Dark Bratva Daddy (Wicked Bratva Daddies #7)

1. Valentina

VALENTINA

Icould tell you who mattered in that room by what they got wrong about the paintings.

The woman in emerald called the Rothko moody, as if it were a teenager who might grow out of it.

A man refilled his champagne twice and pronounced the Basquiat a mess with good marketing.

A senator's wife stopped in front of the Hilma af Klint and told no one in particular that her granddaughter painted things just like it.

None of them looked longer than it took to be seen looking.

That was the whole liturgy of a benefit like this.

You did not come for the art. You came to be the art, framed and lit and priced by the company you kept.

I was there because the Voss Gallery was the only room in Manhattan where the name Ricci bought me nothing.

Here I was not the don's daughter. I was a woman in a gold dress who knew the little Guardi on the east wall had been cleaned too hard sometime in the nineties, and that the gallery had hung it low so the thin, faded sky would sit below eye level.

Knowing things like that was the only inheritance I had ever chosen for myself.

“You keep staring at that boat picture,” a voice said at my shoulder.

She was Bitsy Vandermeer: three husbands, one foundation, and a laugh she had rehearsed in some mirror until it gleamed. She worked the canapés the way she worked every room, warm as a buyer counting your teeth.

“It's a Guardi,” I said. “Venetian. Eighteenth century.”

“It's brown.”

“It's weather.” I tipped my glass toward it. “He painted the lagoon the morning after a storm. Everything is still wet. Look at how the light sits on the water instead of inside it.”

Bitsy looked for exactly as long as manners required, which was not long. “You're the Ricci girl. The quiet one.” She said quiet the way other people said unfortunate. “Is your father here?”

“Somewhere.”

“And the brother?” Her gaze had already left me, hunting better company. “Marco has a gift for these rooms.”

“He does. Rooms love him back,” I said, because it was true, and because agreeing sent people away faster.

She drifted off. I let her. Being forgotten in a crowd is a skill, and I had spent my whole life perfecting it. You stand where the light falls on the work and not on you. You watch the walls instead of the faces, and the crowd decides you are part of the wallpaper. Wallpaper hears everything.

That was how I saw my brother make the handoff.

Marco stood near the Rothko in the far gallery, beautiful the way a knife is beautiful, all clean lines and bad intentions.

He was speaking with a stranger, a thin man with a courier's careful posture and a slim black portfolio case held flat to his chest. It was made for documents, or a single small canvas, or nothing that wanted to be seen.

He kept it in both hands, the way the guards cradled the insured pieces, as if it were worth more than the Rothko bleeding red behind his head.

Marco said something short. The courier nodded once and did not smile. Then it changed hands, my brother's fingers closing around the handle, and for half a breath his eyes lifted and found mine across two rooms of strangers.

He smiled at me. It did not reach anything.

I smiled back and returned to the Guardi, because that is what the unseen do. Behind me the courier left, unhurried, the way a man goes when he has been paid not to be remembered.

Marco came to me anyway. He always did when he caught me seeing.

“Valentina.” He kissed my cheek, and he smelled of cedar and money. “You look like our mother.”

“You say that when you want me gone.”

“I say it because it's true.” He leaned the case against the wall behind him, careless, the way you put down a thing you have decided is invisible. “Are you enjoying the art, or only grading it?”

“Both. The Guardi is real. Most of the room is not.”

Something shifted behind his eyes and was gone. “Careful,” he said, light as a host. “People pay a great deal to believe what hangs on the wall.”

“I know. I grew up with you.”

He laughed, and the sound had teeth in it, which made it the most honest thing he had given me all night. “Go find Papa,” he said. “He has been asking for you. He turns sentimental when he is tired.”

“Is he tired?”

“He is old.” Marco lifted the case once more, both hands again, the way you carry a thing you cannot afford to drop. “We are all getting older, Valentina. Some of us are paying attention.”

He walked off before I could ask what he meant. I watched the case go with him, flat and black and carried too carefully, and I filed it where I filed everything I was not meant to notice, behind my eyes, beside the scrubbed Guardi and the lie in its sky.

While it rested against the wall I had read the luggage tag, the paper kind, turned half away from me.

Reading what people left half-hidden was the one talent no one had thought to take from me.

The tag said Geneva, a freeport address.

I knew what lived in freeports: crates of canvases that hung nowhere, bought and sold in the dark between borders, taxed by no country and seen by no eye.

Paintings like that existed only as numbers on a page.

I looked at my brother's straight back across the bright room, and a question went cold in me, one I did not want to hold.

I found my father by the windows, away from the worst of the noise.

