Chapter 26

Ryan races after The Monster, but the two bodyguards block the wooden doors, the only way out.

Ryan tries to push past them, but they’re too strong. In accented English, one of them says, “Calm down. You go once he’s gone.”

“What’s his name? Why is he—?”

The other giant shakes his head. Ryan stops fighting and they step back. After a few minutes, the brutes move aside, opening a pathway to the stairs. Ryan thinks about questioning them, offering them money, but they’re hired hands and probably don’t know anything. And if he’s fast, maybe he can catch up with The Monster. Or maybe, just maybe, Nora followed him.

He races down the stairs, so fast he nearly tumbles. Bursting out the front doors into the sun from the piazza, he sees Nora. She has a concerned look on her face.

“Did you see him? Did you see where he went?”

“Better,” she says. “I spotted that Fiat and slipped one of my AirTags through the cracked window of his car.”

Back in the van, Ryan races around a curve. The vehicle feels like it might tip over but returns to four wheels. The sky has turned black, a storm blowing into the region.

“Whoa,” Nora says. “We won’t catch him if we’re dead or in a ditch.”

Ryan slows the van. He positions the rearview mirror so he can see Nora, who sits in the row immediately behind the bus’s single driver’s seat. She’s studying her phone, following the dot that tracks her AirTag.

“He’s on the move again,” she says, not looking up. They’ve tracked the blue dot to a place not too far from their B and B. The car stopped there for a few minutes, so they thought they had him. But he’s back on the road.

“Which way?”

Nora taps on her phone, like she’s trying to identify any landmarks in the direction The Monster is heading.

“Which way?” Ryan says again, more impatiently than he should.

“Stay on this road until we get to the roundabout. He’s on the A1. We’re a few miles away.”

Ryan steps on the gas and the van wobbles as it accelerates.

A raindrop splats the windshield, then another. He fumbles with the gauges until he finds the switch for the wipers, his main focus on the chase.

“What happened up there?” Nora finally asks.

Ryan’s mind is still racing, processing. Then he tells her: “He said she’s alive.”

“Wait, what?”

“And that she’s in danger.” Ryan fills her in on the rest. He keeps his eyes on the road but can feel the shock, or maybe skepticism, emanating off her.

Nora says, “And before he told you what’s going on, Pinky Man got a call and just took off?” She’s taken to calling him Pinky Man, which Ryan thinks fits. He wasn’t a monster. He’s just a man, a scared little man.

Ryan nods, as he takes the roundabout’s first exit onto Via Traversa Valdichiana.

It’s raining hard now, difficult to see. He’s always hated the rain since that night on Lovers’ Lane. He used to love the smell of an imminent rain, the clean feeling after heavy showers washed away the grime on the streets, the pollution in the air. He loved going for a run during a downpour. Ali called it le pétrichor, French for the pleasant smell after a rain. But now whenever it rains, he thinks of Ali’s matted hair, her makeup smeared, her milky white skin when she removed her shirt. Then her scream. And those monstrous hands with the missing pinky fingers yanking him out of the car.

Nora directs him to merge onto the A1, her eyes still on her phone tracking Pinky Man’s blue dot. “I think I know where he’s going.”

“Where?”

“The airport.”