No Other Sun
Completed
A murder in Dubrovnik reunites a young woman living in the shadow of her family’s disgrace with her radicalized former lover as political unrest, hidden scandals, and an Austrian colonel’s vendetta push their city toward violence on the eve of World War I.
First Page:
It was meant to be a celebration—a welcome home for a boy long in exile whom all of Dubrovnik loved. Once, Danica Kovač had as well. Not anymore. Those days had passed.
It was not so long ago when she adored parties—the music and laughter, the raised glasses and chaotic toasts. She and Marta had lived for nights out on the Stradun—dressed in fine clothes, heads spinning with wine, dancing until their legs ached. Then shedding their dresses, tying up their hair, and climbing the city walls to leap from the low cliffs of Buža into the warm waters of the Adriatic, over and over until the policija scattered them laughing into the night. But the same parties offered her only a glimpse of a past life. One where she wasn’t a perpetual stranger, out of place among her peers. She was just twenty, yet everything good now seemed so distant.
“Order?” the bartender called out from behind her. His name was Josef, but everyone called him Rasia. Everyone except Marta, who called him and every other older man she knew Tata in that flirtatious way of hers. It was transparent but somehow, for her, it worked. Marta always got what she wanted.
“Four Rakija. But they’d prefer the whole bottle.”
He poured the drinks and set them on Danica’s tray, growling, “Tell them we don’t do that here.”
Danica swung back to face the crowd and hesitated, tray in hand. At this party, she was not a guest but a server, wearing not her favorite sapphire dress but a shabby olive tunic and beer-stained apron. This was how she experienced most parties now—a fact that bothered her only when the tavern filled with faces from her past. This would be one of those nights.
Across the room at a corner table sat Toma Horvat, surrounded by his usual crowd of admirers. The party belonged to him—his mere presence tilting the room his way, just as it always had. Toma Horvat, who had slipped back into town days earlier from Sarajevo without explanation, and who had not even acknowledged Danica’s presence.
