Chapter 16
The best thing about a catering uniform was that it made you invisible. Frederica had used the principle before in different variations—maintenance crews, hotel housekeeping, airport ground staff—but for some reason, a jacket and tray were always the most effective.
People at events like this one had paid a great deal of money to be here and were very committed to the idea that the staff existed in a separate layer of reality from their own.
You could walk directly past a man's elbow, and he would look straight through you because you weren't a person, you were set dressing.
Frederica enjoyed the power of being invisible.
The fundraiser was running the way these things always did. With speeches in the main gallery that had gone eleven minutes over, and a tide of people now released into the room with the focused energy of those who had earned their open bar.
She moved through the periphery of it twice, mapping the guards' patterns against the agreed timing, and both circuits ran clean. Twelve minutes, consistent.
The corridor guard was a young man in a navy blazer who paused at the same point of the service corridor to check his phone every time. She had timed the pause. Twenty-two seconds.
She had everything she needed. What she also had, from her current position near the catering station, was a clear line of sight to Dario.
He was in the middle of the room, in a suit that screamed money. He was talking to a small cluster of guests with ease, acting as if he had nowhere else to be and no interest more pressing than this one. They had all laughed at his jokes. Twice.
One woman wrote something on a napkin and slipped it into his pocket. Frederica's eye twitched, and she looked away before she decided to act on her violent thoughts.
Dario didn't need her watching over him. He was very good at working a room. He wasn't doing it in the showy way she had expected from him. He wasn't performing. He was just present in a way that made the people around him lean in slightly, as though standing close to him was the better option.
She knew that pull. It was like standing next to a sun with its own kind of gravity field that drew you close, just so you could feel the warmth of his attention.
It worked on her as easily as the suckers across the room, which was why she had always gone out of her way to piss him off and start fights.
At nine twenty-two, Frederica slipped through the side service door. The corridor was dim and utilitarian after the warm gallery light, with concrete-block walls, overhead fluorescents, and the smell of industrial cleaning products.
She moved fast and quietly along the left-hand wall, counting doors. Restoration office. Storage. The stairwell door that wasn't alarmed. She slipped through it and down.
The basement was cooler. The archive room was third on the right, the lock exactly what Tore had described: a six-pin mechanical with a secondary catch, the kind that had been considered serious security in 1987. She had the picks out before the door was fully closed behind her.
The reliquary was in a climate-controlled cabinet on the second shelf. It was a dark-wood and tarnished-silver case the size of a matchbox, with Byzantine designs on the lid and a glass panel clouded with age.
Inside, just visible, sat a small, sealed vial of crystallized matter that had no business still existing after twelve hundred years, and yet somehow, it did. Whether or not they were really tears wasn't the point. People believed it was, and that belief was enough to make it powerful.
Frederica photographed the case and its position before her mind slipped to the quiet place that it always went when she picked a lock. It was an ability she got from Tore, and her father had made sure she cultivated it.
After a few moments, Frederica felt the lock give and opened the case. She placed the reliquary in a velvet jewelry bag, tucked it into her bra, and put the case exactly as she had found it.
She was two minutes ahead of schedule. She was also, when she came back up the stairwell and checked her watch against the guard's expected position, thirty seconds behind where she needed to be.
No, it wasn't her. The guard's circuit had run short.
Shit. Frederica pressed back into the stairwell doorway and watched through the gap in the door as the navy blazer appeared at the far end of the service corridor, turned, and started walking toward her.
She did the calculation in three heartbeats. He would reach the stairwell in a minute. The corridor door back to the gallery was behind him. The window exit was forward, past him, two doors down, which was not usable.
She tapped the tiny bud in her ear and whispered, "I need more time. Guard is on early rotation, deviated from his routine, and I'm stuck in the stairwell."
"Copy that." Dario's voice was low and completely unbothered. "Give me twenty seconds."
She had no idea what he would do, but she had no doubt that he would sort it out. She could rely on him, like she had when she had found herself in a jail in Crete.
She counted fifteen seconds, and then heard a crash from the far end of the building.
It sounded like something expensive meeting a marble floor, followed by raised voices.
Then a louder crash, followed by a sound she could only describe as a man having an extremely committed personal crisis in a public space.
Don't overdo it and get yourself arrested, Colleoni.
The security guard stopped walking and turned toward the noise. His radio crackled. He listened, said something she couldn't hear, and he walked quickly back the way he had come, breaking into a jog at the far end of the corridor.
Frederica was through the gallery door and moving past the catering station within ten seconds.
The scene Dario had created was genuinely impressive in its commitment. There was an overturned drinks table, a spreading puddle of red wine, and Dario in what appeared to be the third act of a very loud argument with a man in his sixties.
Both security guards from this end of the building had converged on the situation. The museum director—she recognized Polat from his photograph—was trying to intervene as the man, visibly distressed, watched his fundraiser turn into a scene.
Definitely overdid it, big bear.
Frederica needed to get Dario out before Polat called the actual police, which he would do in minutes if the situation didn't resolve.
Cursing, she took off the catering jacket as she moved, tucking it behind a display stand. She was in a fitted black sleeveless top and black trousers, but she always had a plan. Frederica stopped in the dark alcove near the gallery entrance and stripped.
The trousers had zips running the full length of each outer seam. It was a modification she had made to most of her field clothing, because a change of outfit was a useful thing. Zips went down, the panels came away, and folded into the interior pockets.
