“Come. Stay out here too long, and you’ll freeze your balls off,” Ares muttered before beginning the long walk up the snowy hill to the place where Matteo was pretty sure that children’s nightmares were made.
The inside of the building was even scarier. At least outside, you felt like you could escape if you needed to. Inside, there was no escape. The walls were crumbling, threatening to bury you alive. While the air was so rank, you felt like you were being choked to death.
How could anyone live here? Better yet, how could someone voluntarily work here?
“Can I help you?” an angry woman asked in what Matteo assumed was Belarusian.
They were in Belarus, and Matteo knew that the majority of people spoke either Belarusian or Russian. He had heard Russian spoken numerous times, and this was not Russian.
Matteo’s head snapped in Ares’s direction when the man proceeded to respond in Belarusian.
“Since when do you speak Belarusian?” Matteo whispered as the woman got up and walked around the desk. She nodded for them to follow.
“I speak many languages. It’s why I get along with so many people. I respect them and their cultures, and in return, they don’t shoot me in the back.”
“Wish we got the same respect,” Matteo mumbled.
“Perhaps if Parisians stopped acting like they were superior to everyone else, people would stop calling them French snobs.”
“But I’m Italian,” Matteo clarified.
“But you live in a French castle.Snob.” Ares gave a smirk.
Sometimes he really hated the man.
The woman stopped in front of an office door that was slightly ajar. Not because someone had forgotten to close the door but because the frame was so warped that the bottom rested on the floor, thereby preventing it from shutting.
She pushed open the door and signaled for them both to step inside.
Ares thanked the woman as she left.
“Ares!” a large, burly man cried in English, standing and walking around his desk to greet him. “Been a long time, my friend. Glad to see you’re still alive.”
They both hugged.
“Glad to see you haven’t been arrested,” Ares responded.
“Hey, they can’t arrest me for what they don’t know about.”
This conversation was becoming very cryptic. Should he be looking for an escape route, just in case? There are way too many movies where the charismatic, rich man gets betrayed and locked in an asylum, never to be heard from again.
Perhaps this was Ares’s master plan. Convince him to walk willingly into an insane asylum, have him locked up, and then move into his French castle.
The man was brilliant.
Okay, perhaps he needed to lay off the movies.
“And who is this?” the man asked, extending his hand toward Matteo.
“This is Matteo… Sabarino,” Ares introduced, hesitating on Matteo’s last name.
The man’s eyes went wide.
“Oh. It’s a pleasure to meet you, young man. I am… Dr. Smith,” the man replied, taking Matteo’s hand and giving it a firm shake. His eyes glanced over at Ares.
Matteo highly doubted that the man’s last name was Smith, considering he looked Eastern European.
But if the man wanted to keep his secrets, fine.
