The Woman With Pink Hair
The helicopter dropped Lena Bassi onto a cliff.
That was how it felt. One moment there was only blue below her, the sea so bright it hurt her eyes. The next, a white circle carved into the rock rushed up to meet the skids, and the whole machine shook as it landed.
“Madonna,” Lena whispered, and let go of the seat in front of her.
Beside her, Giulia had her eyes shut. Pietro, the photographer, was already unbuckling, his camera bags hugged to his chest like children.
The door slid open. Heat poured in. It smelled of hot stone and wild thyme and the sea. Somewhere above them, a thousand cicadas were screaming.
And standing at the edge of the landing pad, perfectly still, was a man the size of a wardrobe.
He wore black from neck to boots. Black trousers, black shirt, a black vest with too many pockets. His head was shaved clean and shone in the sun. A thick dark beard, threaded with a little grey, covered the lower half of his face. A coiled wire ran from his ear down into his collar.
He did not smile. He did not wave. He watched them climb out the way a cat watches birds.
Lena pushed her oversized glasses up her nose and lifted her chin. She was used to men who did not smile. She dressed them for a living.
“Good afternoon,” she called over the dying whine of the rotors. “Lena Bassi. Styling. These are Pietro and Giulia. We are here for Mr. Vlastos.”
“I know who you are,” the man said.
His voice was deep enough to feel in her ribs. His English was good, but every word carried the weight of Greek behind it.
“Wonderful. Then you know we have three cases of clothes and very little time.” She pointed at the luggage two guards were pulling from the hold. “The light on the terrace will be perfect at five. We must steam everything before—”
“Phones,” he said.
He held out a small metal box with a lid.
Pietro sighed and dropped his phone in without arguing. Giulia did the same, looking at Lena with wide eyes.
Lena kept her phone in her hand. “I need that. My clients call me.”
“Your clients can wait four hours.”
“You do not know my clients.”
“You do not know this island,” he said. “Guests do not photograph the house. Guests do not photograph the guards. Guests do not photograph the paths, the doors or the windows. The camera of the photographer is checked before he leaves. Your phone goes in the box.”
He did not raise his voice. He did not need to. He simply stood there with the box held out, as patient as a mountain.
Lena dropped her phone in. It landed with a sad little clink.
“Thank you,” he said, which somehow made it worse.
Then he crouched beside her biggest case and opened it.
“Excuse me,” Lena said. “Those are garments.”
He did not answer. His huge hands moved through her things with surprising care. He lifted the folded shirts without creasing them. He checked the lining of a jacket. He opened her sewing roll, the old leather one with the pockets, and looked at the needles, the chalk, the measuring tape, the pins in their tin.
Then he lifted out her shears.
They were long and heavy, the steel dark with age, the black handles worn smooth by hands that were not hers. Two letters had been scratched into one handle a very long time ago. R.B.
He weighed them in his palm.
“These stay with me,” he said.
“No.” The word came out of her before she could think. “No, absolutely not. Those are my grandmother’s.”
“They are a weapon.”
“They are scissors!”
“They are twenty-five centimetres of sharp steel,” he said, “on an island where my employer sleeps.”
“Your employer is in no danger from me unless he wears brown shoes with a black suit.” Lena stepped closer and held out her hand. “My grandmother cut wedding dresses with those for fifty years. In Naples. She gave them to me when her hands stopped working. They do not leave my sight.”
He looked at her hand. Then at her face.
His eyes were very dark, almost black, and they missed nothing. Not her pink hair, cut short and blunt at her jaw. Not the freckles the sun had already found. Not the way her fingers shook just slightly, because the shears were the only thing she owned that she could never replace.
“They will not leave mine,” he said. “You will have them back when you leave.”
He slipped them into one of the many pockets of his vest and closed the zip. Then he stood. Standing, he blocked out half the sky.
“This way,” he said, and walked off up the path without looking back.
