She Had No Idea Why the Mafia Boss Was Following Her—Until He Quietly Warned Her About Her Dress

The Tenth Avenue workshop looked different through the reinforced tinted glass of a Mercedes Maybach.

For three years, Gemma had approached the narrow brick building with a sense of mounting nausea—watching for the orange legal notices taped to the frosted glass, checking the padlocks to see if the landlord had changed the combinations again, listening for the whistle of the radiator that signaled another four-hundred-dollar gas bill she couldn't pay.

Today, there were three black SUVs parked along the curb, their hazard lights blinking in unison through the gray afternoon drizzle.

Two men in dark trench coats stood under the fire escape across the street, their hands buried deep in their pockets, their eyes scanning the windows of the auto body shop on the corner with mechanical regularity. They did not look like security guards; they looked like veterans who had learned how to wait for an artillery strike without shifting their boots.

The rear door of the Maybach opened, and Dominic offered her a hand.

Gemma did not take it. She stepped down onto the wet asphalt herself, the heavy hem of the indigo dress sweeping an inch above the puddles. The dress felt incredible against her skin—snug through the torso, supporting her spine like an external skeleton, the weight of the Kevlar mesh giving her movements a strange, deliberate grace she had never possessed in her sneakers.

The boots Roman had provided fit perfectly. Soft black calfskin, lined with shearling, the soles biting into the wet concrete with total stability.

"The second floor is secured," Dominic said, walking half a step behind her left shoulder, his hand hovering near his lapel. "The locksmiths finished replacing the street access with electronic deadbolts twenty minutes ago. You have a biometric pad at the landing. Your thumbprint is the only one in the system besides Roman's."

"And yours?" Gemma asked, pausing at the heavy green service door.

"I don't need access to art, Miss Vance," Dominic replied with a thin, humorless grin. "I only come in if the alarms go off, and if the alarms go off, the doors usually don't stay on their hinges anyway."

They climbed the narrow staircase. The smell of the building hit her instantly—the familiar, comforting scent of her childhood: turpentine, dammar resin, old rabbit-skin glue, aged walnut oil, and the dry, sweet dust of two hundred years of linen canvas.

She entered the main studio.

The breath left her lungs in a sharp gasp.

The room had been transformed.

The leaks in the ceiling had not just been patched; the entire industrial skylight had been reglazed with fresh, clear panels that let in the northern sky without a single drop of condensation. The old iron radiators had been replaced with whisper-quiet climate control units mounted discreetly along the brick walls, maintaining the room at precisely sixty-eight degrees and fifty percent relative humidity—the gold standard for Renaissance panel conservation.

In the center of the room, resting on heavy, custom-built easel horses, sat three crates made of seasoned ash wood, stamped with the customs seals of the Port of Rotterdam.

Beside the crates stood Roman Costa.

He had arrived before them. He was leaning against her father’s old workbench, looking at an antique brass balance scale that Arthur Vance had used to weigh dry pigments. His fingers, broad and scarred across the knuckles, were gently testing the sensitivity of the balance, watching the tiny brass trays tilt and settle.

"The triptych from the gallery was third-tier work," Roman said without looking up as she entered. "Sixteenth-century studio copies, probably executed by apprentices in Antwerp who didn't know how to mix lead white without leaving chalk streaks."

Gemma walked toward the crates, her boots clicking softly on the clean, sealed floorboards. "Those copies were worth four hundred thousand dollars."

"Money is an opinion," Roman said, turning to face her. His eyes swept over her in the indigo dress, taking in the clean line of her shoulders, the fit of the high collar, the way the Kevlar-lined fabric held its shape without wrinkling. He nodded once—a silent, sovereign approval that made her stomach tighten in a way that had nothing to do with fear. "These, however, are not opinions."

He picked up a pry bar from the bench and handed it to her.

"Open them."

Gemma took the tool. The steel was cold, balanced, professional. She set the wedge beneath the pine lid of the center crate and applied pressure. The wood groaned, the brass nails yielding with three sharp, rhythmic pops.

She pulled back the layers of acid-free glassine paper.

Inside lay a panel no larger than a laptop screen.

It depicted a young woman in a dark green velvet hood, holding an open prayer book against a background of crushed lapis lazuli. The varnish was yellowed, clouded with four centuries of candle soot and surface bloom, but through the murk, the drawing was unmistakable.

The line of the jaw. The translucent glazes of the skin. The impossible, crystalline light in the woman's eyes.

"Rogier van der Weyden," Gemma whispered, her hands trembling as they hovered an inch above the painted surface. "This... this has been missing since nineteen-forty-four. It was in the private collection of the Duke of Arenberg before the occupation."

"It was in a bank vault in Zurich," Roman said, stepping up beside her, his shoulder brushing hers as they looked down into the crate. "Belonged to an old Swiss family that ran out of heirs and collateral at the same time. The receivers wanted to sell it to an oligarch in Dubai who was planning to hang it in a yacht salon."

"The salt air would have destroyed the gesso in six months," she said, horror sharpening her voice.

"I know," Roman murmured. "Which is why I bought it for six point two million dollars and had it flown to Newark under an agricultural transit permit."

Gemma turned her head, looking up at him. He was standing so close she could see the tiny gold flecks in his gray irises, the slight curve of an old scar running through his left eyebrow, the steady, rhythmic pulse beating at the base of his throat.

"Why bring it here?" she asked. "Why not the Metropolitan? Why not the Louvre? They have thirty conservators with doctorates from Oxford."

"Because those doctorates work with synthetic resins and ultraviolet lasers," Roman said, his voice dropping into that deep, intimate rumble that seemed to vibrate directly against her spine. "They don't know how to feel the tension in an oak panel with their fingers. Your father did. And he taught you."

He reached out, his thumb catching the edge of her jaw, lifting her face until she had no choice but to look into the absolute, terrifying clarity of his eyes.

"I don't give my treasures to institutions, Gemma," Roman whispered. "I give them to people who bleed for them."

Before she could answer, before she could pull away from the searing heat of his skin, a sharp, metallic crack echoed from the street below.