What Comes Around by Kory M. Shrum

Author:Kory M. Shrum
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Timberlane Press

* * *

“Strega?” Matteo stepped forward timidly, his head bowed slightly in a picture of humility.

Lou couldn’t suppress her smile. “What do you want?”

Stefano stepped out of the office behind her and closed the door, locking it with a key from his pocket.

Matteo spoke in rapid-fire Italian, looking to Stefano for interpretation.

“She already knows that,” Stefano said. To Lou, “He doesn’t want you to tell Konstantine that he was whipped. He’s worried Konstantine will be upset.”

“Not bad,” Matteo said in shy English. “It’s okay.”

But this didn’t seem to be all. As the boy lingered, his eyes searched her face.

Stefano groaned. “Spit it out.”

Another rapid stream of Italian, this time punctuated with a flourish of hand gestures. But whatever the request was, Stefano clearly disapproved.

“No. No, Matteo.”

Matteo took this to mean he should ask again, and again, louder and louder until he received the answer he wanted.

After Stefano refused for the tenth time, Matteo turned to Lou. In exasperation, he cried out, “I want to go! I want to go. Back. With you.”

Lou laughed. “I already have a pet.”

And yet the little boy searched her face, waiting, begging for an answer.

Stefano pinched his brow. “He wants you to take him to the church where all the boys are. He thinks if they see you deliver him, it will be cool. I told him not to be silly.”

It was silly. Yet Lou understood.

Once she’d lost consciousness in a confessional. The priest got her to a hospital before she bled out on the cathedral’s floor, but he’d kept her guns and her bulletproof vest. So she’d had to go back and retrieve them. When she did, he’d rambled about God, and angels, asking Lou to explain what she was. Why she had the power to do what she did.

She didn’t have an answer for him. Yet that hadn’t stopped her from melding with the shadows of his office, performing a rather dramatic exit for no reason except to feed the old man’s superstitions.

It had been fun. Sometimes you just wanted to look cool.

She reached out to the boy. “Okay.”

He ran into her arms nearly squealing.

Stefano huffed behind them. But when Lou turned and he saw the boy in her arms, something in his face softened.

Or she thought it did. It was hard to tell. His grumpy, perpetually inconvenienced expression had returned already.

Lou didn’t care. With a knowing grin, she slid her shades down over her eyes and stepped into a pocket of shadow cast by the low-slung roof of the dark office.

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