Giulia let out a breath. “Lena,” she whispered in Italian. “Who is that?”
Lena watched the black shape move between the olive trees.
“A wardrobe,” she said. “A very big, very rude wardrobe.”
The Villa Aetós was white stone and glass, built into the mountain as if it had grown there. Terraces stepped down toward the sea. Pools spilled over the cliff edge and seemed to pour straight into the Aegean. There were no other houses anywhere. No roads. No village. Only the villa, the olive trees, the hot white rock and the endless blue.
“Eagle Island,” Pietro murmured, setting up his tripod on the west terrace. “It suits him. A man who builds his nest where no one can reach it.”
“Do not let him hear you say that,” Lena said. “He will take your tripod.”
She meant the Wardrobe. He stood at the far end of the terrace with his arms folded, close enough to watch every move, far enough to pretend he was not there. Twice she caught him looking at her. Twice he did not look away.
The housekeeper was worse. She was short and solid, dressed in black, her grey hair pulled into a bun so tight it seemed to lift her eyebrows. She looked at Lena’s pink hair the way some people look at a stain.
“Agatha,” she said, as if her name were a warning. “You need water, you ask me. You need a toilet, you ask me. You need anything else, you do not need it.”
“Thank you, Agatha,” Lena said sweetly. “I love your bun. Very strong.”
Agatha sniffed and marched away. But ten minutes later a tray of iced lemon water appeared on the table beside the clothing rail, and nobody else on the terrace had been brought anything at all.
At five o’clock exactly, Kyros Vlastos walked out of the house.
Lena had dressed politicians, footballers, a prince who cried at fittings and an old film star who flirted with her mirror. She had never felt a terrace go silent like that.
He was tall and broad, with hair the color of midnight swept back from a hard, handsome face. A nose like a statue. A jaw already dark with stubble at five in the afternoon. And eyes so black they seemed to drink the light.
He looked at the rail of clothes. He looked at Pietro. He looked at her.
“You have one hour,” he said.
“Then we will need only forty minutes,” Lena answered. “Good afternoon, Mr. Vlastos. I am Lena. Please take off your shirt.”
Somewhere behind her, Giulia made a tiny strangled sound.
Kyros raised one eyebrow. It was the smallest movement, but it felt like the weather changing.
“For the linen,” Lena explained, holding up a white shirt. “The magazine wants a man at home on his island. Relaxed. Open collar. Sea behind him. Women in Milan will buy the magazine for this shirt alone.”
“No,” he said.
“Mr. Vlastos—”
“No open collar.”
He said it quietly. But something moved behind his eyes, and Lena, who spent her life reading what bodies said before mouths did, saw his hand rise almost to his throat and stop.
Then he turned his head toward the sea, and she saw it. A pale, jagged line that began somewhere beneath his collar and climbed the side of his neck. Old. White. Not the kind of scar a man got from falling off a bicycle.
Lena put the linen shirt back on the rail.
She did not ask. She did not look at it again. She pulled out the second option instead, the one she had packed just in case: a black shirt with a high, soft band collar, cut close at the shoulders, and a charcoal jacket so dark it was almost black.
“Then we tell a different story,” she said. “Not a man relaxing on his island. A man who owns it.”
He looked at the black shirt for a long moment. Then at her.
“You did not ask,” he said.
“Clothes keep a man’s secrets if he wants them kept,” Lena said simply. “That is their job. My job is to choose the right ones.”
Something in his face changed. It was not a smile. Lena was not sure his face knew how to make one. But the hardness eased by a fraction, the way ice cracks long before it melts.
He took the shirt and went inside to change.
When he came back, Pietro actually swore under his breath. The black against the white stone, the sea behind him, the collar high and clean under that hard jaw. He looked like a king in exile. He looked dangerous.
He looked, Lena thought with satisfaction, exactly right.
The shoot took thirty-eight minutes. Kyros did not smile once. Pietro stopped asking him to. It did not matter. The pictures were better without it.
