across the travertine floor toward the master bathroom.
She knew she couldn't touch the bedroom door. The electronic lock was monitored from the central gatehouse, and Dario was likely sitting in the courtyard security hub with twelve closed-circuit monitors staring directly at the third-floor corridor.
And she knew about the cameras now.
Keeping her back turned to the ceiling cornice where the pinhole lens was hidden, Sienna grabbed a thick terrycloth bathrobe, wrapping it tightly around herself as if preparing to shower. She stepped into the sprawling marble bathroom, turned the brass shower handles to maximum heat, and let the scalding water thunder against the floor tiles.
Within three minutes, the small, high-ceilinged room was choked with dense, billowing steam.
The humidity was her ally. Salvage divers knew how lenses responded to sudden, saturated condensation. The tiny aperture in the ceiling vent blurred, its infrared sensor refracted into useless white glare by the thick moisture.
Sienna didn't turn toward the shower.
She climbed onto the edge of the clawfoot tub, reaching for the narrow, decorative transom window near the high ceiling. It was designed to vent moisture out over the cliffside, barely fourteen inches wide, framed in heavy brass. It was latched from the inside with an antique wing-nut.
Her fingers were still strong from hauling anchor chains. With two hard, wrenching twists, she forced the salt-encrusted nut to spin free.
She pushed the window open.
The freezing morning air rushed in, smelling of raw brine, wet stone, and pine.
Directly below her was a sheer three-hundred-foot drop straight into the churning surf of the Tyrrhenian Sea. The limestone cliff was jagged, slick with sea-spray and morning dew.
To anyone else, it was suicide.
To a girl who had spent ten years scaling the rocky grottos of Capri to free snagged mooring cables, it was simply an unroped traverse.
Sienna pulled off the bathrobe, wearing only a pair of dark running leggings and a close-fitting black thermal shirt she had pulled from the closet. She tied her dark hair back in a tight knot, took a single, deep diver’s breath to settle her racing pulse, and squeezed her shoulders through the narrow brass frame.
The wind hit her instantly, sharp and biting.
Her bare feet found purchase on a six-inch limestone architectural molding that ran horizontally along the villa’s outer facade. Below her, the black sea crashed against the reef with a thunderous roar. One slip, and the rocks would break her bones before the undertow dragged her into the trench.
She didn't look down.
In salvage diving, you never looked at the depth gauge when you were fighting a fouled line; you focused only on the next link of chain.
She pressed her chest flat against the cold stucco wall, sliding her feet inch by inch along the narrow ledge. Her hands gripped the protruding carved corbels supporting the upper roof. Twenty feet to the west, past the master suite’s exterior wall, was the arched balcony of Tazio’s private study.
She reached the iron balustrade of the study balcony, swinging her right leg over the cold metal and dropping silently onto the slate pavers.
She crouched low, listening.
The wind howled through the terrace columns, but there were no shouts from the courtyard below. The thick fog had completely obscured the upper facade from the ground guards.
The study’s French doors were locked, but marine locks were child’s play compared to the rusted brass padlocks she had pried off scuttled cargo holds. She slipped a slender steel hairgrip from her pocket, bent the tip into a tension wrench, and inserted it into the antique tumbler.
Three clicks. A gentle turn.
The door swung inward with a faint groan. Sienna slipped inside and pulled the glass shut behind her.
***
The study was freezing, smelling of beeswax, old parchment, and Tazio’s signature cedarwood cologne.
It felt less like an office and more like a private war room. Massive maritime navigational charts of the Mediterranean were pinned to the corkboards, crisscrossed with red grease-pencil lines tracking shipping lanes from Tangier to Naples.
Sienna moved directly behind the heavy mahogany desk.
She didn't touch his computer yet. Tazio was paranoid; modern operating systems logged keystrokes and sent push alerts to mobile phones whenever an unauthorized login was attempted.
Instead, she went to the wall safe behind the faux bookshelf.
She remembered the sequence from the night before. Tazio had been furious, moving fast, his long fingers punching the keys without shielding them from her view: *0-9-1-4-8-2.* The coordinates of his family’s ancestral village in Calabria.
She entered the numbers.
The electronic keypad chimed softly. The heavy steel door released with a hydraulic hiss.
Inside lay stacks of bundled Swiss francs, three spare Glock handguns, her confiscated diving certification cards, and at the very back, nestled on the bottom shelf—
The black Pelican case.
The exact same waterproof, shockproof military container she had dragged onto her skiff the night she pulled Tazio from the sea.
Her breath hitched.
Tazio had told Donato—and her—that the primary lockbox containing the syndicate’s Marseille ledgers and bearer bonds had gone down with the yacht’s safe into the eighty-meter trench. He had sworn that this container held only secondary transit papers.
Sienna hauled the heavy polymer case onto the mahogany desk.
