Crescendo by Jeffe Kennedy Page A

like that long-forgotten melody. “Be strong enough to let me go.”
    â€œI can’t.” She was sobbing. Tears filling her vision, flowing away also, like the magic, like her blood.
    â€œChristine.” He sang her name, reaching his powerful arms to the sky far above, his muscled chest cording, his cock standing proud. He radiated joyful sexuality, exultant. Free.
    His face shifted and coalesced, into the shining perfection of an old god.
    â€œFree me, Christine.” He smiled, asking her in the same tone of voice that he’d asked her to abandon herself to him.
    With a last wrenching sob, she gasped out her agreement.
    â€œYes, Master.”

7
    E veryone treated her carefully after that.
    No one quite understood how she’d survived the fall that killed Roman. They’d found them when Domingo sent up the alarm and she woke up in Christus St. Vincent much later, with a concussion and multiple lacerations. The nurses said she looked like she’d gone through a plate-glass window. Shards of crystal lay around them, but no matter how many delicate questions everyone asked, Christine didn’t remember what had happened.
    Well, she did remember.
    Just differently.
    Sanchez didn’t much seem to care and mostly questioned her about what had happened before her fall. He seemed totally unsurprised at Carla’s involvement. Turned out he’d suspected her for quite some time. They’d matched her well-known calligraphy to the notes—both the ones Christine finally turned over to the cops and the one found on her body.
    Sanchez couldn’t say much until the DA finished compiling evidence, but he’d let drop that Carla had been obsessed with making Christy leave. The final note, it seemed, had been part of a gift intended for Domingo Sanclaro, who returned the favor with the massive beating.
    Charlie, apparently, was a remorseful mess, having been both suspicious of his wife’s affair with Domingo and desperate to keep her. Being sorry wasn’t enough for Sanchez, though, and he’d arrested Charlie as an accessory. It looked like his fate would depend on how much he’d really known—and if he would bear witness against his wife.
    The actual charges against Matt were relatively minor—especially since Hally said karma would be plenty and she didn’t want to press assault charges. Once the police cut him loose, he took off for some theater group in California. As for Domingo, he appeared to be catatonic with shock and grief over Roman’s death when Sanchez took him into custody. Angie was happy to provide adequate evidence for the state and Feds to take him down for a long time, if he recovered.
    It might be small and mean of her, but Christine liked the idea of him tucked away in a mental institution. A bit of Hally’s karmic justice.
    Time passed, and Christine healed enough to leave the hospital and resume a normal life.
    Even though this had been a hospital for physical healing—not like the other place—she had felt much the same there as she had then. Like her skin was too permeable for the world.
    Hally had talked her into a celebratory lunch, and they were sitting on the porch at El Farol, eating tapas and watching the Saturday tourists flow in and out of the art galleries. A guitarist played acoustic flamenco, bright notes that fit the hot afternoon. Christine hadn’t seen the fiddler again. Nor had she heard that song, anywhere but in her heart.
    Absentmindedly, Christine rubbed her ring finger, which was healing well but still ached. They’d had to cut the ring off her hand because it had somehow cut into her skin, creating massive swelling. At one point they had worried that her hand would have to be amputated at the wrist, to stave off the blood poisoning from the infection, which gave her the shivers as she imagined it immortalized with Seraphina’s. Though several people had pointed out that she could have