Chapter 13
Chapter Thirteen
Yana
The car pulls up to the gallery, and Giorgio gets out first. I step out beside him, and I take a moment to look at him while he straightens his jacket and fumbles with the button.
The suit is two sizes too big across the shoulders.
His head is tipped slightly down. His glasses are thick.
His whole body has folded itself back into the apologetic curve I first saw at Annika’s show.
I watch him, and I think about how easily I was fooled.
For the length of one evening, I looked at this, and I saw a nervous collector’s son.
I saw a coward in a suit that didn’t fit.
I felt the wrongness underneath, but I let it be a question instead of an answer, and that one evening of doubt is the only thing that separates me from every other person in that gallery who looked at Giorgio Ferrante and saw exactly what he wanted them to see.
The loser’s slouch. The oversized jacket. The thick glasses. All of it was built to hide the calculation in his eyes. The eyes do not match the body. They never did. I am the only one in this building who knows it.
I am his consultant tonight. We go in.
The gallery is bright and full. Giorgio shuffles half a step behind me, nervous, and I do the work he told me to do in the car.
I shake hands. I make introductions. I tell people that Mr. Ferrante is here on behalf of his father’s collection and that we are very interested in the early modern Italian pieces, and people warm to me the way people warm to anyone who is calm and certain and seems to know which fork to use.
I am halfway through a conversation with a dealer from Geneva when I see Max.
He is coming toward me. He does not look at Giorgio. He does not acknowledge him at all. He touches my elbow and steers me a few steps away from the dealer into the gap between two display walls.
“Yana. What is happening?”
“Max.”
“Annika told me she’s not working with Giorgio anymore. Just stopped. Won’t take his calls, won’t sell to him, won’t tell me why.” His eyes search my face. “And now, you’re here. With him? What is going on?”
I look at him.
Annika did not tell him about Giorgio being Giovanni. I keep my voice low.
“I can’t tell you a lot. I need you to trust me on that.”
“Yana —”
“But I need you to do one thing. Avoid Giorgio. Whatever he says to you, however friendly he is. Don’t deal with him. Don’t get near him. Stay away.”
Max studies me for a long moment. Then he sighs.
“Okay,” he says. “Okay. I don’t like it, but okay.”
I feel a presence on my shoulder.
Giorgio has shuffled up beside me, and he leans in close, his voice is low and meant only for me, his face still doing the nervous thing for the benefit of the room.
“You seem to have a lot of people interested in you.”
A shiver goes through me before I can stop it.
I think of last night. Of what he did with his mouth between my thighs. Of the orgasm that tore through me, whether I wanted it or not. The memory arrives uninvited, and I am furious at how fast it comes.
I ignore him, and I turn back toward the room, and Max takes the hint and drifts off, and the three of us end up seated in the same row when the bidding begins. Max sits closer than he needs to.
Giorgio leans toward me.
“There,” he murmurs. He nods at a man entering from the far side, an older, well-dressed man. “He is the one. Our job tonight is to win a piece he likes. Once we have something he wants, we have a reason to approach him. From there, I secure a private consultation. He is the doctor.”
I nod.
The auction begins.
It moves quickly through the first few lots. Then a piece comes up that Max wants. I can see it in the way he leans forward, the way his hand goes up.
Giorgio wants it too.
Max turns to him with a polite smile.
“I’m afraid we’re going to have to hug this out.”
Giorgio gives a small, nervous laugh.
“I like a fair fight,” he says.
Then he bids.
He bids so high that the room goes quiet for a second. Max raises again. Giorgio doubles it without hesitating. Max sits back. He is out, and he knows it, and the piece goes to Giorgio along with two more before the night is done.
The auction ends.
Giorgio leans toward me as the room begins to break up.
“There is an after-party. I’ll give him the piece there. Go, do whatever you need to do. We leave in ten minutes.”
I excuse myself to go to the bathroom.
He goes toward the car.
I do not make it to the bathroom.
Max catches my arm in the corridor and pulls me through a side door into the back hallway near the loading area, away from the crowd.
“Max —”
“I don’t trust him.” His voice is low and fast. “Yana, I’m serious. I’ve worked with collectors my whole career. That man’s backstory is bullshit. The anonymous father- I’ve checked. There’s nothing under it. Who is he actually?”
“Max, I’ll explain what I can later. I promise. But not here. Not now.”
I turn to go back, and over his shoulder through the open loading door, I see something.
The doctor.
He is being walked toward a black car at the loading bay.
And the man walking with him, with a hand at his elbow guiding him in, is a familiar face.
