Sapphire

by Sophie Lark

  Black did call Cancio then. He showed up with three squad cars, ten minutes later.

  Black kept a direct eye on Lex the whole time. He knew better than to handcuff her to a post and expect her to still be there when he came back.

  A cursory glance at the scene in the shipping container had shown that Lex was probably telling the truth. He found the broken remains of the chair, the pieces of rope on the floor, and the hitman’s duffle bag.

  He could see a few tattoos on the unconscious man’s hands, and on his chest, where the collar of his shirt lay open. A poppy, a spider’s web, an eight-pointed star—it looked like he had spent time in a Soviet gulag.

  Cancio was less than thrilled to find Black in his city, uninvited, arresting people. He looked a little happier when Black said that the girl should have information on the theft of the Romanov Cross, and that he thought the other prisoner was a mafia hitman.

  Cancio took Black and the two prisoners back to the Venice Police Headquarters, in the old convent of Santa Chiara at the foot of the Ponte della Libertà bridge.

  Here, there was a bit of a squabble while Cancio argued with the chief of the Polizia di Stato over jurisdiction. Italy had a complicated law enforcement system, involving the State Police, who were a civilian force, versus the Carabinieri and the Guardia di Finanza, who were both military.

  Cancio wanted to maintain control of the investigation of the Palace theft. He felt it fell under his purview as a crime related to smuggling, customs, and counterfeiting. The Polizia chief felt he had a better claim as the head of general law enforcement for the city.

  Black didn’t know enough Italian to follow the minutia of the argument. He only marveled how the two men could shout into each other’s faces, looking like they were about to come to blows any minute, and yet be smiling and shaking hands five minutes later.

  “We came to an agreement,” Cancio said, joining Black in the hallway outside the police chief’s office. “I’m giving him the hitman, you and I can keep the girl.”

  “They’re probably both connected to the theft, one way or another,” Black said.

  “Well, we have to compromise. You said you wanted the girl—I thought you’d be happy.”

  “I am,” Black said.

  “You’d better be,” Cancio said, straightening his cap. “I’m going to have to fill out a lot of phony paperwork because of you. What did you do with that gun?”

  “I threw it in the harbor,” Black said.

  “Good,” Cancio nodded approvingly. “That’s one less thing to worry about.”

  Cancio was a short, dapper-looking man of about forty. He’d been fairly handsome and successful with the ladies when Black first knew him. But too much wine and too little sleep had given him pouches under his eyes and a bit of a belly.

  “Did you find the man who owned that office? Gallo?” Black asked him.

  “Not yet,” Cancio said. “But I know who he is. We’ve picked him up before, for drug smuggling. We’ll find him soon enough.”

  “I want to talk to the girl,” Black said.

  “She’s still in processing.”

  “What does that mean?” Black demanded. “They’re not—”

  “Calmati,” Cancio said, “It’s not 1922. They’re just searching her and taking her prints.”

  “I want to see her as soon as possible,” Black insisted.

  He didn’t trust the Italian police, especially in a case like this, without the protection of British or American citizenship. Lex had no solid identity, and that meant no safeguard from a home government.

  He wouldn’t trust any cop to keep his hands to himself with a prisoner as beautiful as Lex.

  He paced the hallways for a full hour, until Cancio said she’d been processed.

  “She’s waiting in the interrogation room,” Cancio said. “You can interview her there.”

  Black paused outside the room, his fingers just barely touching the doorknob. He steeled himself, then pushed opened the door.

  Lex was sitting calmly at the table, her hands cuffed in front of her.

  She was looking less disheveled than previously, having been allowed to wash her face and pin up her hair in a loose chignon. She was still wearing the blue dress. He saw it was torn at the bodice, but he thought that had happened before, in her struggle with the hitman.

  Still, he asked, “Are you alright? Are they treating you well?”

  “Of course,” she said carelessly.

  Despite the metal cuffs around her wrists, she still tucked a lock of hair back behind her ear and leaned her chin on her palm in a way that was painfully familiar to him. She gazed up at him with her blue eyes beneath her straight, black brows.

  It was as if only yesterday she’d been staying over at his apartment, drinking the coffee he made in the morning, laughing at how badly he’d burned the toast.

  Black’s chest felt stiff and swollen, his face too hot.

  He had imagined a thousand times what he’d say to her if he saw her again. He had planned to be so cold and methodical. He would make her tell him what he wanted to know, and then…and then…

  The problem was, what he wanted next had changed so many times.

  Unable to say what he really wanted to say, Black defaulted to his investigatory mode.

  “Where’s the cross?” he asked.

  “How should I know?” Lex said.

  “You stole it. From the Doge’s Palace.”

  “Did I?” Lex said. “What evidence do you have for that theory?”

  “Witness accounts. I talked to Francesco.”

  “Is it a crime to eat at the museum cafe?”

  “A woman saw you climbing out the window.”

  “I doubt she’d identify me in a lineup,” Lex said, switching to lean on her other palm.

