Page 49 of Fastest Kill

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."