Chapter 20
The cover story Dario built for the auction took four hours, a pile of sandwiches, and two pots of coffee. He needed fuel when he worked, and had loaded up on groceries before they arrived.
They had flown into Vienna earlier that day, and he had ensured their safe house had two bedrooms and two bathrooms.
Frederica was still being weirdly polite, which was so unlike her that Dario was staying out of her way. He was glad to have the job to focus on and keep his mind off the filthy replays. Not that it worked much because the filthy replays were next level.
Dario worked the way he always worked: backward from the room. Who would be in it, what they would want to see, and what they needed to believe.
The auction Altun had described was the kind of private event that didn't appear in any calendar and was attended exclusively by people with enough money to be eccentric and enough connections to be dangerous.
The seller was moving the mirror through a specialist. The buyers would be collectors of the genuinely rare, the possibly illegal, and the aggressively unprovenanced.
They would be suspicious of obvious new money and indifferent to charm for its own sake. They wanted to deal with people who understood the value of what was on offer, not people who were impressed by it.
That was the angle.
Dario had his laptop open with four different research tabs, a notepad with handwritten notes because some things he didn't trust to any server, and a plate of food at his elbow.
He had pulled the chair to face the window so he could see the Viennese skyline going gray-gold in the evening light while he worked, and had been aware for the last forty minutes that Frederica was watching him from the other side of the room.
Not overtly. She had her own work spread across the second desk, that focused on the logistics of getting them out of the city with the mirror if they ran into trouble. She checked her laptop. She made calls. Every so often, her attention crossed the room toward him.
Dario had spent a significant portion of his adult life making sure people looked at him and knew exactly what it felt like to be watched.
"Signor and Signora Ferraro," he said, without turning around.
A pause. "Explain."
"Our cover." He pulled the notepad toward him.
"Gabriele Ferraro. Art consultant, private.
Family money from Brescia, old textile manufacturing, sold the business in 2018 and reinvested in what his wife diplomatically calls 'alternative assets.
' He is serious, not flashy. He knows what things are worth and doesn't need to be told. "
Another pause, longer. "And Signora Ferraro?"
"Amelia." He turned around. She had her arms folded, chin at an angle.
"Amelia Ferraro is a restorer. Trained in Florence, worked in private conservation for twelve years.
She understands provenance because she has spent her career watching what happens to objects that lack it.
She has opinions about occult artefacts that are informed and occasionally inconvenient, and Gabriele has long since stopped arguing with her assessments. "
"You gave her a whole career."
"The buyers in that room will ask her questions. She needs answers that hold."
"And the relationship?"
"Eleven years married." He held her gaze. "Long enough that they have stopped being impressed by each other and started being impressed by things together. They are in this room because they saw the mirror's photograph and agreed, without having to discuss it, that they wanted it."
She was quiet for a moment. Working through it the same way she worked through a floor plan: looking for gaps, weaknesses, points of failure.
"The marriage works," she said finally. "It's better than a new couple. Harder to test."
"People stop performing for each other after eleven years," he replied with a nod. "They're honest in ways that are harder to fake. It plays as real because the friction is built in."
"Our friction is not exactly fake."
"No," he said carefully, sensing dangerous ground. "It isn't. That's why it will work."
She stared out the window and seemed to be absorbing her new identity. He risked staring for a beat longer at her profile, sharp against the fading light outside, before he turned back to his notepad.
The cover needed one more layer: a reason to want this specific mirror. Collectors at this level didn't acquire randomly. They had obsessions, themes, lines of interest that an educated seller could trace.
He had spent the afternoon building Gabriele Ferraro's collection on paper: a documented interest in early modern European occult instruments, nothing necromantic, nothing that would alarm, just the kind of serious academic-adjacent fascination that wealthy men with too much time and not enough intellectual challenge developed.
He had a provenance trail for three other pieces Ferraro supposedly owned, sourced from real auction records and adjusted with a light hand.
Iz had done the digital work, building the paper identity out into the corners of the internet where it would survive scrutiny.
