Chapter 3
Margaret: Veronica. Did you post a video of the Crowe manuscript?
Nica: define "post"
Margaret: it has twenty-three thousand views
Nica: ...that’s good right?
Margaret: it’s a record
Tuesday morning at Whitfield, Marsh she caught it with her elbow and bit down harder on the pencil.
The tag on the top crate — CROWE 47, MIXED OTTOMAN — sat just out of reach.
She stretched for it, the old ladder creaking under her socked feet.
Below her, her boss, Margaret Lin, had been on the phone for twenty minutes, her tone moving through four stages in that time: polite professional, polite tense, polite alarmed, and now the register Nica had heard exactly twice in three years.
The one that meant Margaret was managing a crisis.
“Yes, of course, Mr. Vasiliev. We can absolutely accommodate. The full Crowe lot is in active cataloging, but if you wish to acquire — yes. Yes, I understand. By all means. I’ll meet you at the bay door.” A pause. “Five minutes? Yes, that’s — that’s perfect. Of course.”
The phone clicked dead, and Margaret muttered a curse word the prim, proper curator never used in the office. Refusing to remove the pencil from its resting place in her mouth, Nica slurred, “Who was that?”
“Veronica?”
“Mhm.” Margaret never used her full name unless she was about to launch a very long lecture, or unless she was tipsy on champagne — and since it wasn’t yet ten in the morning, whoever had been on that phone had well and truly upset the apple cart.
“Get down from the ladder.”
“In a second. I just need this last —”
“Veronica. Now, please.”
Something in her voice had changed. Nica finally looked down, pencil still between her teeth.
Margaret had gone pale — Margaret, who’d survived two divorces, an IRS audit, and the Cohn-Whitfield merger of ’19 without losing her color — and she was smoothing the front of her blouse with both hands like a woman who used clothing like armor, checking for chinks.
Nica took the pencil out of her mouth. “What’s happening?”
“Pacific Meridian Capital is sending someone.”
“Okay. And?”
“Right now. In five minutes.” Margaret looked at the bay door as though it might swing open on its own. “Demetri Vasiliev. The founder. He wants to acquire the entire Crowe lot, sight unseen, and he’s on his way over.”
Nica stared down at her. “The whole — the whole estate?”
“The whole estate.”
“That’s — that’s forty million dollars of inventory.” Estimated by the client, anyway. It could run higher, it could run lower, which was the entire reason Nica was up on this ladder, cataloging the lot piece by piece.
“I am aware.”
“But I’m not done cataloging.” Nica kept her voice calm.
Reasonable. Rational. None of what she was feeling showed in her expression.
She was a professional. There was no reason for her to be so attached to the Crowe estate or anything in it.
If someone wanted to buy it sight unseen, someone who could not possibly care about its contents, then it was great for her business.
Great for her. She should be glad the work was about to be over.
Thrilled. Excited. Dammit. He can’t just carry off the most wonderful things I’ve ever seen before I get to see it all.
What. The. Fuck. “Doesn’t he want to know what he’s buying? ”
Her voice sounded a little desperate, even to her own ears. She took a deep breath and gave her best smile. The sales pitch smile. Time to regain a bit of dignity. “For insurance purposes?”
“I don’t know.” Margaret pressed her palms together at her chest, almost like prayer.
“He didn’t say. He offered a thirty percent premium for immediate delivery, however.
He requested a tour of the in-progress materials.
And he asked specifically — Veronica, he asked specifically — about the Russian-language items in the video. ”
Something small and bright turned over in Nica’s stomach. “The Russian items? He asked about the book?” Did a billionaire actually see my TikTok?
“He asked,” Margaret continued, raising air quotes, “whether the cataloger fluent in pre-revolutionary Cyrillic would be available to walk him through the manuscript today.”
The pencil slipped out of Nica’s fingers, bounced off the second rung, and pinged against the concrete far below, the sound ringing up through the cold steel. “Pre—This is crazy. Isn’t he a—”
“Billionaire. Yes.”
“Me?”
“I know.”
Nica mentally took stock of herself. No. No. This was not good. “Margaret.”
“I know, Veronica. Get down from the ladder, please, and pull yourself together. He’ll be here in,” she checked the time on her phone, “three minutes.”
“Shit.” Nica climbed down. Raced was more like it.
She’d taken her flats off three crates ago — against bay protocol, which she hadn’t cared about until exactly this second — and her sock caught on a splinter and ripped.
She lost her balance for half a second before stabilizing.
Then she pushed her feet back into her flats.
Smoothed her blouse. Smoothed her hair, which was useless, because her hair was knotted up and pinned with a pencil and a second, redundant pencil that had migrated somewhere.
There was ink on the inside of her left forearm, paint on her cuff from the Italian icon last week, and her blouse, she now realized, was missing its second button.
“Margaret. Tell me I don’t look like a person who lives in a box. A small one.”
“You look fine.” Margaret said the words out of politeness. And friendship. Her face told another story. Fear.
“Shit.”
“You look fine. Really. Besides, he’s not coming to look at you. He is coming to look at a forty-million-dollar collection, and you are the expert, the professional, who can tell him what’s in it.”
Nica laughed, and it came out shaky. There was still one crate left to open.
“Right. Okay. Yes. I’m the expert who can tell him what’s in it.
Then I’d better have the answers.” She took a deep breath and climbed back up the ladder, because if she was going to give a billionaire an item count, surely it ought to be a complete one.
She couldn’t have said why she needed to reach that last crate at that exact second.
She told herself it was the tag on Crate 47.
She told herself she didn’t want to be standing exposed in the middle of the floor, vibrating with nerves, when the man walked in.
She told herself a great many things. The truth, buried under all of them, was that her curiosity would never let her rest if she didn’t find out what waited in that crate.
Another relic? A second book? Something a thousand years old?
She got the pencil back between her teeth and climbed to the third rung from the top, reaching over her head for the tag — and that was when the storage bay door opened.
She heard Margaret gush, in the polished tone she reserved for clients with seven-figure paddles, “Mr. Vasiliev. Welcome to Whitfield, Marsh and Sampson. You’re lucky you called when you did. This collection has been getting inquiries all morning. Can I get you some refreshment before—”
Nica snickered softly to herself and went back to work. Margaret will have him eating out of her hand in no time. So a billionaire wants the whole lot. So I’m the unfortunate employee selected to show it to him. Just another day on the job. What was I so worried about?
Mr. Vasiliev said something to Margaret, something Nica couldn’t quite hear, his tone polite.
Impartial. The words themselves went right past Nica’s ears like so much noise.
His voice, though, did something to her as she listened.
Something almost wicked. The fine hairs on her arms lifted, one by one, as though the temperature had dropped and climbed in the same breath.
Her body pulled her two directions at once: desire slammed through her along with an instinctive certainty that a predator had entered the room.