Free Arcadia Awakens by Kai Meyer

listened in silence as she removed bits of cherry from her teeth with the tip of her tongue.
    “Fundling was probably one of those hostages,” said Alessandro. “Maybe his kidnappers were just passing through and stopped off at the hotel for the night, but more likely the hotelier was in on the abduction himself. At the time my father assumed that the child’s family had been murdered, and the boy would have been the next victim. The arson attack on the hotel saved his life. The men brought him to us at the castle, and before anyone could decide otherwise my mother handed him over to the domestic staff. Between them they brought Fundling up. Later on he helped out in the garages. He can take an engine apart and put it back together again in no time at all; he’s pretty good with that kind of thing. For the last year he’s been taking messages, acting as a chauffeur, all that.”
    “And no one ever found out who his parents were?”
    Alessandro shook his head again.
    She put her full glass down on the deck beside her before she could give way to the temptation to sip it after all. Not here. Most certainly not with Tano Carnevare around.
    The thought of him brought her back to reality and the present. She instinctively glanced at the bar. And there he stood between the open sliding doors, a bright green drink in his hand, wearing bathing trunks and an unbuttoned shirt. Up on the sundeck a woman called his name, but he didn’t respond. He simply returned Rosa’s gaze in the same piercing way he had at the baron’s funeral.
    “What is it?” she asked sharply.
    Alessandro looked over her shoulder, frowned, said nothing but just stared darkly at Tano, his whole body tense—and bared his teeth.
    Rosa had caught it out of the corner of her eye, and next moment she thought she must have been mistaken. When she looked straight at Alessandro, his face was still angry, but his lips were firmly pressed together.
    Tano turned without a word and strolled back inside the Gaia . As he passed the billiard table, he slammed a ball across it. The billiard ball struck the cushion so hard that it jumped over the side, came down with a crash on the teak floorboards, and rolled away with a clatter.
    “What was that all about?” asked Rosa in a low voice.
    Alessandro didn’t reply.
    Isola Luna looked like a piece of moon landscape that had once dropped from the sky and, for some inexplicable reason, had been drifting around the Tyrrhenian Sea ever since. Gray volcanic rock, with flecks of brown and green macchia shrubs. But even the tough furze, oleander, and holm oak stopped trying to grow halfway up the mountain, as if all life there was doomed in advance to failure.
    The Gaia glided into a bay at the south of the island. The fine sand of the beach had presumably been shipped in. At least, from a distance Rosa hadn’t spotted such perfect, clean sand anywhere else on the coast of Isola Luna. As they headed ashore in two of the yacht’s motorboats, Rosa didn’t see a single plastic bottle or the slightest scrap of garbage floating in the water. Unusual for Sicily.
    She and Alessandro were sitting in the bow of the white boat, while Tano’s gang filled the other benches. Tano himself was steering the boat toward a narrow pier with the aid of the outboard motor. Rosa felt his eyes boring into her back. Why didn’t he stare at one of the three girls who had come aboard with him? One black-haired beauty with the measurements of a model seemed particularly interested in him, but he hardly seemed to notice her.
    The two other young men were much less vivacious than the girls with them. They were good-looking southern Italians, both wearing mirrored sunglasses. Rosa thought they were about as interesting as a couple of pretty soaps in the cosmetics department.
    Alessandro stretched out his hand to help her ashore. She accepted the offer not because she needed assistance, but just because she wanted to touch him. However, she took her