Leo had called a contact in Vienna who could verify Ferraro's name if anyone checked.
Rodrigo had said nothing useful or obstructive, which was approximately the best Dario had come to expect from his older brother on short notice.
It wasn't Rodrigo's kind of fight; it was Dario's, and he trusted his brother to take care of it.
Frederica crossed the room, stopped behind his shoulder, and studied the notepad.
"You do this in your head when you're working a room?" she asked.
"Mostly."
"At the museum in Ephesus. When you were talking to Polat." There was something careful in her voice, like she was working out where a thought was going while she said it. "You were building that story in real time."
"It's faster when you know the room well."
"I thought you were just very good at talking," she admitted.
"I'm also very good at talking." He kept his voice easy. "It helps to know what you're talking about so you don't sound like an idiot."
She pulled the notepad toward her, read the details of Amelia Ferraro's conservation career, and pushed it back.
He watched her process the gap between the Dario she had filed under charming liability and the Dario who had spent an afternoon building a plausible art consultant from the ground up, complete with a wife's independent professional history.
She was careful about not showing when he surprised her, but he had been around her enough in the last few weeks to know at least some of her tells.
"What did Amelia study in Florence?" she asked.
"Paintings, early medieval conservation. She specializes in panel paintings and triptychs, which led her to develop an interest in objects of the same period. Her thesis was on material deterioration in tempera paintings, which is publicly accessible and dull enough that no one will read it."
"You found an actual thesis?"
"Iz found an actual thesis. I found Amelia a reason to have written one."
Frederica absorbed this with a nod. "Show me the auction floor plan."
Dario moved his laptop toward her. She took the chair across from him without asking. She pulled the screen toward her and started working through the venue layout with the same attention she had given the museum in Ephesus, marking positions and running angles.
This was the version of her that few people got to see.
It wasn't the sharp-tongued threat or the woman who had kissed him like an argument in the street outside the museum.
Just the professional underneath, precise and serious, and completely at ease with her own competence.
He could see both Tore and Despina's training hard at work, and despite what she thought about herself, Frederica was the best of both of them.
"The mirror will be in a secure viewing case," she said, breaking his train of thought. "They won't let it be handled until bids are placed. We need to see it before the room does."
"Altun's contact can get us in for the pre-auction viewing. Catalog access only, but it's enough."
"We'll need to know what's in the case with it. If the mirror is warded, Serapis, Kon, and Altun need to know before we move it."
"Already on the list." He flipped the notepad to the next page and showed her.
She read it. Her expression shifted, barely, in the way it did when something had not gone how she expected. "You had already thought of that?"
"I think of most things," he said with a smile. "I just don't always announce them. Sometimes it's easier to let people make assumptions about being a big himbo."
Frederica looked across the table in the low lamp light, and there was a moment he recognized: the same moment there had been in the car after Ephesus, and on the terrace in Rhodes, and in approximately twelve other instances he had stopped counting because counting them was not helping him maintain the 'just a hookup' position they had both agreed on.
He had always suspected that Frederica Alesci would be incredible in between the sheets.
Now he knew that she was absolutely feral in the best possible way.
He had the bruises and bite marks to prove it.
He would never regret it even if it only ever happened once.
It had been worth all the awkwardness and then some.
Frederica picked up her phone. "I'm going to call Altun about the pre-auction access."
"Tell her we need the full catalog," he replied. "It's better if—"
"I know what to ask for, arkoúdos." She was already dialing as she walked away. She was back to calling him 'bear,' and he took that as a sign she was warming up again.
He looked at the notepad and the name he had written at the top of the page: Amelia Ferraro, married eleven years.
Wonder how that would look and feel, he thought, and Despina and Tore sprang into his mind. They had the kind of ease and love that was rarer than the whole contents of the auction they were about to crash.
Dario felt a pang of longing and shut it down just as quickly. This job was going to be a problem in ways that had nothing to do with Agrippa and his damn mirror. With a sigh of resignation, he picked up his pen and got back to work.