‘Ms. De Luca, are you okay?’ The voice startles me. If I weren’t half drunk, I’d have been running down the street breaking an ankle in these heels. I turn to see Mrs. Amhurst, an American transplant to Rome who lives two floors down from me. She cradles her toy poodle under one arm, a can of pepper spray in her other hand.
‘I… uh…’ I’m still shaking, so rattled by the interaction with Nicola, I can’t even catch my breath. I probably smell like alcohol and sex, probably look a mess too, the way Victor let my messy bun out so my hair hangs loosely.
‘Oh, dear, what happened to you?’ She presses the security button on the door I’m leaning on. There’s no way past me until I get my bearings, and I don’t have legs to stand on right now.
Gio, the doorman, is there in a flash, slowly pushing the door open as Mrs. Amhurst helps me away from it. I can’t sling together a sentence for the life of me as they chatter on in Italian about what to do. When Gio finally manages to wrangle me inside the building to the front desk and park me on a chair, I start to breathe again.
‘Do we need Policia?’ he asks, crouching in front of me. He’s a middle-aged man, more salt than pepper in his hair, with kind eyes.
‘What?’ I raise my eyebrows and gawk at them.
‘Policia? Are you hurt? What happened, Isabella?’ His eyes search me. Mrs. Amhurst stands aloof, glancing at the door, then the elevator. I can tell this wasn’t on her agenda, but she doesn’t want to leave me here like this.
‘My God, no. No police. I don’t need that.’ I rub my face and imagine trying to explain to the local cops why a convicted criminal is cornering me outside my building. The humiliation of even being associated with Nicola the first time was hard to live down, but I managed. I don’t want this getting out again.
‘Well, I can’t just very well let you go up to your apartment alone. You look like a wreck,’ Mrs. Amhurst says. ‘Come to my place, and I’ll pour you a glass of port.’
I try to stand but I sway. Gio steadies me with a hand on my elbow and an unnerving gaze pinned on me. I can tell they just want to help, but I’ll be better off alone. Besides, if Nicola knows other people care about me for any reason at all, he’ll punish them too.
‘Really, I’m fine. It was my ex-boyfriend. He got a little handsy, and I made him leave.’ I can still feel his talons around my throat, and I touch it unconsciously.
Gio scowls at the red marks I’m sure are there, but I can’t see them. I don’t have a mirror. I don’t even want to see it if it’s there, anyway. I don’t need any reminders of what Nicola and the men he runs with are capable of doing to me.
‘If it’s all well and good, Ms. De Luca, I’d like to walk you to your place.’ He narrows his eyes on me, and I nod, acquiescing. I’m not likely to fend him off after this, and I know he has a good heart.
‘Thank you, Giordano.’ With a fake smile and my hand trembling around his bicep, he leads me to the elevators. We ride up to Mrs. Amhurst’s floor, and she exits with a note of caution to carry pepper spray with me, then we ascend higher to my penthouse. Gio waits, back turned, as I input the code for my penthouse door and then holds the elevator doors open while I saunter off.
‘You just have to dial the star from your intercom if you need me.’ His reminder puts me at ease. I’m on the fourteenth floor, no way for anyone, outside of sheer acrobatics, to get to me unless they have a helicopter to land on my roof.
‘Thank you, Giordano. I appreciate your concern.’ Keeping it as professional as possible, I turn and wait until the elevator doors slide shut and then kick off my heels and turn straight for the kitchen.
I know I’ve drunk too much this evening, but there is far too much in my head to care. I fucked Victor Costa in the back seat of his fucking limo and moments later, I was assaulted by Nicola Vitale, a man I never want to see again. Life is spinning out of control and I’m not sure what to do with it. It’s not okay. I’m not okay.
The cork breaks off in the bottle and I curse it. Then I spend the next ten minutes finding a screwdriver and a hammer to jam what’s left of the dumb cork down into the bottle to allow the wine to flow freely. When I have a glass poured and a large swig from the bottle, I carry both into my bathroom and turn on the water for my shower.
I want to wash this entire evening out of my hair the way women do in sappy romance novels when the hero treats her poorly or lets her down. I’m sloppy drunk, tired, and emotional. Nicola is in my past, and that’s where he should stay. Matthias’s warning came too late. With such short notice, I’ve not been able to even make an attempt to protect myself or prepare for it.
I eye my phone, left on the counter in the bathroom where I set it as I dressed for dinner with Victor. I could’ve refused, stayed inside my penthouse and made Gio send him away, but something inside me wanted to go.
