‘I’m lucky to have you,’ I say fervently, and I mean it.
Ryan replies flatly out of the darkness, ‘I don’t see how. I can’t do what you do. I lost everything at the Galleria — I left my duffle bag with the coat-check girl, dropped my pack, which had a tonne of things in it, useful things. All I have is my phone, my wallet, passport, a folded-up picture of you that looks nothing like you, not any more. I’m bringing exactly zip to this little “mission” of ours. I can’t do any … magic,’ he ends falteringly, ‘not your kind, anyway. I’ll just hold you up. Get you killed.’
‘It doesn’t matter, Ryan,’ I whisper, reaching out and taking his hand unerringly in the darkness. ‘Right now, I couldn’t do this “magic” without you, and that’s the truth.’
He gives my hand an answering squeeze, and I feel his relief.
‘So you’ve still got my back?’ I remind him sternly of his words.
‘Always,’ he replies without hesitation. ‘Even when I can’t see a damned thing.’
I laugh and pull him to his feet, and he’s suddenly take charge, like the Ryan I remember from Paradise.
‘We need to get our bearings,’ he says, gripping me tightly, not letting me withdraw. ‘Work out how we’re supposed to get out of here without attracting any attention. But this place won’t open for hours. So, first, I want to see how far we’ve come, where we crash-landed.’
‘You crash-landed,’ I say sheepishly, turning him in the direction of the roof.
Ryan’s usually possessed of a natural, athlete’s grace; strength in every sense of the word. But the darkness has robbed him of any certainty and he stumbles as we begin to climb up the winding, uneven staircase in the dark. Even our linked fingers, my own unfaltering eyesight, can’t make him see where the handholds, steps and landings begin and end. In the light, the staircase defies logic. In the dark, to human eyes, it’s an impossibility.
‘We need to get back to the lakeside town I saw in my dream,’ I say over the laboured sound of Ryan’s breathing, the scuff of his boot heels on the stone. ‘I think I know where she is; there was a villa there, a large estate, with a smaller outbuilding of some kind, and a pier, on the water. I can still see it all in my head. We’ll work our way from there, okay?’
The plan sounds better than it is. Ryan can’t know that, at this point, there are way more holes than plan. What town? What villa? Where do I even begin to locate them when all I have are visual cues I picked up in a dream in the dead of night?
I’m pounded by another sudden wave of dizziness, and am so shaken, overwhelmed and nauseated that I think I will pass out. I don’t think I’ve ever been more afraid of the task ahead, and it makes me miss a step.
Even sightless as he is, Ryan catches me before I fall, his strong hands grasping me around the waist unerringly.
He turns me to him clumsily. ‘Forget what I said before,’ he breathes, feeling for the contours of my face. ‘Glow or no glow, whatever you look like, you’re still beautiful, and I’d know you anywhere.’
In the dark, Ryan can’t see me searching his face. He can’t see in my eyes all the fear I feel for him. Before I can change my mind, I reach up and pull his head down to me, kiss him lightly, lingeringly, upon the lips, before drawing back.
I ignore the lick of fire that thrills through me like live current that seems to whisper: Forbidden.
It’s just a kiss, I tell myself fiercely. I must have done so much worse, in my time.
Beneath my hands, Ryan is shocked into stillness.
What I feel for him is so different from what I felt for Luc. Loss, sorrow, regret: these things are already built into every word we utter, every glance we share, accompanying us moment by moment, like spectres at a feast. They only serve to heighten the complex, hard-won love that has somehow flowered between us. People say that you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone. But I do know. What we have is precious and rare, and so utterly terrifying.
I can tell that Ryan hadn’t really expected me to kiss him again. Not after what happened the last time. He’d actually meant what he’d said about crumbs being enough. He’d been teasing me when he talked of tolerance levels and comfort zones.
His love is so humbling that I’m suddenly glad he can’t see me.
‘Maybe that’s the secret to working “us” out,’ I laugh awkwardly to cover my terror, ‘taking it one tiny step at a time.’
‘Here’s to more steps like that one,’ Ryan answers shakily.
‘You deserve so much more than this,’ I murmur. ‘Than me.’
I can’t bring myself to tell him I love him, for fear it’ll all go to hell the way Luc and I did. I’m cursed, and maybe I always will be.
‘I couldn’t even dream up someone like you,’ Ryan mutters, his hands tightening on me, drawing me closer, wanting more, in the human way of things.
But then I hear the sound of something mechanical, far, far below us. A noise so faint it could be the sound a pebble makes hitting the bottom of a dry well.
‘What is it?’ Ryan says, confused, as something primal flares in me, some instinct for danger.
Fear propels me instantly into motion. I start moving upwards again, hauling him along by the front of his leather jacket.
‘C’è qualcuno?’ a man says below, faintly but clearly in Italian. Is anyone there?
‘Cosa c’è?’ another voice replies sharply, also in Italian, also male. What is it?
‘Noises — listen,’ the first man replies.
Ryan’s footfalls, his laboured breathing, sound so terribly loud.
‘I hear nothing; you’re jumping at shadows,’ the second voice says dismissively after a pause.
‘I tell you, I heard something,’ the first man insists.
‘Pietro’s voice is loud enough to wake the dead,’ comes the reply. ‘He’s probably on his way to meet us with the others.’
There’s the faint sound of tapping. The noises move steadily closer, and I’m starting to pick up the interior buzz the two men give out, as if each carries a hive inside him: of thought, feeling, imagery, energy.
‘Ryan,’ I say, my voice low and desperate. ‘You have to hurry. We can’t be seen here. We can’t be questioned.’
‘By who?’ Ryan says, exasperated, unable to hear the echo of footsteps from below. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘I tell you, there’s someone up there!’ The first voice is insistent. ‘Pietro?’ he calls.
‘We can’t be found here, Ryan!’ I hiss, exploding back into motion. ‘I won’t allow myself to be trapped again.’
We stumble towards the doorway that leads out onto the lower level of the roof. As we exit beneath the stone lintel onto the north-facing walkway, I’m immediately hit with a sensation of vertigo so powerful, I have to lean against the inner wall, let Ryan take in the jaw-dropping view on his own until the world ceases to buckle around me.
When my sight grows clearer, I see a faint pink line streaking the far horizon, growing steadily all the time, eating away the edges of night, the roofline of the Galleria smouldering to our left. Though there are miles of open sky all around me, I feel like a rat in a cage.
‘We have to hide!’ I tell Ryan pleadingly.
Ryan doesn’t turn, still awed by the whole of Milan spread out before him. ‘Not before we get our bearings, Merce, there’s