Broken Compass

The rope bit into my palms as I rappelled down the shaft, my headlamp cutting a weak yellow cone through the black. Fifty feet below, the floor of the tomb waited. I knew because I'd dropped a pebble and counted. Three seconds. A long way to fall if the anchor gave.

It wouldn't give. I'd set it myself.

The air tasted like wet limestone and something older. Something that had been sealed in here since before Rome was a mud hut on a hill. My boots scraped the wall, and dust rained down into the darkness. I kept my breathing steady. In through the nose, out through the mouth. The way my father taught me on the cliffs above Kilkee when I was nine years old and terrified of heights.

He'd also taught me never to trust a man who smiled too much. I should've remembered that.

My feet hit stone. I unclipped from the line and swept my light across the chamber. Small. Maybe fifteen feet square. The walls were covered in frescoes, faded but intact, figures in profile with dark hair and long fingers, holding cups, holding birds, holding what looked like the reins of something. A funeral procession, probably. The Etruscans loved their processions.

And there, in the center of the floor, the sarcophagus.

I knelt beside it and ran my fingers along the lid. Alabaster. Veined with pink and gray, cool as river water. The carving showed a woman reclining on one elbow, her other hand extended, palm up. An offering pose. The inscription ran along the edge in letters I couldn't read, not yet, but I recognized the shape of the script. Seventh century BCE, maybe earlier. My heart did a little skip. The kind of skip that had gotten me into trouble in eleven countries.

"You're beautiful," I whispered. Talking to a dead woman. Not the strangest thing I'd done that week.

I reached for my tools.

That's when I heard it. A scuff of leather on stone, somewhere above me. In the shaft.

I killed my light and pressed my back against the sarcophagus. My hand found the knife on my belt. A small blade, more useful for cutting rope than for fighting, but it was what I had. The darkness was total. I counted my breaths and listened.

Nothing. Then, again. A soft sound, deliberate. Someone descending. Someone who knew how to move quietly and didn't care that I might hear.

"Sophia." A man's voice, calm and familiar, echoing down the shaft. "Don't do anything stupid."

I knew that voice. I knew the way it curled around my name like it had a right to.

Adrian.

"You're supposed to be in Florence," I said, not moving.

"I was. Then I heard you'd found the tomb."

"Who told you?"

"Does it matter?"

He landed on the chamber floor, lighter than a man his size should. I heard him unclip, heard the whisper of his jacket as he moved. He didn't turn on a light. He didn't need to. Adrian had always been comfortable in the dark.

"I'm going to turn on my lamp," he said. "Don't throw anything."

"I wasn't planning to."

"You threw a chisel at my head in Palermo."

"You deserved it."

He laughed. A low sound, almost warm. Then light flooded the chamber, and there he was. Tall, dark-haired, wearing a canvas jacket that had seen better decades and a smile that had seen better intentions. His eyes found mine and held them. Gray eyes. The color of a storm coming in off the Atlantic.

"You look good," he said.

"Don't."

"Just saying."

I turned back to the sarcophagus. My hands were steady. Good. I didn't want him to see them shake.

"You need to leave," I said.

"I can't do that."

"You can. You put one foot in front of the other, you climb the rope, you get in your car, and you drive away."

"I mean I won't."

I looked at him then. Really looked. There was something different in his face. Tighter around the mouth. The smile was still there, but it wasn't reaching his eyes.

"What did you do?" I asked.

"Why do you assume I did something?"

"Because I know you."

He flinched. Just barely. A flicker at the corner of his jaw. Good. Let him flinch.

"The Menotti family knows about this site," he said. "They've known for three weeks. They have people on the way."

My stomach dropped. The Menotti family. Art collectors with a private army and a taste for things that didn't belong to them. I'd crossed them once before, in Turkey, and I still had the scar on my shoulder to remember it by.

"How do you know?"

"Because they hired me to find it first."

The words landed like stones in still water. I felt the ripples move through me, one after another. I didn't say anything. I just waited.

"I took the job six months ago," he went on. "Before I knew you'd be here. Before I knew it was you."

"You've known it was me for weeks."

"Yes."

"And you didn't warn me."

"I'm warning you now."

"That's not the same thing."

He stepped closer. I stepped back. The sarcophagus was between us, the dead woman with her open palm, and I thought, absurdly, that she looked like she was waiting for one of us to put something in it.

"How long do we have?" I asked.

"An hour. Maybe less."

"And you expect me to trust you."

"I expect you to run."

He was right. That was the worst part. He was right, and I hated him for it, and I hated myself more because some small, stupid part of me was glad he was here. Glad I wasn't alone in the dark with the Menotti family closing in.

I looked at the sarcophagus. At the frescoes. At three thousand years of history that would be looted and sold and scattered across private collections if I walked away.

"I'm not leaving her," I said.

"Sophia."

"I'm not leaving her, Adrian."

He was quiet for a long moment. Then he sighed, the sound of a man who knew he'd already lost an argument he hadn't even started.

"Fine," he said. "Then we do it fast."

I didn't thank him. I didn't smile. I just turned back to the sarcophagus and got to work, my fingers finding the seam in the alabaster, my mind already three steps ahead, calculating time and weight and the exact angle of the shaft.

Above us, somewhere in the dark, I heard the first distant echo of footsteps.