Chapter 26
The water taxi's engine was a low thrum against the call of gulls, tourists, and lapping waves.
Frederica watched Venice slide past, a watercolor painting bleeding at the edges.
Ochre, terracotta, and rust-red plaster peeled from facades that had been standing when Serapis was a boy and a hell of a lot longer before that.
Dario sat opposite her, his back to the driver. He wasn't looking at the scenery. His gaze was fixed ahead on the approaching bend in the canal, his jaw tight. He hadn't been this tense in the last few days, but this was different. It was a homecoming he hadn't had time to prepare for.
The Tuscan Colleoni villa was a fortress, a monument of ancient stone and martial history, designed to keep the world out.
This was the opposite. The houses were packed shoulder to shoulder, leaning on each other for support.
They were part of the water and the city's life.
Ancient but beautifully alive at the same time.
They hadn't had time to talk about the fact that they had ended up in bed together again the previous night.
Frederica didn't want to dissect it or debrief it.
It seemed stupid to do that, and she was coming to terms with the realization that she didn't want to put her usual walls up between them anymore.
It was exhausting, and the bastard saw through it anyway.
She wasn't over Agrippa fucking with her, either, or the mystery of the woman he mentioned. She couldn't deal with that and fight with Dario, too.
The taxi slowed, turning down the Rio della Fava, and Dario pointed, "That dock there."
The Palazzo Foscari wasn't a palace. It was a tall, narrow house of faded brick, three stories of arched windows looking out onto the canal.
Time had softened its edges, worn the stone of the window frames, and stained the walls with damp.
It looked less like a building and more like something that had grown up from the canal's silty soil.
The driver cut the engine and nudged the boat against the mossy dock steps. Frederica stepped out, her boots finding solid ground. The air smelled of salt and damp stone and something faintly floral from a window box full of plants two houses down.
Dario paid the driver with a quick exchange in the Veneto dialect, and then he was on the steps beside her. He stood for a moment, just looking up at the house.
The door was heavy wood, painted a dark, lacquered green, now scuffed and weathered. In its center was a bronze lion's head, its face contorted in a silent snarl, a heavy ring through its mouth, and verdigris blooming in the lines of its mane.
Dario reached out, but not for the ring. His thumb found a small, almost invisible stud on the side of the bronze plate, no bigger than a rivet. He pressed it, and with a faint click, a narrow panel slid open, revealing a key safe.
Frederica smiled because he knew this door not as a visitor, but as a son, in the same way Frederica knew to look under the saint's robe for the spare key in Rhodes. Dario twisted the dial of numbers that the thief in her couldn't help but memorize, and he retrieved an iron key.
The lock turned with a groan, and the door swung inward. He stepped aside, "Ladies first."
"Pfft, lady," she said, but went in.
The air inside was cool and smelled of old leather, beeswax, and the faint, lingering aroma of coffee beans.
Dark blue walls drank the light from the tall window on the landing, and a thick, crimson velvet runner muffled her footsteps on the wide wooden staircase that curved up into the gloom.
Dario flicked switches and light from a blown-glass chandelier overhead scattered soft, jewel-toned colors across the polished floor.
It was silent, yet restful and peaceful. The only sounds were the distant chime of a church bell and the low hum of boat engines and lapping waves.
Dario closed the door, the sound a heavy thud that settled into the quiet. He let out a breath, looking younger somehow, as if the threshold stripped him of any bullshit or burdens. Frederica put her bag down out of the way and looked around her.
"I like it," she declared. "No balls anywhere to be seen."
"He never changed it and wouldn't let Gabriella hang any balls," Dario replied with a soft chuckle.
He ran a hand along the smooth wood of the banister.
"She wanted to gut the place and put in white walls, chrome, and glass.
My father wouldn't let her. It was his family home, and if she wanted to redecorate, she could do it in the villa. "
"I can't imagine a man strong enough to tell Gabriella Colleoni to fuck off," Frederica replied.
"He didn't say it in those words exactly, but he could always win her over with a kiss and a smile," Dario replied. "Only one who could. She never came back here after he died. Couldn't handle it. It's the only reason it still looks like this."
Frederica walked further into the hall, her eyes adjusting.
This wasn't a statement of power like the villa.
It was a home, and the evidence was everywhere, in a hundred small details.
Photographs hung in mismatched frames along the wall leading upstairs.
Not the stiff, formal portraits from Tuscany, but candid, lived-in moments of the Foscaris through the decades.
There were three boys, limbs tangled together on a sofa, asleep.
Rodrigo, the oldest, with his arm thrown protectively over a much smaller Leo.
She saw a photograph of Niccolò, younger than in the other portraits, laughing, with his arm around a teenage Rodrigo whose expression was one of pure, unadulterated hero-worship.
Her eyes found Dario amongst the shots. He was maybe ten or eleven, grinning a gap-toothed, triumphant smile at the camera, a smear of chocolate cake on his cheek.
In another, he was a toddler, curled asleep on his father's chest in a worn armchair, a tiny fist clutching the fabric of Niccolò's shirt.
He was watching her look at them with a faint, sad smile on his lips. "We did have some normal moments as a family before he died."
Frederica felt a familiar, unwelcome tightening in her own chest. This was the warmth she knew. It had a similar, if a slightly more restrained, feel of her own parents' house—the easy comfort, the lived-in clutter, the silent testimony to years of affection.
