This Vicious Grace (The Last Finestra #1)(15)

His lip curled as she neared, and he leaned in to say something to the other boy that made them snicker.

Face hot, Alessa bent to fix an imaginary problem with her shoe.

Fine. Not Kaleb, then.

She found another target. Their huddle tightened as she neared, but Kamaria, Shomari, Nina, and Josef held their ground.

At Alessa’s tentative hello, Kamaria and Shomari glanced at each other, a brief look loaded with words unspoken. Kamaria uncrossed her arms. Shomari did not.

Silence fell after a round of strained greetings. The others nursed their drinks, but Alessa had nothing to hold, so she wedged her hands inside the deep pockets of her skirt, picking at a loose thread. If Saverio’s morale depended on her talent for small talk, the outlook was bleak.

Nina tugged on her long reddish braid. “Do any of the books in the Cittadella say when, exactly, Divorando will arrive?”

“No,” Alessa said. “We won’t know the date until the First Warning.”

The gods’ idea of a countdown clock to the final invasion was a month of blights, floods and storms and locusts, so people didn’t forget that something much worse was coming.

Nina didn’t seem reassured. “But it will be sometime this year. Aren’t you worried?”

“Of course, she isn’t,” said Josef. “That’s why Dea sends the First Warning, so we know to begin preparing, and that hasn’t happened yet, so we still have plenty of time.”

“Exactly,” Alessa said. “She won’t let us miss it.”

“Right,” Nina said. “How big, exactly, are the scarabeo?”

Apparently, Nina hadn’t outgrown her tendency to blurt out uncomfortable topics. Kamaria sighed. “Nina, most people will never even see one. Including you. Right, Finestra?”

“Not from inside the Fortezza,” Alessa said. “You can leave the scarabeo to me. And my Fonte, of course.”

The scarabeo were the last thing Alessa wanted to talk about.

Joseph cleared his throat. “Have you chosen, then?”

Fine. Second to last.

“Not yet.” Alessa’s smile pulled tight as a violin string about to snap.

As the silence stretched from uncomfortable to painful, Alessa caught the eye of a passing server, who extended his tray as far as his arms would reach so Alessa could snag a sweet.

“You should try one,” Alessa said to the others, smiling too brightly. “They’re absolutely to die for.”

The words stuck in her throat as everyone flinched. Where was a scarabeo when you wanted to be torn to bits?

She cast up a silent apology. Dea, I didn’t mean that. Please give me as much time as possible.

The paving stones didn’t open up and swallow her as she requested, so she pinned on a smile and excused herself from the group.

Saida Farid sat alone, scribbling what appeared to be a recipe in a small notebook.

Alessa cleared her throat so she didn’t startle the girl. “What are you writing?”

Saida flushed and put the notebook in her lap. “It’s just a pet project. I like to analyze food, try to figure out the ingredients of dishes so I can recreate them. My goal is to write a culinary history of Saverio, to memorialize our ancestors’ respective cultures through food.”

“That’s ambitious.”

“It started as a school assignment, but it got me thinking about how most families have special dishes they’ve passed down for generations that aren’t written down anywhere else. I want to make sure they’re recorded, just in case…” She trailed off. “How’s your…” She gestured at Alessa’s ear.

Self-consciously, Alessa checked to be sure her hairstyle was still covering it and took an empty seat. “It’s fine. Really. Barely a scratch.”

“Still. Must have been scary.”

At the other girl’s sympathy, tears pricked Alessa’s eyes. She smiled harder to force them back. “Knives are the least of my problems, right?”

Saida’s tawny complexion went ashen. “But you’ve been working to get that, um, sorted out, right?”

Damn. She’d been referring to the scarabeo, not her Fonte-killing problem.

“Absolutely.” Alessa stood quickly. “I am confident, and I have everything under control.”

Whoops. She hadn’t meant to say the last part out loud. It seemed to reassure Saida, though, so for once, her tendency to say the quiet part out loud hadn’t made things noticeably worse.



* * *



It was past midnight when Alessa returned to the relative peace of her rooms. Sleep offered the only escape from the hum of anxious energy twitching through her body, but her bed loomed rather than beckoned. Insomnia never felt more inevitable than when she settled herself in the middle of the massive four-poster monstrosity, acres of cold emptiness on either side.

Alessa flopped onto the couch instead.

She still didn’t know who to choose. The strongest? The person whose gift was most practical? If her chosen Fonte didn’t live long enough to fight, what difference did it make? She needed a Fonte who would live.

Choosing Emer, her first Fonte, had been so easy. His funeral, unbearable.

At first, she’d been so angry when people insisted he was a bit too gentle, but the thought became a lifeline. It was still her fault for choosing him, but maybe not entirely her fault he’d died.