The top was actually a tight dress that she pulled down to end mid-thigh. She had worn heeled ankle boots that night instead of sensible shoes, just in case she needed the change.
Frederica pulled her braid out, ran her hands through its waves, and shook it loose. Emergency red lipstick came from the bag's exterior pocket.
Frederica breathed out, straightened her shoulders, and crossed the gallery floor at a walk, heels clicking angrily. She was aware of heads turning.
When Frederica really wanted to be seen, she made sure to draw attention to herself. It was all in the attitude, the walk, the dominance, and the way she used her size to take up space.
She would have to be very convincing because Dario was currently being held by one arm by a security guard while the older man he had been arguing with pointed a finger at him and said something in Turkish that she didn't need to translate.
Dario saw her, and his expression turned to a slack-jawed 'holy shit' look. She could work with that and reached them in ten seconds.
"Dio mio! Ma che cazzo!" she demanded and grabbed Dario's free arm.
She turned the full force of her attention on the security guard.
"I'm so sorry. My husband… Please… I'm so sorry.
He didn't eat today, and he had too much to drink.
He gets very… How you say… Obnoxious." She gestured expressively at the disaster area.
"We will, of course, pay for whatever he did.
Please, I'm so embarrassed. He isn't usually this embarrassing when I take him out in public—"
She turned to Dario, switched back to Italian, and hissed in a rapid whisper, "You are an enormous idiot, and I'll deal with you properly at the hotel.
You are going to look very sorry right now, and let me manage this, or I'm going to bend you over and spank the stupid out of you right here and now.
Dario stared at her like something in his brain had snagged on the image and was working to catch up. Then he arranged his face into something sheepish and considerably more pitiful than he usually was.
"Tesoro mio," he said, with impressive pathos, reaching for her.
"Don't you 'tesoro' me," she snapped in English and turned back to the security guard. "Please. We will go. I am so sorry for this idiota's behavior."
Polat had appeared. She aimed the full weight of her apology at him, a mortified foreign wife, completely sincere, absolutely going to make this right. His anger wavered into pity as he sighed.
The security guards, who had been doing a job that involved a drunk foreigner and were now looking at a domestic situation, stepped back in self-preservation. The older man Dario had been arguing with was being talked down to by a colleague.
Polat said something to Dario in Turkish which made his position very clear.
Dario nodded earnestly and said something back.
Whatever it was, Polat's expression shifted fractionally toward a more mollified expression.
Frederica got them moving with the promise of a large donation to make up for the blunder.
She was aware of Dario at her left shoulder, keeping pace with her through the gallery, out through the entrance, down the steps to the dark street. The reliquary was in the velvet bag between her breasts.
Just keep walking, don't look back.
In the street outside the museum, Frederica checked over her shoulder and spotted another security staff member standing in the museum doorway watching them go.
"You idiot! You almost got your ass kicked by security and arrested in another foreign country! I'm so mad I could just—" Frederica turned on Dario, pushed him against the stone wall, and kissed him angrily.
His hand buried deep in her loose hair, and he kissed her back. She grabbed the lapels of his jacket, pulling him closer, needing all of his muscled chest against her again. His other hand dropped to her ass before sliding down her thigh and dragging her up against him.
"Amore mio, I'm so sorry," he said plaintively.
"I don't want to hear your excuses," she snapped back, her hands tugging at his long hair. "Just shut up and kiss me."
She dragged her teeth over his bottom lip, and Dario made a sexy growling sound that vibrated all the way from her lips to her pussy. Oh god, that wasn't fair at all. She ground up against his dick in retaliation, making his grip on her tighten.
Frederica counted to ten and pulled back to look over his shoulder. Dario's mouth dropped to her neck, the stubble of his beard brushing over her skin. Frederica bit down a whimper, and she forced her eyes open to check on security.
The doorway was empty.
"Staff member is finally gone," she said breathlessly. "He was watching us like a damn pervert."
"I know. I think we made his night," Dario replied, his voice completely level. She let go of his lapels, and he lowered her leg.
They walked without hurrying, and neither of them said anything until they were inside their car, and she had the reliquary out of its hiding spot. His brows went up.
"What? I needed to put it somewhere," she said and started laughing, because the whole scene of Polat's face and the horror of the other guests was a disaster.
"That was the dumbest thing I have ever seen," she said between giggles.
Dario was smiling. "You're welcome for that, Spartana."
"I can't believe that worked."
"I had less than a minute to come up with something! You're lucky it wasn't worse."
The low light of the car made the shadows dance on his face. He was still grinning, and it was big and genuine.
"What did you say to Polat? My Turkish is rusty," she asked.
"Only that I had been testing him because a collector had told me the documentation on a piece in his collection was questionable. I had wanted to see how he responded to pressure." He shrugged. "I told him he did very well and that I would be passing his name to my client as a reputable source."
She stared at him. "He believed that shit?"
"He wanted to. People usually do to make the embarrassing moment go away."
"Huh, what an idiot."
The adrenaline was still moving through Frederica, warm and electric, making the edges of everything slightly too bright, too clear, and her own heartbeat audible. She was very aware of how small the car was and how Dario was too big for it.
"Hotel," she said, looking into the visor mirror and wiping a smear of lipstick off her chin. Dario never did anything by halves, and she looked like a drunk clown. "Quickly, before anyone figures out we didn't arrive at the party together."
"Hotel," Dario agreed and started the car.