And then there’s the meeting with Matthias I missed. But there are no missed calls from him. If he were going to meet me and I wasn’t there, I’d have thought he’d have called to ask where I was and when we could reschedule. But there’s nothing. Not even a blip.
Leaving the water to warm up, I strip off the soiled dress and throw it in the trash. I’ll never wear it again. And the panties? They’re torn, useless to me now. They go in the trash too, and I walk to my bedroom to pull out a nightgown and clean underwear for when I’m done showering. As I do, the pink cover of my spiral-bound journal peeks out at me.
For the past five years, I’ve done nothing but investigate claims from conspiracy theorists about Raphael’s works. In my world, it’s not enough to know about the art itself. I have to know the lore, the reasons Raphael painted his works, where he was, the secrets behind them, and the people who commissioned him to paint them.
I’ve heard stories about a few of the paintings having used blood in the paint, ‘the blood of the martyrs,’ some people call it. As if Raphael murdered poor, innocent souls to create forbidden works or himself shed blood to protect his art. And I’ve heard things about this lost Raphael too—things I know Costa would flip over if he knew.
The journal calls to me, despite the running shower hissing out steam that beckons me. I pick up the journal and flip open the pages, turning them until I find what I’m looking for. From everything I’ve observed, there is nothing extraordinary about the painting other than being an original Raphael. The paint is just that—paint. There’s no blood, no evidence of murder, though there is a great deal of evidence externally that a theft occurred. It has Nicola’s name all over it, but I can’t see how he’d have gotten to it weeks ago when he was supposed to be in prison.
But it isn’t the painting that the lore speaks of. The frame is said to have been swapped in the mid-nineteen hundreds, traded for a hollow one that houses uncut diamonds dug from the mines in Siberia in the late eighteen hundreds and housed in an unnamed Russian consulate in Glasgow.
How much of it is true stands to be proven yet, but I have my doubts. Still, these doodles of diamonds scrawled on my private journal next to notes about Raphael will only show Costa my thoughts, and if he wises up and searches this place, he’s likely to figure out what may be so special about it.
I tear out the pages and put the journal back, crumpling them and carrying them to the bathroom with me. The water is so hot the entire bathroom is filled with steam, the mirror and window fogged up. I toss the crumpled paper into the toilet and flush it, then drop my clothing onto the vanity next to the sink and step under the flow of water.
I let Nicola suck me into a deadly ring of art forgers and thieves and it almost cost me my life. Now he’s back, and he’s not going to give up until he gets what he wants. I wasn’t supposed to be a part of his scheme before. He came to me and we fell in love, and I saw the world in his eyes. He loved art and was passionate about the classics. We once flew all the way to the Kremlin to see a Rembrandt on display.
But it was too good to be true.
The water attempts to relax away my tension, but I can’t shake the fear. Wine helps more. I down the glass and skip it from there, drinking straight from the bottle now. It stays with me in the shower as I wrestle over what to do next.
Nicola got me to forge that DaVinci as a means to protect it from thieves who would come along to steal it. It’s apparently a pretty common con—convince the art curator or gallery owner that a lift is going to happen, then hire an artist to fake the painting. When it’s not on display, the painting is vulnerable, under less scrutiny with fewer protections. The thief then lifts the real painting, leaving the forgery, or in my case, they lifted both, and I was pinned in the crime.
Matthias was the only one to believe I’d had the best intention—to protect the original. I lost my job at the museum and nearly my life when Nicola slipped out after his arraignment and nearly strangled me. Policia caught him and threw him in the clink, and I’ve been living on edge ever since.
Maybe forging the Raphael isn’t the right thing. Maybe I should just give Matthias the original intact in the frame. But if Victor Costa finds out I’ve given his painting to Interpol, I’m sure he won’t be happy. He’s already put a gun in my side once. he won’t hesitate to off me without blinking.
So now I have an even worse problem.
Not only am I running the same scheme I nearly fell for before, but two men want the real thing and all I want is to get out of this alive. I dry off and call Matthias, but he doesn’t answer. It goes straight to voicemail. I want to meet him at the gallery now, tonight. Give him the painting and be free of this entire thing. Maybe he can help me skip town, find some place safe to lie low until the dust settles.
But he’s not picking up, and the more I drink, the more tired I get until I pass out with my phone in my hand, towel still draped around my torso, eyes heavy with wine.
If I get out of this alive, I promise myself I’m moving to Japan or Canada. Somewhere far away from here where no one can find me. And I’m never looking at another Raphael again.