Salvatore Ricci had once filled a doorway. Tonight the suit did most of that work. The skin beneath his eyes had gone the color of old paper, and his hand, when it found mine, weighed less than it had any right to.

“There she is.” The gravel was still in his voice, and I loved it the way you love a house you grew up in. “My daughter. The only one in this family who came for the paintings.”

“Somebody has to.”

“Your brother came for the room.”

“Marco always does.”

He held my gaze a moment too long, and his face carried something I had no name for, soft and afraid, a thing he did not usually let me see. “Do not stay late tonight,” he said.

“It's just a party, Papa.”

“It is their party.” He nodded toward the crowd without turning to it. “We are guests in this room. Remember that.” His fingers closed on mine with the last of what he had brought with him. “Go home early. For me.”

I wanted to ask him why. I wanted to ask a hundred other things I had swallowed for twenty-two years. Instead I pressed my lips to his cheek, because that was the only language we had ever managed, and I felt him lean into it like a man who needed the wall to stay upright.

I went looking for air. Bruno Sasso found me first.

Bruno was one of my father's men, the kind whose work had no title and no clean edges. He had soft hands and a hard reputation, and he wore both like cologne. He blocked my path near the service hall, a glass in each fist, easy as a man who had never been told no in a way that stuck.

“Valentina Ricci.” He held out a glass. “All alone.”

“I'm working on it.”

He did not move. “You don't remember me.”

“I remember you, Bruno. That's the problem.”

He chuckled, too close, the champagne sour on his breath. “Your father lets you drift through these rooms as if you belong in them. Pretty thing, all these hungry men.” His gaze took the slow tour, ankle to throat, that men like him mistook for a compliment. “Somebody could get the wrong idea.”

“Somebody already has.” I gave ground, and he took it, until the wall met my shoulder blades. Twelve feet away the party went on without a single head turning, because wallpaper does not call for help. “Move, Bruno.”

“Or what?”

I held his eyes. “Or I tell Marco you put your hands on me, and we both find out which of us he can't afford to lose.”

That reached him. Bruno was stupid, not suicidal. The grin curdled on his mouth. He lifted both glasses in a small mock toast and folded back into the crowd, and I did not let myself breathe until he was gone.

My hands were not steady. I needed a minute with no Ricci in it, no Bruno, none of the loud machinery of being looked at and unseen in the same breath.

A corridor ran behind it, dim, hung with the pieces not chosen for the floor. I slipped past the velvet rope and let the noise close over my head like water.

At the end of it, under a single picture light, was the Caravaggio.

It was a study, not a finished work, only a man's face turning out of black, one cheekbone catching a light from no visible source while the rest of him surrendered to shadow. Caravaggio always did that. He did not paint the light. He painted the dark, and then he let one true thing escape it.

I stood in front of it, and my shoulders came down for the first time all night.

This was the only conversation I had ever wanted at these things: a dead man four hundred years gone, telling anyone who bothered to look the same quiet thing.

The light is in there. You only have to stay in the dark long enough to find it.

“He hid it in the corner,” I said to the painting, the way my mother taught me when I was small enough to believe she would always stand beside me. “Look where he hides the light.”

I moved closer, until the black of it filled the whole of my sight. “And if you wait in it long enough, you can almost...”

The hand closed over my mouth from behind.

It was not rough, and that was the worst of it.

The glove was soft leather, and it pressed with a terrible patience, fingers spread along my jaw while an arm folded around me like a door swinging shut.

I was pinned to a chest that did not give when I shoved at it.

My heel came down and found only air. My glass slipped free and did not break on the carpet, and some useless part of me noted it, even with his glove locked over my mouth.

“Don't,” the voice said into my hair. It was low and accented, calm in a way that turned my blood to water. “Don't scream. Screaming ruins the line of a good dress.”

I bit down on the glove. He did not flinch. I drove my elbow back into ribs that felt cut from the same stone as the wall, and his arm only drew me deeper, away from the light, away from the noise, away from everyone who had spent the whole night not seeing me.

“There you are,” he murmured, with something close to satisfaction in it, a tone that frightened me worse than any threat. “I wondered whether you would come down here. You always find the best thing in the room.”

I clawed at his wrist. My nails found leather and skin and changed nothing.

His other hand rose. Something cold and small touched the bare inside of my arm.

“Easy,” he said.

The needle bit.

The Caravaggio swam. The single point of stolen light smeared and ran, the black around it spreading until it was everything I could see, and my knees stopped belonging to me, and the arm took my weight as if it had expected to all along.

The last thing I owned was the voice, close and unhurried, while the dark finished what the painter had started.

“Hello, Miss Ricci.” A breath of warmth against my ear. “You have been the most interesting thing in every room your entire life. Nobody ever noticed but me.”