The flames caught the edge of the canvas. The boy’s smile curled and blackened. The cards turned to ash. Within two minutes, the painting was gone—not stolen, not recovered, but destroyed. And with it, the Duchessa’s lies, Dante’s leverage, and Viktor’s fifteen-year dream.
The painting’s replacement was the hardest part. Viktor could not simply take the Caravaggio. The theft would be discovered within hours. He needed a fake—a perfect fake—to hang in its place. Marcus had spent a year painting it, using seventeenth-century pigments ground by hand, on a canvas aged with smoke and sunlight. When he finished, even Viktor, who had stared at the real Caravaggio for eight hours of surveillance footage, could not tell the difference. grand theft
“Mr. Nazarov,” the tall man said. “My name is Dante. I represent the Duchessa’s family.” The flames caught the edge of the canvas
“Then what do you want?”
Viktor felt the floor tilt beneath him. “The Duchessa is in Venice.” Within two minutes, the painting was gone—not stolen,
It was about the thing you left behind.