I squint to be sure. The brace on his leg. The way he carries himself. It is Fabiano, Giovanni’s Capo. I learned his name tonight because Giovanni called him several times to give him orders.
“Yana?” Max is watching my face. “Is everything okay?”
Fabiano did not come to the show. Giovanni left him at the mansion to handle things. He told me himself. So why is Fabiano her, at the back of the gallery, putting the exact man we came for into a car?
Did Giovanni send him? Without telling me?
Or does Giovanni not know?
“Yana.”
I pull myself back.
“Be good,” I tell Max. “Go home. I mean it.”
I go back through the front.
I expect the car to be gone; maybe Giovanni had lied about the after-party and sent his Capo to get the doctor without my interference. But the car is there.
I get in.
The door closes. The driver pulls out.
I look at him.
“Did you ask Fabiano to come tonight?”
“Fabiano is at home.”
I frown. Giovanni grabs my arm and pulls me toward him. I gasp in shock.
“Why did it take you fifteen minutes to use the bathroom?”
I pull back.
“Are you crazy?”
His other hand comes up and takes my face, fingers spread along my jaw.
“You dare run off with another man under my nose.”
“Don’t be crazy.”
But my body is already betraying me — the grip on my jaw, the heat from the roughness of his hands. I feel the same warmth that I have felt every time he has put his hands on me, and I hate it, but it is there anyway.
He pulls me closer. “I saw you both. Stealing glances at each other.”
“Max was just worried about me.”
“You belong to me until the deal with Kirill is over.” His face is close to mine. “Do you understand?”
The tension sits between us, thick.
His phone rings, and he answers it without letting go of my jaw. He listens.
“Oh,” he says. “Oh. I understand.”
He lowers the phone and looks at me.
“My men at the party say the Doctor didn’t attend. He sent word he’d come down with a fever.” He sits back. “Let’s go home. I’ll find another time to give him the piece. Soon.”
I watch his fingers tap against his knee.
I think about what I saw. Fabiano, at the loading bay, walking the man into a car. The man who is supposedly home with a fever. The man Giovanni needs more than anyone alive.
He must not know that Fabiano was here. This wasn’t a plan between them to keep me out. At least, it didn’t look like it.
I weigh it for half a second. Do I want to interfere with his matters?
He doesn’t trust me, and he won’t believe me. But —
“I saw your Capo taking the man away,” I say.
He looks at me, irritated.
“I saw him,” I say. “At the back. Walking the Doctor to a car at the loading bay.”
“Fabiano is at the mansion.”
“He is most likely not. I just saw him. The brace, the leg, the way he moves. It was him. He had a hand on the man’s elbow, and he put him in a black car.”
Giovanni’s face changes.
“Stop the car,” he says to the driver. “Turn around. Back to the mansion.”
He looks at me.
“If you are lying,” he says, “I will have to punish you.”
I look out the window.
We drive back fast, and the city slides past. He does not speak again. His hand stays on his knee, and his fingers keep tapping.
The car pulls through the gates and up the drive. As soon as the car stops, he is out and reaches back in, taking my hand, pulling me out after him. We go up the steps together, and he pushes the front door open.
Fabiano opens it from the inside.
He is on his crutch. He is in house clothes. He looks like a man who has been home all evening.
“Don,” he says. “You’re back.”
Giovanni turns and looks at me.
I am staring at Fabiano.
He looks like he never left the house.
I swallow.
“Did you meet the doctor, Don?” Fabiano asks.
Giovanni gives Fabiano a stiff smile.
“The man was unwell. We couldn’t meet him.
” His voice is even, pleasant, the voice he uses when he is most dangerous.
“Send him a card. And a gift. Something from the early modern lots. And find his itinerary for the next few days. I’d like for us to run into each other somewhere, casually, before the week is out. ”
“Noted, Don.”
“That will be all. You can handle it from your quarters. Rest the leg.”
“Yes, Don.”
Fabiano turns and goes. His crutch taps against the floor as he walks across the hall. His face is blank the whole way. He does not look at me once.
I wait until he is gone.
“I saw him,” I say. “I’m telling you, I—”
Giovanni takes my hand.
He pulls me through the door and toward the stairs.
I plant my feet and fight against him, but his grip does not give way.
His fingers are clamped around my hand and wrist, and I can feel the bruise forming under them, the pressure going all the way into the small bones, and still, he does not slow.
He takes me up the stairs and down the corridor to his room. He pushes the door open and throws me toward the bed. I land on it and catch myself on my hands.
I prop myself up on my elbows. My heart is slamming against my ribs.
“I really saw him!” I cry. “I —”
His lips cut me off as they cover my mouth in a rough kiss.