Chapter 9

CHAPTER

NINE

CAL

Wake up hard and aching for Jack, the pillow wall still solid between us, take the boat to Piazza San Marco, sit at the cafe, wait for Azzura Scivolo to arrive, watch her eat her pastry, drink her espresso, and people-watch for a couple of hours before leaving.

Rinse. Repeat.

For the last two days, all we’d done was sit and wait, and it was driving me fucking crazy.

Or maybe it was the waking up next to Jack that was making me nuts.

Either way, I was tired of waiting for something to happen.

“If you’re so sure the painting isn’t at her house, then why are we still following her around?”

Jack took a deep breath and let it out through his nose, his nostrils flaring. I’d asked this question yesterday too.

“Because she’s back in Venice for something. We need to figure out what.”

“And you can’t find out anything using your hacker skills?” I already knew the answer because I had my own duo of handy hackers back in Seattle, and I’d asked them to work their magic. They’d turned up exactly nothing. The only thing they could find out was that her daughter, granddaughter, and some other family still lived in Venice, though their connection to Scivolo had all but been erased. Neither carried her last name, and it had taken hacking into Scivolo’s medical record to even find out she had a daughter. None of her family had a criminal record. Her daughter was a nurse, and her granddaughter taught primary school. Scivolo didn’t even have a cell phone we could track. She was as off the grid as she could get, and if I wasn’t looking at her with my own eyes, I might have believed Reuben’s intel about her being back in Venice was bullshit.

Jack rolled his eyes. “Nothing to find.”

I sat back in my seat, my ass nearly numb from lack of movement. The afternoon sun was bright, and it filtered between the open umbrellas over the cafe tables. My fake wedding ring caught the light, and I turned my hand, making the gold reflect on the table. I was chasing a flying bug with the little circle of reflected light when movement at the table where Scivolo’s bodyguards sat caught my attention.

One of the men had a sleek cell phone pressed to his ear, and I leaned forward to whisper to Jack. “Something’s happening.”

“I see it. Relax. Act natural.”

Reaching within myself, I found the place of calm I accessed right before I took out a target and watched. My skin itched with the need to move in, but I stayed put, my ass on the edge of my seat. We were too far away to hear what the bodyguard said, and it wouldn’t have mattered even if we could since neither of us spoke fluent Italian. The bodyguard ended the call, nodded to his comrade, who stood and tucked his phone back into his pocket. He moved quickly to the table where Scivolo sat, her eyes again obscured by large sunglasses while she read the newspaper and watched the tourists in the square.

The second the bodyguard leaned down to whisper in her ear, her entire demeanor changed. She was out of her seat in the blink of an eye, walking quickly toward the dock, her bodyguards flanking her on either side.

When they cleared the sightline of the cafe, I rose to my feet, ready to take off after them. “Let’s move.”

But Jack didn’t.

“What are you waiting for?”

He finally got to his feet. “If we go tearing after them, they are going to catch on that they are being followed.”

“Fuck that. If we wait here any longer, we’re going to lose them, and this is the most action we’ve seen from her for days.” I held out my hand. “Give me the keys. If you want to wait around, fine. But I’m following them.”

“I’m not giving you the keys, Cal.”

I growled my frustration, then remembered I didn’t need a goddamn boat to follow them through the canals. I ripped the gold band off my finger and tossed it onto the table, then took off running through the square.

I heard Jack yelling for me to stop, but I didn’t care. I ran toward where we’d docked our borrowed boat and saw Scivolo and her bodyguards pulling away from the dock and out into the canal. I already had my shirt off, yanking it over my head as I hit the dock and tossing it into our boat as I jumped onto the deck. I let my jeans fall as I toed off my boots and socks. Shifters were common around the world, but public nudity was still frowned upon in some places, so I stripped quickly, then jumped into the brackish water of the canal. Someone on a boat farther down the dock yelled at me, presumably shouting that there was no swimming allowed, but it was too late. I’d already ducked my head under the water, calling my animal form forward, and when my shift was complete, I came up just long enough to take a breath before disappearing under the surface again.

My eyes had been trained on Scivolo’s boat the entire time I was on the dock and while I was shifting, and I was able to spot it easily in the water, motoring down the canal at a brisk pace.

The water was deep enough that I could stay fully submerged while I was in pursuit, and I used my fluke to propel me forward, putting on a burst of speed.

Jack and his boat could kiss my ass.