Total pages in book: 106
Estimated words: 96271 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 481(@200wpm)___ 385(@250wpm)___ 321(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 96271 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 481(@200wpm)___ 385(@250wpm)___ 321(@300wpm)
The young woman’s eyes, in the vision of the Worldtree, were harder to explain. I did not explain them. I drank my espresso instead.
“Excuse me.”
The voice was Italian-accented English, low and musical, and it came from beside my left shoulder. I looked up.
The woman standing next to my café table was the most beautiful person I had ever seen outside of a fashion magazine. Even inside a fashion magazine I thought she might have given most of the rest of the contents a serious challenge. Olive skin, dark hair arranged in a way that looked effortless but had certainly taken considerable effort. A pale linen suit that fit her in a way that told me it had been made for her body specifically. She was perhaps thirty, perhaps thirty-five. She had arranged her face in an expression of polite inquiry that managed also somehow to be an expression of complete certainty that her inquiry would be answered in the affirmative.
“I’m sorry to interrupt,” she said, not sounding sorry at all, but in a pleasant way. “May I sit for a moment?”
I said yes, because the alternative was saying no to a woman who looked like that.
She sat, crossing her ankles, and looked at me with a gaze of direct appraisal. I had the strong sense, in fact, that this woman made a professional study of looking at people… young women, in particular, though I couldn’t have said why. I felt her eyes travel from my face down to my shoulders and back up.
“Have you ever considered modeling?” she asked.
I blinked. “I’m sorry?”
“Modeling.” Her mouth curved. “You have extraordinary bone structure. The coloring is unusual—very striking, especially here in Sicily, of course. I work with an agency here in Palermo and I occasionally approach women I think would be of interest.”
I was twenty-four years old, five feet ten inches, and had spent the last three weeks in cargo pants with soil under my fingernails. I had also, I remembered, washed my hair this morning and I had put on the one good shirt I had brought to Sicily, because I had needed to feel like a normal human being after the previous afternoon’s events. I was trying to decide whether this represented coincidence or the universe’s poor taste in timing when I noticed it.
The collar around the woman’s neck.
It was so subtle that I had almost missed it entirely—a thin band of dark leather, fitted close to her throat, with a small fastening at the back that her upswept hair nearly concealed. Not really a fashion accessory, I thought, since not a choker in the style that had been recurring on runways for the past several years. It seemed like something deliberate and specific, worn against the skin with the familiarity of an accoutrement she never removed.
My mouth went slightly dry. To my distress, I found myself thinking about the carvings on the cavern wall. I thought about the phrase bed thrall. I thought about the expression on the faces of the women in those carvings, the settled, undone quality of it, and I thought: stop it, Ilsa.
“Do you have a card?” I asked. My voice came out steadier than I felt.
She tilted her head slightly. “I could give you a card,” she said. “Or you could simply come with me. The agency is five minutes from here. You could see it, meet some of the staff, have a sense of whether it might interest you.” A small pause. “I think it would interest you.”
I should have asked for the card. I knew, in the part of my brain that had navigated three years of graduate school, two field seasons, and the particular social minefield of academic conferences, that I should have taken the woman’s card and put it in my pocket… and then of course done nothing with it.
At the very least, even if I did find the situation rather intriguing, I should have done some appropriate due diligence before going anywhere with a stranger who had approached me at a café.
But she had a collar on. And I had spent the previous evening in a limestone cavern having an experience that had rearranged something fundamental in my understanding of my own body. Sitting here in the morning sun pretending to be a normal person was not, it turned out, something I could do for more than about forty-five minutes.
“All right,” I said.
She stood. I blinked up at her for one crucial moment. I let the moment pass; I stood. I left money on the table and followed the beautiful woman in the collar down the street.
Agenzia Ostia—the Ostia Agency—occupied the ground floor of a building on a quiet side street, behind a facade of pale stone that gave nothing away. Inside, though, the reception area had the kind of atmosphere that communicated money without displaying it: clean lines, good art, a marble floor that had been there for a hundred years and polished until it reflected the light from the tall windows like still water. The air had a floral scent that reminded me of a five-star hotel, from the very few times I’d ever entered one.