  She was smiling at him across the table. Enjoying herself.

  Black took a deep breath. He had to stay calm. He couldn’t let her see so much as a tremor of his hand.

  “What about your friend Gallo?” Black asked. “Do you think he could identify you?”

  Lex laughed quietly.

  “I really don’t think he could,” she said. “Whoever he might be.”

  She was so infuriating. Why did she never seem to feel anything? What would it take to crack her shell?

  Black forced his voice to remain low and steady.

  “Lex,” he said, “you’re not getting out of this one. Maybe we can’t find any evidence here in Venice. But there’s one theft I know you committed. If you don’t help me find the cross, I’ll take you back to London. And you’ll stand trial for the diamonds you stole.”

  Now he thought he saw her flinch, just the slightest bit. Was it the threat of dragging her back to London?

  Or was it her memory of that night?

  11

  Alex Moore

  Venice

  My heart no longer felt as if it belonged to me. It now felt as it had been stolen, torn from my chest by someone who wanted no part of it.

  Meredith T. Taylor

  Lex had to hand it to Black—seeing him on the wharf had probably been the biggest shock of her life. And she wasn’t easy to surprise.

  She had thought about running. She didn’t believe he would actually shoot her. But it would have been unwise to underestimate a man she had lied to and humiliated. It was clear that she had, indeed, already underestimated him.

  After all, he had tracked her across the continent two years later. So, either his feelings for her, or his desire for revenge, were much stronger than she’d anticipated.

  Far from being annoyed with him, she was impressed.

  She had never intended to stay in London for an entire year. She never stayed in any place that long. After a few months, she always got restless.

  Her restlessness usually manifested as an urge to steal something. She never knew what it would be ahead of time. The pieces just called to her. She would be walking around a museum or gallery, and she would be
struck. A culpo di fulmine, as the Italians would call it. “The thunderbolt”—their way of saying “love at first sight.”

  It could be anything. An Egyptian necklace. A Greek chalice. A Renaissance painting. A Medieval book.

  The object, whatever it was, seemed to glow with an internal light. It had a power to it, an energy. She felt a connection to it, like she never felt linked to anything else in her life. Not people, not places, not anything at all. Except stunning, perfect works of art.

  Whatever it was, she had to have it.

  She would obsess over the object for weeks, planning in detail how she would liberate it from its prison.

  When she was working, it felt as if all the universe conspired to bring the art into her hands. She had never yet failed to take something she wanted.

  And when she had the object, once she was actually holding it, she felt suffused with the most intense emotion she ever experienced. She felt alive in a way that she never did in her normal, day-to-day life.

  She had felt that way in London, before she took the sculpture of Artemis. She had seen it at the National Gallery. It had been woefully insecure, covered only by a single plexiglass case, not even alarmed. All it had required to steal it was a screwdriver, and a high level of patience. She’d done it in broad daylight, while the gallery was open.

  There had been no regular guard stationed in the room, only a rotating shift, with a four-minute break between checks. Lex had only to wait until the room was empty of other visitors (which took about an hour and a half), then she popped open the case, slipped the little statue up the sleeve of her jacket, and replaced it with a laminated card that read “Objects Removed for Cleaning”.

  The theft hadn’t even been realized until three days later.

  Usually, Lex would have used that delay to flee the city entirely, but she had actually liked the job she was holding at the time. She worked at a gallery as an appraiser, occasionally helping the owner put on exhibits and shows.

  Wealthy patrons from all over London would bring her their most secret and precious treasures, to ask her what she thought they were worth. She kept all their names and addresses stored on her computer, just in case she wanted to nip over to their houses late at night, to steal the pieces they so brazenly brought for her perusal.

  And then, Black had walked through her door. She had been amused by him at first, this hulking, fair-haired Adonis, who was apparently some kind of hero, having risked his life to stop a bomber.

  She had expected him to be a bit of an idiot. He knew nothing about art or culture, or how to investigate the theft of the statue. It had amused her to watch him search for the thief, who happened to be sleeping right next to him in his bed.

  However, she soon came to realize that Byron was far more intelligent than she’d given him credit for, and capable of much greater depth of feeling. When they would go to the cinema together, or to see a new exhibit, he noticed things that were different from what she saw, he explained them in a way that surprised her.

  And of course, she was attracted to him. Their physical chemistry was unlike anything she’d felt before. It was the closest thing she’d experienced to the thrill of a heist.

  In the end, that was what scared her more than anything. How comfortable she was becoming with him, how attached.

  Then the Home Secretary’s wife had brought in her diamonds to the gallery to be appraised. Lex had asked her a few questions about the security measures she used in her home, to keep them safe.

  It was second nature to her, to gather this kind of information. She had no plans to actually use it.

  Until Byron had invited her to a party at the very house in question. It seemed to her that, once again, fate had provided an opportunity.

  Even though it wasn’t the sort of thing she usually stole, she decided to take the diamonds. She used Byron as her cover, in case she was interrupted. She lured him up to the study, and distracted him with a naughty little tryst, one that quite distracted her as well.