When it was over, Kyros walked to the clothing rail and ran his fingers down the sleeve of the charcoal jacket.
“Who made this?” he asked.
“I did. I altered it last night for your measurements. Your office sent them.”
“My tailor in London died in the spring,” Kyros said. “His son has taken over. His son should be making tents.” He looked at her over the rail. “I have a closet upstairs full of his mistakes. Autumn is coming. Athens. London. Meetings with old men who judge a man by his cuffs.”
Lena waited. She had learned that the most important part of any negotiation was keeping her mouth shut.
“Stay five days,” he said. “Fix what can be fixed. Burn what cannot.” He named a fee.
Lena did not let her face move. Inside, something leaped. That fee was a year of rent for her little atelier by the canals in Milan. It was the overdue bill from the fabric supplier. It was breathing room for the first time since Davide had walked out with her sketchbooks and her name.
“Five days,” she said. “I will need a room with good light, a steamer, a large table, and my grandmother’s shears.”
Kyros glanced past her shoulder.
The Wardrobe had not moved from his place at the end of the terrace. His face gave away nothing.
“Yanni will see to it,” Kyros said. Then he walked back into the house, and the terrace started breathing again.
At sunset the helicopter carried Pietro and Giulia away. Giulia hugged her hard on the landing pad and whispered, “Call me every night,” and Lena did not have the heart to say she had no phone to call with.
Then the machine lifted, tilted, and became a black dot against the orange sky. Then nothing.
The cicadas had gone quiet. The wind had a new edge to it, cool and restless, pulling at her hair.
Lena turned around.
Yanni stood behind her, the metal box under one arm. He held out her phone.
“One hour each evening,” he said. “In the security room. With me.”
She took it. “And my shears?”
“You will have them every morning at eight,” he said. “You will give them back to me every night at eight.”
“You are joking.”
He looked at her. He did not look like a man who had ever made a joke in his life.
“Every morning,” Lena repeated slowly, “you will bring me my own scissors. And every night, you will take them away again. Like a prison guard.”
“Like a man who does his job,” Yanni said.
He turned and walked toward the villa. After a few steps, he stopped and looked back at her over one enormous shoulder.
“Five days, Miss Bassi,” he said. “Try not to cut anyone.”
Measuring the Mountain
Yanni Stavrou woke at five, as he had every morning for nine years.
He did not need an alarm. His body simply opened its eyes in the dark and was ready. He dressed in black, checked his weapon, clipped the radio to his vest and walked the outer path before the sun came up. The helipad. The olive grove. The steps down to the boathouse in the north cove. The long white wall of the villa, every door, every window.
Everything was where it should be. Everything was quiet.
That was how he liked it. Quiet meant safe. Safe meant he had done his job.
At seven, the Boss flew to Athens.
Kyros stopped on the landing pad with his jacket over one arm and the rotors already turning. The merger meetings had started again. The Boss had the grey look around the eyes that meant a headache was coming and he would not admit it.
“Three days,” Kyros said over the noise. “Maybe four. Keep the stylist happy and keep her out of the West Wing.”
“Malista,” Yanni said.
Kyros looked at him for a second longer than usual. “She saw the scar,” he said. “She said nothing.”
“I saw.”
“Most people say something.” The Boss climbed into the helicopter. “Pay attention to people who do not.”
Then he was gone, a black shape shrinking into the blue, and the island belonged to Yanni.
At eight o’clock exactly, he knocked on the door of the East Wing sitting room.
Agatha’s girls had worked half the night. The sofas had been pushed to the walls. A long table stood under the tall windows, covered with white paper. Two steamers waited in the corner. A rail held twenty of the Boss’s suits, sorted by color, each one hanging like a man waiting to hear bad news.
Lena Bassi stood in the middle of it in a yellow dress and bare feet, her pink hair pushed back by the oversized glasses she had shoved on top of her head. She had a pencil behind one ear and a pin between her lips.
