Chapter Nineteen

Justine

I’VE WANTED MY own gallery show since I was ten.

The fantasy was more vivid than most at that age, framing me as a supernova in the center of the room, every painting I created another part of a compelling, inescapable orbit. I would be rich and famous enough to refuse the highest offers, rejecting anyone who wasn’t worthy of my work, who didn’t understand what my soul had poured out onto the canvas. The satisfaction of being unattainable, yet too powerful to look away from.

Reality has me standing in a room where they charge exorbitantly by the square foot, squeezing every last dollar out of New York City’s downtown value. Usually, a dozen different artists would be squabbling for space here, clawing past one another to make a life-changing sale, but I rule the room with three solitary paintings, each one claiming a wall and leaving the fourth open for a curious observer.

Campbell arranged everything exactly as I asked—lighting, temperature, the single small, high table without any chairs so La Rosa can never get too comfortable. Then they spent hours interrogating me on my disguise, asking dozens of detailed questions I never would have thought of, making the mask I plan to wear more flesh than porcelain.

Jane Liu has two older brothers in finance, almost died in a car crash when she was twelve, and is nigh smug about the quality of Parisian restaurants. She graduated from Beaux-Arts de Paris the same year I left Barnard. I can list the awards she’s presumably earned in three languages, although she’s not the kind of person to discuss such things unprompted. Her art focuses on the deconstruction of the self, breaking the body into surreal pieces, leaning on enough abstraction to escape the notion of blood and gore.

The way Enrico built her career from scratch online is unsettling. He edits search results the way other people prune flowers, even aging down a portrait Campbell took of me in front of a blank canvas. It’s an overtly dramatic shot, with my hands soaked in red paint up to the wrist, but exactly the sort of thing people expect from reclusive, mercurial artists. Anyone looking at Jane’s website would assume the picture is ten years old, rather than a complete fabrication from the day before.

“Your words are only half the equation,” Campbell told me before we left, helping me into the fur coat again. “A man like La Rosa will watch your body language, your cadence, even the way you breathe. For him, trust is primal, gut-deep. Don’t hesitate unless it’s on purpose. Stay casual but never familiar. To you, he’s just another rich New Yorker trying to bloat his collection.”

I’m in a dress that cost more than my wedding, with heels to match, putting me an inch under La Rosa’s eyeline. He’s not a tall man, apparently, so he’ll cherish that minor difference more than others would. I left my coat in the small closet in front, an invitation for him and his wife to do the same, implying that we’re equally unarmored.

God, I’m nervous.

La Rosa is supposed to be here in ten minutes, and I can’t stop looking around the room for any cracks in the façade. I’ve run shows for other artists too many times to count, but the stakes in comparison were fractional. A collector like him will know a professional gallery down to his bones, and the smallest detail in the wrong place could put La Rosa’s hackles up. If Campbell can’t get close, this is for naught.

“Justine.” They’re suddenly right next to me, a hand on my arm. “Breathe.”

I do, dragging breath into my lungs until the rigid line of muscle strung from shoulder to shoulder goes slack. “Sorry. I really don’t want to fuck this up.”

“You won’t.”

That razor-sharp confidence is part of why I fell in love with them; if Campbell wants something, the world either surrenders or gets cut in two.

“I made sure you were over-prepared,” they continue. “A mistake or two makes you look human, and La Rosa will want you to be vulnerable like everyone else.”

That makes sense. I know business negotiations well, and if he latches onto a weakness, La Rosa is more likely to use it to drive down the price rather than accuse me of trying to murder him. “And you’ll be right here?”

Campbell nods. “Playing concierge and bodyguard.”

They’re dressed down in a simple black suit and tie, the sort you see a hundred of on every red carpet. The fabric is high quality, but there’s no style or substance beyond that, inoffensive by virtue of being so generic. Campbell could be anyone behind their sunglasses, and that’s the point. La Rosa shouldn’t remember a thing.

The front door swings open. My heart leaps up into my throat, but Campbell falls back in silence, standing against the wall with one hand holding the opposite wrist. I’m meant to be the sublime host, so I walk to the entrance of the gallery with my head held high.

Miceli La Rosa is deep into his sixties, with more salt than pepper in his well-maintained coif. He’s never seen much sun, but harsh lines cut into his face—the deep trench of a frown, a tight groove etched between embattled brows—and give him the countenance of a starved predator, a wolf who’s resorted to carrion. The blue of his eyes reminds me of cathedral glass, vivid but too opaque to know what’s hiding on the other side.

I offer my hand and smile. “Mr. La Rosa. I’m glad you could make it.”

“Miceli, please,” he counters and captures my fingers between his own. When he brings my knuckles to his lips to kiss, it’s all I can do to hold my expression. “If I can call you Jane.”

“Of course,” I say.

Will the angle Campbell’s looking for work if he never shakes my hand? Now that La Rosa is in the room, it’s too late to ask.

“This is my wife, Nina.” La Rosa lets go of my hand to put an arm around her shoulders. “I appreciate you entertaining us at such a late hour.”

Giovanna outshines her husband by far, draped in enough jewelry to sink a ship. Her hair is pulled back in a tight, neat bun, holding the luster and color of old gold. She’s also staring at me with barely veiled hostility, but it’s not hard to guess why. Giovanna is at least fifteen years younger than her husband, but I’m even younger, and dressed to kill. Miceli strikes me as the kind of man who trades up for a new model when he’s bored; Campbell mentioned this is his second marriage.

