that led to the hole.
The fact was that he really didn’t want to be here at all.
But for some reason that maybe only God knew, that strange scarred man had followed him out of the Jesolo after saving both him and Benito from the Squalos gang. And, presumably for that same reason, he had decided to set himself up as a kind of watchdog or bodyguard for the two of them. Marco felt a certain guilty responsibility for the man’s well-being. They had abandoned him when Aldanto and Maria had come to their rescue.
So here he was, clinging to the ledge above the waterline, with a bundle and a message to deliver and only the haziest notion if the man was still in there.
If he hadn’t been so nervous, he might never have noticed the stranger at all. But Marco was desperately afraid that his last escapade had drawn unwelcome attention to the entire Aldanto ménage, attention that would have to include the Montagnards. And if anyone who had ever known Lorendana Valdosta got a good look at him—well, there’d be no doubt whose kid he was.
So he’d been watching every shadow, and thinking out every footstep ever since he’d emerged shakily from his sickbed—and he’d seen the man ghosting along, fifty feet behind as he went to work one morning. And no matter how he’d changed his course, there the man was. Then he’d watch from the dirty window of the Ventuccio offices as the man shadowed Benito on his first run of the morning. He was ready to rush out to attack the man himself out of sheer terror when he moved across a patch of sunlight—
It was at that point, when he got a brief but very good look at the man’s scarred face, that he’d recognized him as the mysterious stranger who’d saved them.
That night he’d spotted the man slipping into the foundation hole across the canal.
And now, when he watched carefully, he could catch the stranger at his comings and goings—and very rarely, at trailing them. He thought that after a few days the man would get tired of it and go away—loco folk from the Jesolo weren’t known for long atten­tion spans. But he hadn’t, and Marco realized that he was going to have to do something about the fact that he was there, and was apparently