She took the pin out and held out her hand.
Yanni unzipped his vest pocket and laid the shears across her palm.
“Eight o’clock,” she said. “You are very punctual for a wardrobe.”
“I am not a wardrobe.”
“You are the size of one. You are made of wood. And you keep things locked inside you.” She turned the shears in her hand, checking the blades the way he checked a weapon. “Thank you for not breaking them.”
“I do not break things.”
“No,” she said, looking up at him. “I think you are the kind of man who stops other people from breaking things. That is different.”
He did not know what to say to that, so he said nothing. He went to stand by the door.
She worked.
He had expected chatter. He got some. She talked to the suits as if they could hear her. She called one jacket a liar and another a coward. She told a pair of grey trousers they should be ashamed of themselves. She sang under her breath in Italian, songs that sounded old, songs a grandmother might sing in a kitchen.
But mostly she worked, and that he had not expected.
She was fast. Her hands never stopped. She ripped out seams in single long pulls. She chalked lines without measuring and they were straight. She held fabric up to the window, turned it, frowned at it, and cut, and the shears made a sound like breath. Shhhk.
Yanni had watched men strip and clean rifles with less focus.
At eleven, she put the shears down and turned around.
“Your jacket is lying,” she said.
He looked down at himself. He wore his black field vest over a black shirt. No jacket.
“The one on the chair in your security room,” she said. “Last night, while I called my assistant, I looked at it. Black. The lining is worn through here.” She touched her own left side, just under the ribs. “Because of the gun. And the seam across the back is stretched, because your shoulders are too big for the size they gave you. So when you wear it, you stand with your arms forward to stop it tearing. That is why you look like you are about to hit someone.”
“I am always about to hit someone.”
“No, you are not. That is the lie.” She picked up her measuring tape and snapped it once between her hands. “Come here.”
“No.”
“Mr. Vlastos asked me to fix his wardrobe.” A small smile tugged at her mouth. “You are the biggest piece of furniture in it.”
He should have said no again. He had said no to princes. He had said no to ministers and to a famous singer who wanted to bring her dog on the helicopter.
Instead he crossed the room and stood in front of her.
She had to tip her head back to look at him. She was small. The top of her pink head barely reached his collarbone.
“Arms out,” she said.
He lifted his arms.
She stepped close and passed the tape around his chest. Her arms had to stretch wide to do it. For one moment her cheek was almost against his shirt, and he smelled her. Not perfume. Soap, and steam, and something warm like bread.
Her fingers pressed the tape flat over his heart.
He stopped breathing.
She read the number, said it under her breath in Italian, and moved on. Shoulders. Back. The length of his arm, from the bone at his shoulder to the bone at his wrist. Her fingertips were light and quick and sure, and everywhere they touched, his skin woke up as if someone had flipped a switch.
“You can breathe,” she said, not looking up. “I am measuring, not stealing your soul.”
He breathed.
She reached for his right hand to measure the wrist, and stopped. Her thumb moved across his knuckles, over the thin white scar that ran across all four.
“How?” she asked.
“A window,” he said. “A long time ago.”
“Were you going in or coming out?”
Nobody had ever asked him that. He looked down at her.
“In,” he said. “There was a child on the other side.”
She was quiet for a moment. Then she wrote the number down and let go of his hand, and he missed the weight of her thumb at once.
“I am making you a suit,” she said.
“I have suits.”
“You have sacks with buttons.” She went to her largest case and pulled out a bolt of cloth, dark charcoal wool, so fine it moved like water when she unrolled a length across the table. “My grandmother always said a good tailor never travels without one piece of good cloth. In case of emergency.”
“This is not an emergency.”
“You are wearing black cargo pockets to guard a billionaire,” Lena said. “This is a fashion emergency.”
Behind them, someone sniffed.
