Chapter 115 – Heading to Rome
It turned out that adults couldn't just get up and go somewhere.
Ethan had said let's go with the energy of someone who had made a decision, and then immediately encountered the reality that making a decision and executing it were two separate events with logistical infrastructure between them.
The weekend was days away, which helped. But John's estimate of the timeline — three to four days at minimum, possibly longer — meant at least two clinic workdays would need to be covered or rescheduled. That was patients with appointments, follow-ups that mattered, people who had built their week around a specific time on a specific day.
Helen handled it.
She pulled up the appointment book, went through it with the specific efficiency of someone who had been running the front of a medical practice long enough to triage on instinct, and identified the actual problem cases: two appointments that couldn't simply be left open.
Everything else could be pushed back by a day without causing real hardship. She made the calls herself. Both rescheduled without complaint.
"That's it," she said, closing the book. "You're clear."
Ethan looked at the empty schedule with a mild sense of disbelief at how uncomplicated that had been.
"Okay," he said. "Then we're going."
John was still opposed.
Not loudly — John Wick was incapable of doing anything loudly — but clearly. He looked at Ethan with the specific expression of someone who has accepted that a decision has been made and is making one final attempt to reverse it.
"You shouldn't come," he said.
"Because it's dangerous," Ethan said, before John could say it himself.
"Yes."
"Is it not dangerous if you go alone?"
"If I go alone," John said, with complete factual neutrality, "I have no complications to manage. Bringing someone who is not prepared for this environment—" He paused. "It limits what I can do."
Being described as a logistical complication by John Wick was not the most flattering way to start a Tuesday, Ethan reflected. But he understood the reasoning. By almost any objective measure, a twenty-seven-year-old Brooklyn clinic doctor had no business accompanying a former Continental assassin into a mission environment in Rome. The math on that was not in his favor.
"I have ways of keeping myself alive that you haven't seen," Ethan said. "And I'm not asking you to protect me. I'm asking you to let me be there."
John held his gaze for a moment.
Then he switched approaches. "Do you actually intend to resurrect Gianna after the marker is fulfilled?"
"Yes."
"That will create significant complications."
"It will create a complication," Ethan said. "Which is different from significant complications. She's your friend. She's connected to the High Table. Having someone in that world who owes us her life seems like exactly the kind of relationship worth having."
He looked at Helen. "What do you think?"
Helen had been quiet, turning something over.
She spoke slowly. "There are risks and benefits. Objectively, John going alone is the safer option." She paused. "But risks that produce meaningful relationships are often worth taking. And Ethan's logic about Gianna isn't wrong — one more person who has a reason to wish us well in that world is better than one more person who doesn't."
She turned to John. Her voice changed — not harder, but more specific.
"John. Whatever happens over there — nothing happens to Ethan. That's not a request."
A brief silence.
John nodded. "Understood."
"Good." Ethan closed the matter. "Book the flights."
He paused, and something in his expression shifted slightly — something that hadn't been there a moment before.
"I've never left the country," he said. Not with complaint — just as a fact. "The closest I've come was a very ill-advised road trip toward the Texas-Mexico border when I was fifteen, which ended before it got very far."
He looked out the clinic window at the Brooklyn afternoon.
"Rome," he said. "Alright then."
Fiumicino Airport in the afternoon.
The flight had been long enough for Ethan to sleep four hours and spend the remaining time looking at the Atlantic from thirty-five thousand feet and thinking about things he didn't have a resolution to yet. The insulin girl. The charitable foundation idea. The specific shape of what the Whitmore promise and the Axelrod promise and the Wick employment contract might eventually add up to.
He came off the plane into Italian air and immediately understood why people described Rome differently from other cities.
New York's air had a specific character — the compressed energy of a place that had decided to operate at maximum intensity and had never reconsidered the decision. It got into your lungs and made you feel like you were behind on something even when you weren't.
Rome's air was different.
It moved slower. It carried something old in it — damp limestone, the specific mineral smell of a city built on centuries of itself, dust that had been settling and resettling for two thousand years. The light was a different quality of afternoon gold than New York ever produced.
The buildings on the way in from the airport were low and mottled and dense with history that had never been torn down to make room for something taller.
They got into a car.
John sat in the passenger seat with his hat brim slightly lower than usual. He didn't look out the window.
"You've been here before," Ethan said. It wasn't a question.
"Many times."
"Missions?"
"Yes."
Ethan nodded and turned back to the window. There was no point in asking for details. The details were John's and they'd stay there.
Outside, Rome continued doing what Rome did — arches and stone and streets that hadn't been designed for cars and managed to look exactly right anyway. Ancient aqueduct fragments between apartment buildings. A fountain in a square that had been running continuously for longer than the United States had existed.
Ethan watched it pass and let his mind go quiet in the way it sometimes did in transit — the specific mental blankness of being between one place and the next with nothing actionable available.
The car stopped.
The Continental Hotel Rome.
Ethan looked up at the building from the sidewalk.
The facade was what the word imposing was invented for — stone that had been there long enough to have absorbed some quality of permanence that newer buildings couldn't replicate. The doors were tall and dark, nearly black, with the weight of something that had been built to do more than just open and close.
A deep red carpet ran down the front steps. It wasn't new, but it had clearly been cleaned every day for years. Two attendants in dark uniforms stood on either side of the entrance — the posture and stillness of people whose function was to be present rather than to be helpful.
John got out first.
He did the thing he did in every new environment — the rapid, complete environmental scan that took in the steps, the porch shadows, every surrounding angle, all of it processed in the time it took most people to decide whether they needed a jacket.
Ethan followed him out.
An attendant moved to the trunk. The luggage appeared on the sidewalk. Another attendant stood by the car door with a slight bow.
"Welcome to the Continental Hotel."
The street behind them was quiet in a specific way — not empty, but cleared. There were no tourists crowding the entrance, no locals cutting through. The Continental occupied a kind of social exclusion zone: everybody in the vicinity had, apparently, decided independently and simultaneously that they had somewhere else to be.
It was, Ethan thought, the most expensive-looking neutral territory he'd ever stood in front of.
The doors were held open. They went through.
The street noise cut off.
The lobby was high-ceilinged and deliberately quiet. Not empty — there were guests on the sofas, a figure or two near the far pillars — but the quality of the quiet was maintained by collective agreement. Voices were kept low. Movement was unhurried and deliberate. Nobody looked up when John and Ethan came in, which was itself a form of acknowledgment: people here knew who arrived and chose to register it privately rather than visibly.
The décor was understated in the specific way that cost money — no excess, nothing performative, everything exactly in the place where it belonged and had belonged for a very long time.
Ethan understood immediately that this wasn't a hotel in any sense he'd previously used the word for. It was the physical space of an institution — the neutral ground that made the High Table's economy possible, the place where the rules applied absolutely and everyone present had agreed to them.
An attendant led them to the front desk.
The receptionist in her dark suit looked up, saw John, gave a minimal nod — the specific acknowledgment of someone who recognized him without needing to make it a thing.
Her gaze shifted to Ethan and held for half a second. The pause of a person processing information they hadn't been briefed on.
"Welcome to the Continental Hotel, Rome Branch." Her voice was measured and warm. "How can I assist you?"
John placed two gold coins on the counter.
"Two rooms."
The receptionist reached for the coins.
A voice came from somewhere to their left and slightly behind.
"John."
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