The Colleoni brothers hadn't been born into the cold war she had witnessed when Gabriella had still been alive. They'd had this, and as soon as Niccolò wasn't there to hold them together, she had taken this warmth from them.
Bitch, she thought, but kept her mouth shut because Gabriella was dead, and Dario and his brothers weren't broken. They were batted around the edges by their upbringing, but who wasn't?
Frederica turned away from the photos. "I suppose we'd better start looking for the bee before Serapis gets on the phone to harass us."
Dario nodded, the softness receding from his face, and the focus returning. "Serapis said Niccolò hid it here, where no one would ever find it."
"That narrows it down to the entire house."
"Not necessarily," Dario said, already moving toward a set of double doors at the end of the hall.
"Gabriella inventoried everything. Jewelry, art, furniture.
She had a ledger for it all. If it was valuable, she knew about it because of the crazy amount she paid on insurance.
So he must have hidden it in a place that was his alone.
A place she never went out of respect for him. "
Frederica followed him as he pushed open the door to a library, and the scent of leather and old paper washed over her.
Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves lined every wall, crammed with volumes bound in leather and cloth.
The ceiling was a dome of midnight blue, painted with the constellations of the zodiac in tarnished silver leaf.
Dario pushed open another narrow side door that led into a tidy office.
In the center of the room, a large mahogany desk stood like an altar, its surface clear, save for a green glass banker's lamp. Two worn leather armchairs faced a cold, black fireplace, and everything was neatly arranged in a weird kind of time capsule.
Frederica scanned the study before turning back to the library. There were countless hiding places. Behind books. Taped under drawers. Inside a hollowed-out volume. It would take hours.
"We start here," Dario said, his voice resonating in the quiet space. "This was his sanctuary. She hated this office and said it was morbid because it had no windows."
"It's the safest room in the house then," Frederica pointed out. "Especially if he was practicing magic."
"Makes sense why he favored it now that I'm a bit older.
" Dario walked to the desk, his fingers ghosting over the polished surface.
"I used to hide under here when I was a kid.
He'd be working, on the phone, yelling at someone in Milan or London.
I'd set up my toy soldiers on the rug. He never told me to be quiet. "
"I liked toy soldiers too," she replied with a smile.
"I'm not even a little surprised," he chuckled, and some of the tension around his eyes eased.
Frederica left him to the study and began with the bookshelves, pulling out a book at random. It was Herodotus's Histories. She shook it. Nothing. She ran her fingers along the shelf behind it. Just dust. This would take hours. Days.
"Think like your father," she said, not looking at him. "You're hiding something small and precious. Where does it go?"
Dario was silent for a long moment. She heard him moving around the desk, the soft slide of his hands on the wood.
"It would be somewhere clever," he said finally. "He loved puzzles. Tricks. Things with hidden compartments. This desk is like a puzzle box. He built it himself with his father when he was a teenager."
Frederica turned. Dario was crouched down, running his hands along the underside of the desktop, his brow furrowed in concentration.
"He used to hide biscotti and sweets in the secret drawers for me.
Said if I could find them, I could eat them.
It took me a week to find the first one," he said, a fond smile on his face.
"Gabriella tried to replace this desk with something modern once, and he almost divorced her.
In retrospect, he should have gone through with it. "
Frederica went back to the books, giving him space. The rhythmic slide of volumes being pulled from the shelf and replaced was the only sound. She worked her way along one wall, a systematic process that required no thought, leaving her senses free.
She listened to Dario's quiet breathing, the whisper of his fingertips on the wood. He was tracing the carved legs, the panels, the joints. He was searching not just for a hidden compartment, but for a memory, a connection.
She was halfway down the second wall when there was a faint, sharp click.
"Frederica," he called. "I think I found something."
"Something good?" She placed a copy of Paradiso back on the shelf and turned.
Dario's hand was resting on a small section of the ornate side paneling, which now stood ajar. It wasn't a drawer she could see from her angle, more like a thin slice of the desk itself had swung open. It was perfectly flush, the seam invisible unless you knew exactly where to press.
"Gabriella never found this one," Dario said quietly. "I never even found this one."
He reached inside and pulled out a slim, leather-bound journal, the color of dried blood, its pages held shut by a simple leather tie. It was worn at the corners, and the cover softened with use.
Dario just stared at it, resting on his palm. "This is his journal. I remember him writing in it all the time."
Frederica was anxious for him to open it up, but the look on his face stopped her from pressing.
"Fuck, I don't know if he would like the idea of me reading this," he said as he untied the leather with unsteady fingers and opened the journal to the first page. "Damn, I haven't seen his writing in so long. This is…weird."
"Let's hope it's not an account of him and Gabriella's sexual adventures," Frederica teased, hoping to make him laugh. He gave her a disapproving look, and she held her hands up in surrender. "Hey, I'm only saying it because it's something my parents would do, so I'm just warning you."
Dario sank from his knees to sit on the floor, his back against the desk, the journal open in his lap. "I don't think he was the kind to write something like that down, but if I get to a juicy bit, I'll let you know."
Giving a man space was a language Frederica understood better than comfort, so she left him to it and turned back to the bookshelves without a word.
She pulled down a copy of Petrarch's sonnets, its pages brittle and smelling of vanilla.
She opened it, checked the spine, and, finding it solid, slid it back into its place.
She moved to the next one and left him alone.
If Dario wanted her input, he wasn't afraid to ask, and someone had to get through all the shelves by nightfall.