Agatha stood in the doorway with a tray. Bread, cheese, tomatoes, olives, a jug of water with lemon. She put it down on the end of the table, looked at Yanni with his arms still half raised, looked at the tape around Lena’s neck, and said nothing at all in a very loud way.
“Efcharisto, Agatha,” Lena said.
Agatha’s eyebrows went up. “You speak Greek?”
“Four words. Thank you, good morning, beautiful and sea.”
Agatha made a sound that might, in a gentler woman, have been a laugh. On her way out, she patted Yanni twice on the arm, the way she might pat a dog that had finally learned to sit.
The wind came in the afternoon.
Yanni felt it before he saw it. A change in the air, cooler, drier, pushing in from the north. By four the olive trees were tossing their silver heads. By five the sea had turned from glass to white teeth, and the flags on the boathouse snapped like gunshots.
The meltemi. The summer wind of the islands. It came every year, and when it came hard, nothing flew and nothing small could cross the water.
At five-thirty a little blue fishing boat came bucking into the north cove, nearly sideways in the waves. Yanni went down to catch the rope.
The boy at the wheel was Stelios, Agatha’s sister’s grandson, from Lyra, the next island over, twenty minutes away when the sea was kind. He brought bread and fish and vegetables twice a week. He was nineteen, thin, with a quick grin and a phone that never left his hand.
“Kyrie Yanni!” Stelios shouted over the wind, throwing boxes onto the dock. “The sea is crazy! I cannot go back today!”
“Then you sleep in the boathouse,” Yanni said. “And you stay out of the main house.”
“Of course, of course.”
Lena had come down the steps behind him. She had wanted air, she said. She stood at the bottom of the stairs with her yellow dress whipping around her legs and her glasses spotted with salt.
She watched Stelios carry the boxes up. Then she leaned closer to Yanni and spoke under the wind.
“Those shoes,” she said.
Yanni glanced at the boy’s feet. White sneakers. Clean.
“What about them?”
“They are eight hundred euros. Last season, but real. I dressed a footballer in that exact pair in March.” She tilted her head. “That watch too. Very expensive. Strange things for a boy who carries tomatoes.”
“Tourists leave things on boats,” Yanni said. “Boys find things. Or they buy copies.”
“They are not copies,” Lena said. “I know shoes, Wardrobe. Copies never get the stitching right.”
He looked at the boy again. Then he filed it away, in the place where he kept small things that did not matter yet. It was not his job to judge a boy’s shoes.
That night he walked the perimeter twice instead of once.
The wind howled through the olive grove. Up at the villa, every window was dark but one: the East Wing, where a lamp still burned. She was still working. He had taken the shears at eight, and she had looked at him as if he had stolen bread from a child, and then she had started hand-stitching with a needle instead.
At midnight, above the north cove, he saw a light in the sky.
Small. Red. Moving against the wind where no bird would fly.
Yanni ran.
He took the service path down at full speed, gravel sliding under his boots, the radio crackling at his shoulder. “Petro. Manoli. North cove. Something in the air.”
By the time he reached the rocks, the light was gone. Only black water and white foam and the wind screaming in his ears. The little blue boat rocked at the dock, tied tight. The boathouse door was shut. No light behind it.
He stood there for a long time, breathing hard, searching the dark.
Nothing.
When he finally climbed back up, his chest burning, he stopped below the East Wing and looked up.
She was standing at the window. The lamp behind her turned her hair into a pink halo and her body into a dark shape inside a white shirt. She had seen him run. She had seen him come back with nothing.
She lifted one hand.
Yanni did not wave. He was on duty. He did not wave at guests.
She kept her hand there anyway, flat against the glass, waiting.
After a long moment, he lifted his.
The wind blew all night. In the morning, the pilot in Athens called to say nothing would fly for three days, maybe four. The Boss was stuck on the mainland. The boy was stuck in the boathouse.
And Lena Bassi, who had come for one afternoon, was stuck on Eagle Island with him.
