"Enjoy it while you can," Bartlett murmured in her ear. His hand cupped her breast through soiled, torn linen.
Sibyl rammed an elbow into his gut. He grunted and dropped his hand. Sibyl whirled, trying to escape him, but lurched off balance and caught herself with one hand against the wall.
"Don't touch me!"
"Baby," he grabbed her shoulders, "before I split this hellhole, I'm gonna do a lot more than touch you." Tony backed her against the wall. His physical strength terrified her, left her trembling with rage and helpless hatred. He must have felt the tremors, because he smiled coldly.
"I owe you, bitch. For plans you screwed up. I had to make two trips, one to set up the deal in the first place and the second to ditch you. Did you think I planned to pay for that stuff with just you?" His tone was scornful.
"It was all set. Then you slithered out of the frameup. Jésus said we had to get rid of you. Says, 'See if you can go back and change it, Tony. Don't worry about a thing, Tony. I'll tell your wife you died brave if you screw it up, Tony, I'll even cry at your funeral.' My own brother-in-law..."
Sibyl wanted to shrink away, but was jammed solidly against the painted wall. He's mad. Genuinely mad. My God... When she tried to push free, he tightened a fist through her hair. "Forget it, bitch! You're going nowhere. I'll take my grief out of your hide, then be on my way."
His kiss was brutal. He drew blood with his teeth. Sibyl fought for a handhold in his hair, against his throat, anywhere. He pinned her wrists. His breath stank in her mouth. Sibyl squirmed, thought about a knee to the groin, decided she didn't dare. She couldn't risk any further injury. When he came up for air, she fought the impulse to gag.
"Not bad, little Sibyl," he grinned. He licked blood off his lower lip with the tip of his tongue. "I thought you'd fight harder. Guess you wanted me after all, huh?"
He ground his hips lewdly against her.
Sibyl snarled in his face. He just laughed and forced another brutal kiss. Sibyl came up spitting.
"So help me God, Tony, you'll pay for this!"
He just laughed. And kept laughing. The sound echoed off the walls and blended with the continuous roar of Vesuvius' wrath to form an insane harmony. Bericus—for better or worse—chose that moment to walk distractedly into the room. Tony immediately released her. Sibyl lurched away from him. She didn't care where she was going, just so long as she was just going. A moment later, Bericus collided with her. He swore and slapped her to the floor. Sibyl, too dazed to struggle against anything any longer, lay where she'd fallen. Please, don't hurt me any more, please...
Bericus dragged her up. "You! How did you get here?"
She simply hung in his grip, unable to answer. He snarled something she didn't understand, then dragged her toward the nominal front of the house, away from the sea and toward the kitchen. He locked her into a tiny, dark hole of a room and left her there, giving her neither food nor water.
Sibyl sat in near darkness for a long time, nursing her injuries as best she could and just listening to the distant sounds that reached through the thick-walled house. Voices... Traffic in the street... And beyond that, the endless, ominous roar of Vesuvius. The heat was stifling. Sweat trickled into numerous abrasions in the most sensitive parts of her anatomy. Every one of them stung like fire-ant bites.
Gradually, shock wore off, leaving her in the grip of mere pain and terror. Sibyl held herself and wept. She would cheerfully have killed any number of people to obtain a Tylenol-3 and a bucket of lukewarm water. She sobbed curses at Publius Bericus, at Tony Bartlett, at the man she had never seen, the man who had ordered this done to her: Jésus Carreras.
Occasional earthquakes, sharp, violent, rocked floor and walls. The villa groaned and trembled on its foundations. Each time the earth shook, Sibyl covered her head with both arms and waited for the roof to fall in on her. Eventually, fear of being buried alive—again—drove Sibyl to explore her prison. There had to be a way out!
But there wasn't.
There were no windows and the bar on the door was too strong. She discovered this only after bruising one shoulder. Sibyl concluded that either movie heroes were a lot stronger than she was, or they bashed open specially constructed doors. There wasn't a single piece of furniture in the empty room she could use as a battering ram, either.
So she sat on the floor in one corner and wondered how far Charlie would get before she died. Her mind moved in aimless circles. Part of her wondered why, exactly, people were being dumped back in time to die. The energy cost alone must be staggering. Surely there were cheaper, easier ways to dispose of witnesses? Of course, God knew where Jimmy Hoffa had ended up; probably in a sausage grinder somewhere. Or the foundation of a building. Organized crime had a way of disposing of folks where no one would think of looking.
Charlie's guess had been that all of this was to protect the secret of time travel itself. In the hands of the mafia... If you refused to dicker, you simply ceased to exist. Or maybe your family did. Talk about a big stick. But they didn't seem to be using it that way. Of course, neither she nor Charlie had been in on the palavers of the high muckety-mucks.
Who knew what they were really up to or how many poor souls had been disposed of already. Had they possessed the thing long enough to be up to anything substantial? Or were they still just feeling their way around, playing with it, seeing what could be done? Tony's comments about his trips suggested the latter, but she couldn't be sure and she needed to be.
And just who was the "old man" for whom Tony had secured the manuscripts, anyway? Not Carreras, Tony's brother-in-law—that much, at least, had been easy to see—but someone else, someone more powerful than Jésus Carreras. Someone Charlie evidently hadn't known about. She groaned and thumped her forehead with folded hands. She just didn't have enough information. "So what else is new?" Not knowing was the story of her life. Why should this be an exception?
Sibyl straightened her back cautiously and leaned her head against the wall. "All right, Sib, try to think this one through. We're not getting anywhere at this rate." She took a deep breath and calmed her thoughts.
The cost ratio still bothered her. If the only thing Carreras was using time travel for was witness disposition and artifact acquisition, he was a fool. Either he didn't understand what he had and how it worked, or simply didn't care.
She shivered despite the heat.
Somehow, she didn't buy that.
How in the world had he gotten hold of it in the first place? Who had developed it? Government research? A private corporation? University researchers? Tony had said something about Army drugs. The military, then? She sighed. It didn't matter nearly as much where he'd gotten it, as what he was doing with it now that he had it. If she were a mafia crime boss, what would she do with the ability to travel in time?
Sibyl didn't like any of the answers she came up with.
A slave finally came for her. When she emerged from her stuffy little prison, Sibyl gratefully breathed in cooler air, then coughed. Ash stung her nostrils and throat. When they passed the open doorway to the garden, the lack of daylight alarmed her. Darkness had settled deceptively soft violet wings across Herculaneum. Vesuvius still roared ominously in the distance.
"What hour is it?" she asked the slave, still peering into the dark skies visible above the open garden.
"It is past the eleventh hour," the woman replied, with a touch of surprise, "and nears the twelfth."