Jenny, absorbing all this, was filled with despair. She stood, her head pulled into her shoulders, which were slightly hunched, as if she needed to protect herself from the assault of his words. She had always thought that he'd believed in her; now she knew that had it not been for Dex's intervention, Zorzi would have rejected her as the others in the Order had wanted to do. His belief had been in Dexter, not in her.
Still, she was not yet prepared to give up. 'Why are we siting here when we should be trying to find Bravo?'
'I'd rather talk about you,' Zorzi said. 'Tell me what happened.'
'I was guarding the rectory where Bravo and Father Mosto were talking. I was attacked from behind, overpowered. The next thing I knew, I woke up in a utility room. When I went out into the corridor, I found Father Mosto with his throat slit and my knife beside him in a pool of blood.'
'Your knife.'
'Yes.'
'How do you suppose it got there?'
'That's obvious. Whoever assaulted me took it.'
'How would they know you had it on you?'
Jenny's heart skipped a beat. She glanced around at the four other Guardians, who were hanging on every word that was said. For the first time she viewed her situation in another light.
'Is this an interrogation? Do you think I murdered Father Mosto?'
Zorzi rose, paced back and forth in front of her. 'As you know, there is a traitor in our midst. Lately, as the death toll has mounted, it has occurred to me that there may be more than one traitor.' He stopped and leveled his gaze at her. 'You see what I mean.'
'All I see is that I've got to go after Bravo,' she said doggedly. 'I screwed up; it's my responsibility-'
'I'm afraid I can't allow that.'
'You think I'm a traitor,' Jenny said in a strangled voice.
There was that look again, reasserting the distance he'd put between them, and when he spoke, his tone was cold and unforgiving. 'You failed to protect our most important asset; that is unforgivable. As if that weren't enough, consider the situation from Bravo's point of view. He finds the body, the throat slit, your bloody knife beside the corpse, and you gone. What would you think if you were him?' Zorzi crumpled the message in his hand with a kind of cold fury that terrified her. 'His position is the same as mine, he can't afford to trust you.'
She stood up. 'You can't just-' She stopped, turning as the four other Guardians came toward her. 'This isn't right,' she said weakly, and felt immediately foolish, because if she were in Zorzi's place she knew she'd do the same thing he was doing.
'Now I must leave,' he said, 'to try and clean up the mess you made.' He turned back. 'Pray for me. Pray that I find Braverman Shaw before it's too late.'
With that damning accusation, he and two of the Guardians swept out. The heavy wood and iron door of the refectory slammed shut behind them.
Another wave of despair filled her, fueled by her sense of outrage and helplessness. She had lost the confidence of her mentor and was being detained by her own people, all because she had been implicated by her inattention, her schoolgirl crush, her own stupidity. Why hadn't she taken a page from Anthony Rule's book and kept herself free of emotional entanglements?
The two remaining Guardians stared at her with looks of mixed pity and hostility. She turned away. The hostility she could handle-she always had. It was the pity that unnerved her. To compound her stupidity, she took a wild couple of steps toward them. One backhanded her across the face while the other moved away, so he could cover her from a different angle. She staggered back, and the Guardian pushed her down into a chair and told her to stay there.
She glared up into his sneering face.
'This is how I always knew you would end up.' He looked at her as if she were a cockroach he was about to grind beneath his boot. 'You're a failure-worse, you're a disgrace.' He spat onto the patch of floor between her knees before stalking away.
Jenny swiveled around and put her arms on the table. She thought of the mess she had made of her life. She thought of Ronnie Kavanaugh and of Dexter Shaw. She thought of the other path that might have been, the path that had been snatched away from her, in whose terrible aftermath Dex had appeared to save her. But had he saved her? she thought bitterly. For what? For this?
She put her head down on her forearms. Last of all, she thought of Bravo. She hadn't wanted to think of him, but now in her misery she could not help herself. He could have been the one to save her, truly and finally, as in the end Dex had been unable to do. She thought she understood now why Dex had wanted her to guard his son. With his uncanny prescience, he knew-he had to have known, she was certain of it.
All at once, she heard the low derisive laughter of her guards-her former compatriots-and the sound cut through her like a knife blade. She was immediately ashamed; they could see for themselves the weakness they had always suspected would one day lay her low.
Then, into her mind appeared the image of Arcangela-and with it the memory of the life she had led, of the almost insupportable deprivations she had endured so that her charges could carry out their work. Sacrifice seemed inadequate for the path she had chosen. Either way, though, it was her courage now that seemed to wind through Jenny's veins and arteries like a vine that, though abused by frost and axe, refuses to die. Instead, it grew green in the springtime of her emotions. And now she realized that Arcangela had given her something more precious even than the advice and support she had taken from Dex-the Anchorite had given her a chance to take back her life.
Now, through the lens of Arcangela's uncanny eye, she saw how she was repeating with Bravo the mistakes she had made with Ronnie and, to some extent, with Dex. She had fallen under their spell. Why? Because she felt that on some level they would save her. But no one had come to save Arcangela; she had the inner strength to save herself.
While she was with the Anchorite she had been awed and, to some extent, cowed by both the extremity of Arcangela's circumstances and depth of her inner strength. Now she realized that she herself possessed the same courage. It only remained for her to claim it.
Easier said than done, because here she was, a prisoner, with Paolo Zorzi doubtless on his way to find Bravo, and she had her head in her hands, weeping. No wonder the two Guardians were laughing at her. She was about to lift her head up, to defy them once again, when it seemed as if she felt the touch of Arcangela's hand on her defeated shoulder, staying her.
Wait, a voice inside her head whispered, there's a better way.
She remained where she was, her head on her forearms, and continued to weep. All the while, her mind was working in fifth gear. If they thought her weak, then let them believe it all the more, for once let their perception of her work to her benefit. This was what Arcangela would do, she was sure of it. Arcangela, who had used the means forced on her, the means no one else wanted, to achieve extraordinary ends.
She began to sob, her shoulders hunched and trembling visibly.
'Look at her.' One of the guards laughed. 'Better bring her a handkerchief.'
'A towel is more like it,' the other guffawed.
She heard the scrape of boot soles on the worn stone floor, the creak of old wood as one of the Guardians bent over her chair. She could smell him and knew precisely how close he was to her.
'Here, take this,' he said shortly, 'before you bring on the acqua alta, ha ha-'
She flung out an elbow, putting all her physical strength and her outrage into it. The cocked elbow landed square in his eye socket and he gave a cry, muffled by the hands clasped to his face. The second Guardian started toward her, but she had the first one around the throat, had his throwing knife out, and she brandished it.
The second Guardian checked only for a split instant. Then he grinned.
'Don't make me use this,' Jenny warned.
The Guardian lifted his bladed weapon, the scimitar curve gleaming in the candlelight. 'Do I look worried?' he said with a smirk. He came on, his weapon swinging back. 'You don't have the guts.'
Jenny threw the knife butt first. With expert precision, it found the place just above his nose. As he fell, unconscious, Jenny smashed the first Guardian's face into her upraised knee and he, too, collapsed.
Jenny ran through the darkness. As soon as she had cleared the seawall, she could hear the lagoon lapping