The Fires of Saint John
By the third morning, Lena knew three things about the wind.
It never stopped. It found every open window in the villa and slammed it. And it made the man who guarded her even quieter than before, which she would have said was impossible.
He brought her shears at eight. He took them at eight. In between, he stood by the door of her workroom like a black statue and said perhaps twenty words a day. She counted.
But he watched. Oh, he watched. Every time she looked up from the table, his dark eyes were already on her, and every time, he did not look away. It made her skin hot. It made her cut a sleeve two centimetres too short and have to start again, which had not happened to her since she was seventeen.
In the evening he took her to the security room for her hour with the phone.
The room was cool and dim and full of screens. Twenty small squares of the island glowed in grey and green: the helipad, the paths, the pools, the long white walls. The wind made the olive trees shake on every screen at once, as if the whole island were shivering.
Lena sat in his chair. It was far too big for her. She called Giulia and told her she was fine, she was rich, she was a prisoner, the food was wonderful and the jailer was enormous.
Yanni stood behind her with his arms folded. He did not pretend not to listen.
When she hung up, she turned the chair around to face him.
“You can ask,” she said.
“Ask what?”
“Why I took this job. Why I said yes so fast. You were thinking it on the terrace. I saw you.”
He took his time. “Why did you?”
“Because I am almost broke.” She said it lightly, but it still scratched her throat. “Two years ago I had a business partner. Davide. He was also my fiancé. Very handsome. Very good with clients. Not so good with needles.” She shrugged. “One night he went through my sketchbooks. All of them. Five years of designs. He photographed every page while I slept. Then he sold them to a big fashion house under his own name and left.”
Yanni’s jaw moved under the beard.
“I could not prove it,” Lena said. “My books, his photos. My word, his lawyers. So now I have a tiny atelier above a bakery, and a lot of debts, and I keep my sketchbooks under my pillow like a crazy woman.” She smiled without much humor. “That is why I wanted my phone. And my shears. Everything I have, I hold in my hands. I do not let people go through my things anymore.”
He looked at her without speaking.
“I went through your things,” he said. “On the helipad.”
“Yes.”
“I am sorry.”
The words were stiff, as if they were not used often. Lena blinked at him.
“That is the most you have ever said to me,” she told him.
“It is the most I have said to anyone this month.”
She laughed. She could not help it. And the corner of his mouth moved, under the beard, just a little. Not a smile. But the place where a smile would go, one day, if someone was patient.
Lena had always been very patient with difficult fabric.
“Tonight is Saint John,” Agatha announced at dinner, banging a plate of grilled fish onto the kitchen table in front of Lena. “The staff make a fire on the south beach. You come.”
It was not a question. Very little Agatha said was a question.
“What happens at the fire?” Lena asked.
“We eat. We drink. We jump.” Agatha looked at her over the fish. “Three times over the flames. You leave your bad luck in the fire. The young girls make wishes about husbands.” She sniffed. “You are not so young. But you have the hair of a young fool. Maybe it works.”
“Agatha,” Lena said, “I think you like me.”
“I think you are too thin.” Agatha pushed more bread at her. “Eat.”
The south beach was a curve of pale pebbles at the bottom of a long stone stair, tucked under the ridge where the cliffs broke the wind. Down there the air was almost still. The sea came in long and slow instead of white and wild, and the stars were so thick above the black water that they looked spilled.
The fire was already roaring when Lena reached the bottom. The guards were there, Petros and Manolis, out of their black vests for once, in t-shirts, laughing. The old groundskeeper, Thodoris, was playing something on a small stringed instrument. Two of Agatha’s girls from the kitchen were roasting sausages on long sticks.
And Stelios was there, sitting on a rock with his phone, its blue light on his face. He held it up toward Agatha and said something pleading in Greek.
Agatha rolled her eyes to heaven. She took a paper napkin from the basket of bread, wrote something on it with a pencil from her apron pocket, and slapped it into his hand.
