J. Geissinger: Edge of Oblivion

“Oh my,” she said, still casually swinging her foot with its finely turned ankle back and forth.

“I wonder if it was something in the water. Too bad you weren’t able to assist him with a dose of your wonderful acupressure . It looks like his ‘inner gate’ could use a little oiling.”

He felt the tiniest twinge of admiration that she would risk something so bold purely out of spite, right before it was swallowed by a wave of blistering anger so strong he had to curl his hands into fists to control the itch to curl them around her neck.

“Try something like that again,” he said, his voice very low in his throat, “and you’ll find yourself missing a pair of hands.”

She flushed red, and he was gratified to see it. The porter struggled to stand. He found his footing and backed away toward the door, wiping his mouth on the sleeve of his beige linen uniform, still stammering apologies and assurances that someone would be up directly to attend to the mess. He reached the door and disappeared through it at a run.

Morgan bent and retrieved her handbag from the floor, then rose, all without the slightest bit of haste or discomposure. She retrieved one of her smaller suitcases from the row against the wall, then walked in easy, graceful strides to the door of the master suite. Inside the door she paused and turned, her hand on the doorframe, a smile on her face, the picture of untroubled elegance.

Only her eyes gave her away. The heat in her emerald gaze scorched the air between them like a lit fuse.

“And if you ever threaten me again, errand boy,” she said quietly, swinging the door shut, “you’ll find yourself missing your di —” The door slammed closed before he heard the final word, but he didn’t have to. He knew exactly what it was.

When the woman from housekeeping arrived twenty minutes later to clean the carpet, Xander was still standing in the middle of the living room, staring hard at the closed bedroom door.

It was two hours before she was sufficiently calmed to leave the master suite, and by then Xander was gone.

The shower helped. It was a mosaic-tiled, glass-enclosed expanse of luxury with silky lavender shampoo and French-milled grape seed oil soaps and three sets of jets set at various heights, the better to massage a body with hot, pulsing water from all angles. Seething, she spent what felt like forever under the sprays before she began to relax. When she emerged—puckered—there were Egyptian cotton towels, plush and pristine white, there were ivory cashmere robes hung from a gleaming silver dowel, there was a marble fireplace and what appeared to be a real Picasso hung above the dressing table. There was even a window with a view to the faraway, sunset-emblazoned hills.

What there was not was a gun. Which she very much would have liked to find hidden in one of the vanity drawers.

Bastard. Cold, arrogant bastard. If it weren’t for her promise to Jenna, she would put a bullet in his head and burn this place to the ground.

But she had work to do and couldn’t afford to spend any more time envisioning putting a gun against his temple or pushing him off the balcony or Suggesting to one of the hotel staff they poison his food. The sooner she found what she’d come for, the better.

And then to hell with him.

She dried her hair and dressed, then went out to the living room, expecting to find him skinning kittens or swallowing live goldfish, but there was only a pair of black kid-skin gloves—women’s gloves, supple and delicate—laid out beside a handwritten note on the glass-topped desk in the living room.

Dinner. Eight o’clock. Downstairs. Don’t be late.

A pair of gloves and seven words, all harmless in themselves. Yet nothing in as long as she could remember struck such a raw chord of bitter resentment deep in her heart. The collar, now this .

Did he really expect her to humor him and wear the gloves, voluntarily giving up the final Gift at her disposal? Leaving her defenseless, completely at the mercy of fate?

No. Her hands would remain bare, and God help him if he tried to force them on. As for dinner...she’d rather have dinner with the devil than with him.

She ignored the gloves, balled up the note, tossed it to the floor, and went down to the lobby, where she hailed a taxi and disappeared into the purple-blue haze of the warm Roman dusk.

From his position behind the spreading branches of a potted raffia palm in the lobby bar, Xander watched her go and won a bet with himself. Then he took the next cab and instructed the driver to follow her.

Morgan had no idea where she was going until she saw, ethereal and enormous and uplit in a vivid wash of gold, the jagged stone outline of the Colosseum. It was the hugest thing she’d ever seen, an ellipsis of pale yellow blocks of travertine and tufa the length of a football field with a three-story façade of superimposed arcades, arched hollows where enormous statues of gods and emperors had once stood. The dark hollows stared out over the city like rows of empty eyes.

“There!” she said to the driver, excited, pointing through the open window.

He glanced at her in the rearview mirror. He was graying and paunchy and utterly nondescript, but his eyes were like dark chocolate, liquid and sweet, and she saw the echo of the younger man he’d once been.

“ Dove? ” he said around his cigarette, pulling the two syllables out in a languid, sensual tenor that also belied his age. And made her appreciate his ambition.

“The Colosseum,” she said, hopeful. Surely that translated to any language?

“ È chiuso. ” He made a gesture with his hand that sent pale gray whorls of smoke rising in ghostly circles from the cigarette now held between his fingers. “ Tour fermano a cinque. ”

She recognized only one word of this languidly delivered answer, which was chiuso —closed.

“It’s okay.” She gave him the international sign for approval: a thumbs-up. “Please— per favore —take me to the Colosseum.”

He shrugged and kept on through the snarl of evening traffic, several times barely avoiding hitting one of the dozens of scooters that whizzed by the taxi at lightning speed. They turned onto Via dei Fori Imperiali, and Morgan watched it grow closer and closer, a hulking giant erected right in the heart of the city nearly two thousand years ago. The cab slowed to a stop at the curb. This garnered a chorus of irate honking and shouts of “Spostati!” from the line of cars behind them.

“ Grazie ,” she said, the only other Italian word she knew besides please . She leaned over the front seat, touched her hand to the driver’s shoulder, and met his eyes in the rear-view mirror.

“ Grazie ,” she said again, softer. He nodded, slowly, and she left him with a smile and the impression he’d been paid for the ride. And handsomely tipped.

Though denied access by locked iron gates, three times the height of a man, that closed off every arched entrance, throngs of people still strolled around the grassy perimeter of the Colosseum, talking, laughing, smoking, taking pictures in front of it. She felt like a tourist herself, awed and amazed, craning her neck to gaze up in wonder. She’d only ever been allowed out of Sommerley once, on a trip with Leander to Los Angeles, and that city was so elementally different from this one that trying to compare them would be like comparing water to fire.

But Rome. Oh, Rome.

Even the air was different here, warm and soft and filled with life, ripe with birdsong and honking horns, nearby laughter and far-off singing, heady with the scent of fresh-baked bread and sun-