  Then she threw his belt under the sofa and used his minute of searching to break into the safe. She tucked the diamonds into her hair, as she pretended to tidy herself after their rabid fucking.

  They went back to the party, her heart soaring with the thrill of it all.

  But it hadn’t been a clean pull. The diamonds hadn’t really wanted to be stolen. So, the delivery van had crashed into them, and she’d had to run away, empty handed.

  The look on Byron’s face, when he realized what she’d done…

  It was probably the only time in her life she’d felt guilty.

  She knew she had hurt him, badly.

  And now here he was, back in her life, when she thought she’d never see him again.

  Despite it all, she was happy to see him again. The stern, square jaw. The narrow blue eyes. The sweep of sandy hair, and the ridiculously broad shoulders.

  The only thing that had changed was that his body looked harder, more brutal than it used to be. And he had a small scar on the right side of his face, where the broken glass of the car accident had cut his cheek.

  Also, his expression was not quite as she remembered. There was an intensity that hadn’t been there before. She had always thought he was fairly conventional at his core. But there was nothing conventional in what he had done to find her.

  “You seem different,” Lex said.

  Black laughed in disbelief.

  “Of course I’m different,” he said. “What you did nearly destroyed me.”

  “I’m sorry, Byron,” Lex said.

  Had she ever actually said sorry before? To anyone? It surprised her, hearing it come out of her mouth.

  “I don’t even know your real name,” he said.

  “I told you the name I like best.”

  “What is it really, though? What did your parents call you?”

  She pressed her lips together. It was a name she never liked, though her father had insisted on using it.

  “It’s Alex,” she said at last. She gave a short, mirthless laugh. “I think my dad wanted a boy.”

  Black just stared at her, his face stricken and white.

  “I loved you,” he said.

  “Well,” Lex replied, sadly, “you loved what you thought I was.”

  “You didn’t give me a chance to know who you really were,” he said.

  “You know now, though,” Lex said.

  “Yes,” Black said, “I do.”

  He stood up from his chair and came around the table toward her. Instinctively, Lex stood up, as if to protect herself.

  Instead, he grabbed her in his arms, and he kissed her, with her handcuffed wrists pinned between them. He thrust his hands into her hair, and he pushed her up against the wall. He kept kissing her, with all the pent-up frustration and longing and misery of the past two years.

  His mouth was rough and insistent. She could feel his heart hammering against her chest, and her heart beating just as fast, directly across from his.

  Then, as abruptly as he’d grabbed her, he let go.

  He turned and walked out of the room, without saying anything else.

  Lex heard the click of the door locking automatically behind him.

  Her hair had come loose from its chignon, and she was breathing much harder than she would have expected. He had almost discombobulated her entirely.

  Almost, but not quite.

  She took the pen she had stolen from his jacket and tucked it inside her bra, making sure to turn her body out of the line of sight of the camera as she did so.

  She looked around the tiny, dreary room, with its overhead fluorescent lighting, and its plain cement walls. Other than the camera mounted up by the ceiling, and the plain steel table and chairs, there wasn’t much she could use.

  But Lex was eternally resourceful. She sat down at the table once more. She reached underneath, and quietly began to loosen one of the screws holding the metal leg to the tabletop.

  12

  Luca D
iotallevi

  Venice

  Poets do not go mad; but chess players do.

  G.K. Chesterton

  Luca felt a little guilty, leaving Lex behind at the wharf, but there was no point in both of them getting pinched. Besides, at least she was alive. He might not be for much longer, if he didn’t make amends with Bruni fast.

  Luca had just attacked Bruni’s number one hatchet man, and probably got him arrested. As soon as the Roma got permission to make a phone call, he was going to call his boss and put Luca in a whole world of trouble.

  The only way for Luca to wiggle out of this was if he had something to make it up to Bruni. Something like the cross.

  So now all he had to do was steal it back from an Armenian arms dealer. Easy peasy.

  A job like that would usually take weeks of planning, if it could be done at all. Luca figured he had a day or two, before Bruni started sending the rest of his goons after him.

  Kasperian’s estate sat on the island of Burano, northeast of Venice. The rest of the island held a little fishing village, where tourists liked to take pictures of the brightly colored houses, stacked in rows like so many children’s blocks. Of course, no tourists were permitted within ten miles of Burano’s place. His house was perched on the edge of a cliff, with only one road leading up to the formidable gates.

  Having made plenty of enemies over the course of his career, Kasperian kept cameras mounted all around, and at least twenty guards patrolling the house and grounds, none of whom would be as hesitant to shoot Luca as the guards at the museum had been.

  It was the worst sort of job to do in a rush, and all on his own. Still, he felt a thrill trying to make his plan. No matter the circumstances, he couldn’t help feeling the joy of the challenge, the desire to overcome seemingly impossible barriers.

  Luca stopped at his flat to gather some of the equipment he thought he might need. Then he went down to his berth to get his little cruising sailboat to sail over to Burano.