“The guest internet,” she told Lena in English, seeing her look. “Not the house one. The house one is for Yanni and his machines. The boy cries without his phone like a baby without milk.”
Stelios grinned and bent over his screen, typing fast. On his wrist, the expensive watch caught the firelight. Lena looked at it, and then at the white sneakers, and then away, because it was not her business and tonight she did not want anything to be her business.
Yanni came down the stairs last.
He had not changed. Black shirt, black trousers, the radio on his shoulder. He did not sit. He stood at the edge of the firelight with his back to the cliff, where he could see the whole beach and the stair and the sea all at once.
Lena took two glasses of wine and walked over to him.
“I am on duty,” he said before she could offer.
“You are always on duty.”
“Yes.”
She drank from one glass and held the other. “Do you ever stop?”
He watched the fire. “Nine years,” he said. “I have worked for him nine years. Before that, eleven in the navy. I dived. Ships, harbors, places where men put things they did not want found.” His eyes moved across the beach, the stair, the black water. “A man who sleeps with one ear open is useful. He is not a man who stops.”
“Did somebody tell you that?”
A pause. “A woman told me something like it,” he said. “Years ago.”
Lena wanted to ask. She did not. She had learned, from Kyros on the terrace, that some men opened only when you stopped trying to open them.
The music changed. Thodoris began to play faster. The kitchen girls shrieked and ran at the fire, hand in hand, and jumped. The flames had burned down low enough for it, but they still licked at their ankles. Everyone cheered. Petros jumped, then Manolis, roaring like a bull. Agatha, to Lena’s astonishment, hitched up her black skirt and jumped once, very neatly, and came back looking as if nothing had happened.
“You,” Agatha called to Lena. “Three times. Go.”
Lena put the glasses down on a rock. She looked up at Yanni.
“Come,” she said.
“No.”
“You have bad luck. I can see it from here. It is hanging off you like a coat that does not fit.”
“I am on duty.”
“Then guard me,” Lena said, and took his hand.
His hand was enormous. Warm. Rough. It closed around hers before he seemed to decide to let it.
She ran. For one terrible second he did not move and she thought she would be yanked off her feet like a dog on a lead. Then he ran too, and the fire rushed up to meet them, and they jumped.
Heat licked her legs. Sparks flew up around her. She landed on the pebbles, stumbling, and his hand held her up.
“Twice more,” she gasped.
They jumped again. And again. The third time, she landed laughing, breathless, her glasses crooked and her hair full of smoke.
And Yanni laughed.
It was short and low and surprised, as if it had escaped from somewhere deep inside him that he had forgotten existed. It changed his whole face. The hard lines around his eyes broke apart. His teeth flashed white in the dark beard.
Lena stared at him. She forgot to let go of his hand.
So did he.
They climbed the stairs together, long after midnight, when the fire was only red coals.
The steps were steep and uneven, cut into the rock, and the higher they went the harder the wind pushed. Halfway up, where the stair turned beside an old stone wall still warm from the day’s sun, Lena missed a step in the dark.
He caught her before she knew she was falling. One arm around her waist, and then her back was against the warm wall and he was in front of her, blocking the wind, blocking the stars, blocking everything.
Neither of them moved.
She could feel his breath. She could feel his heart under her palm, where her hand had landed on his chest. It was not slow, the way it had been when she measured him. It was pounding.
“Lena,” he said.
It was the first time he had said her name. Not Miss Bassi. Just Lena, low and rough, as if it cost him something.
“Yes,” she whispered.
He lifted one hand and touched her face. His thumb moved along her cheekbone, slowly, as if he were checking that she was real. He smelled of smoke and salt. His beard was a breath away from her mouth.
“Tell me to stop,” he said.
Lena looked up into those dark eyes and did not say anything at all.
He bent his head.
And above them, in the black olive grove, a white light flashed.
