Red Star

Before the Fire Part 2

"I'll meet you in fourteen minutes, no more, no less."

"What if I'm late? Or early?"

"I'm sure you'll really enjoy finding out, then." She pats him comically on his shoulder, smiling patronisingly, and turns quickly away towards the front doors of the very upmarket hotel in which the ball was being held.

"Anything else?"

She turns her head back round towards him, causing her bronze hair to splay out in a whirlwind. Castano seems to have forgotten what he had originally asked her now, and was blushing again, causing Rosa to shake her head disapprovingly. He really needs to get over this childish crush as soon as possible.

"I'm gonna do a fancy-pants accent so don't get too put off guard," she adjusts her dress slightly and checks the time on her phone. "And come on, get your shit together, Castano, it's showtime."

The ballroom is absolutely grand.
Lavish scarlet carpets lie on marbled tile, surrounding a hardwood floor space, obviously made for dancing. Adjacent to that dance floor is a raised platform for the classy musicians to perform with their violins and clarinets, all overlooked by a beautiful crystal chandelier, a iridescent dome, extremely large in diameter. Rosa takes in and establishes her surroundings before she strikes up a conversation with a group of clearly wealthy aristocrats, playing the perfect role of the bored wife of a wealthy businessman who "couldn't make it tonight, but who's complaining?".

Honestly, Castano couldn't have fucked up more if he tried. Twenty-six minutes after they said a temporary farewell, he turns up to the ball, grasps Rosa around the waist, and kisses her fiercely. The group she had been talking to make noises of surprise and of impress, and Rosa wonders if they would be more or less impressed if she murdered him right here and now.

"Hello, darling." 

"Passerotta, I've missed you ever so much." Castano beams, and Rosalynn doesn't have to look too far into his smile to know that he really isn't acting at all. She only feebly smiles in response.

"Ladies, gentlemen, I do hope that you don't me taking my husband away for just one dance." They don't seem to care all that much, so she hauls him over to the dance floor, digging her freshly manicured fingernails into the skin of his wrist for good measure.

"It's things like that which will get us killed, passerotta." She arranges them into a Viennese waltz, surprised to see Castano doesn't seem new to it at all. They sway around the dance floor, smiling at each other as genuinely as they can humanly manage, just to keep up appearances, of course. Castano makes some sort of comment about her saying the wrong thing in Italian, but she simply ignores him. She's been getting really good at that lately.

"Did you find the guy?"

"Yes, and we're both about to get killed. If you don't do as I say," she says with a smile on her face, just so that the other guests become any more suspicious than they already are.

"How the heck did you find him?" Castano does the same smile-while-talking-about-very-dark-and-possibly-fatal-things and Rosa is taken slightly aback by how unsettling it is.

"Well because someone wears tight suits so that our guy could see fucking guns in 'tight suit guy's' pockets."

"Shit."

"That's right."

"How do you know it's the guy?"

"He's also wearing a very tight suit and I can see at least three guns in his suit jacket," she twirls under Castano's arm, causing her red dress to twirl around their feet at the same time. "He's also been furtively glancing at his phone which m-"