“It’s my pleasure.” I gesture to the coat closet. As I walk away, I add, “Set aside whatever you like, then we can get down to business. Would you like a drink?”

“I’m fine, thank you,” La Rosa answers, emerging from the hall without his jacket. “But my wife would love whatever you have.”

As Giovanna steps into the gallery, two bodyguards follow. I pretend not to notice them at all, although I mark their positions; one stays by the front door, the other takes up space against the back wall of the room, settling into a position almost identical to Campbell’s. They’re standing by the table with the champagne, but I treat them like a statue, fetching the bottle so I can wrangle the cork.

I pour just one glass, offering it to her when she steps out of her husband’s shadow, but La Rosa’s eyes are locked on the painting in the center of my triptych. His instant fascination sends a surprising surge of pride through my chest; I may have made these paintings to lure him in, but seeing it work so well is undeniably satisfying.

Turning to align myself with his vision, I say, “Interesting that you start in the middle. I’ve found that says a lot about a person.”

“You enjoy dividing a greater piece into its lesser parts,” he replies, not bothering to return my gaze. La Rosa’s speaking like an expert, even if the only way he could have gotten that information was by reading a fake interview on Jane’s site. “Is three a particular number of interest to you?”

Ah, now it’s time to bullshit the same way I’ve guided countless other artists. The rich know they can own anything physical put in front of them, but what compels the sale is a notion of unique mystery that they alone can possess. Stock broker or mobster, the hunger is exactly the same. Their desires are—as Campbell would put it—predictable.

“The rule of threes matters to everyone, I think.” My tone is light, affecting the breathless arrogance of someone who has never known a world outside their own. “Life, death, rebirth. It’s pagan. It’s Jungian. It’s—”

“Catholic,” La Rosa interrupts. “I look at this canvas and I see a broken altar. A saint bleeding out down the steps.”

This time, I don’t have to fake my smile. “I’m lapsed, but you caught me.”

“I think we’ve all lapsed in recent years.” He takes two steps forward to examine the canvas more closely; Giovanna stays where she is. “Who was your confirmation saint?”

“Justina of Padua,” I say, forced to lean on the truth under pressure. “What about yours?”

“Adrian of Nicomedia.” La Rosa laughs softly. “My father was a butcher, and I suppose I’m not much different.”

He turns to the first painting, face heavy with contemplation. I poured my anger out on the canvas in swathes of malignant red, dripping into a gouge of black, etched with a subtle pattern of pale, overlapping teeth. The rough hatching could be mistaken as crosses at a certain angle, but my rage had nothing to do with religion. I was bleeding out for years, yet no one seemed to notice until Campbell. Venting through the splash and swipe of paint was invigorating, casting it out into the world so the feeling could no longer be ignored.

La Rosa leans in, only inches from the dappled surface, and I bite my tongue. I had to age all three paintings the instant they dried, playing with water damage on the edges and sandpaper on the widest streaks before piping drops of mineral spirits onto the most vivid sections, encouraging them to melt and fade. Leaving the canvas out under the sun for a few days would have been ideal, but I barely finished in time to begin with. My left wrist still aches; I haven’t held a brush for ten hours a day since college.

“What did you use for the etching?” he asks, and the knot of tension in my chest unfurls. “A chisel?”

“A pocketknife, actually.” Campbell turned up an entire box of weapons hidden in the apartment when I asked for something sharp, but I needed a blade easy to control. “I used a base of white paint to thicken the surface, then made the cuts. Black acrylic poured in after like water through a ditch.”

“How wonderfully modern,” La Rosa declares, as if that means anything. “I like it. I almost want to rip the whole thing open.”

When I raise a brow, he steps back and laughs. “That’s a compliment, I promise. Haven’t you ever seen art so beautiful you wanted to ruin it for everyone else?”

Not in the least, but his brutish raison d’être is a good distraction. “Painting is how I stop myself from ruining everything else. The beast needs somewhere to feed.”

“It does, doesn’t it?” Blue eyes sweep the second painting again before La Rosa nods, turning on his heel to the third. He has a surprising amount of grace for a man his age, some vestige of carnivorous strength waiting in the wings. “And we end on vicious reflection.”

That’s one way to put it. A black square centers my last piece, which I painted and polished until it resembled an obsidian mirror, surrounded by a bloody frame, shades of red clashing against one another. One careful crimson splash mars the mirror, darker lines pulling back around the corners to give the image more of a three-dimensional effect.

I wonder if La Rosa sees himself—really sees himself. His wife doesn’t want to see anything, as far as I can tell; she’s sipping her champagne and looking away from me at the columns of empty white between the canvases, which suits me just fine. The less she’s paying attention to what’s about to happen, the better.

“I’d like to sell these before I return to Paris,” I begin, “but only to someone who appreciates—”

La Rosa turns sharply, then steps into my personal space. “You don’t have to nickel and dime me, Jane. Name your price. I’m not sniffling over my checkbook like half the dealers in New York. If I want something, it’s mine.”

The feeling’s mutual, Miceli.

“Fifty thousand,” I say after feigning a moment’s contemplation, “a piece.”

“Very good.” He grins, lines sinking deep into both cheeks. “I’ll write you a check right now. Just let me see the certificates.”

I look over his shoulder to Campbell. “Get my paperwork.”

They nod and disappear into the back room. I stay as close to La Rosa as I can, watching the line of his arm and the steady vision of his bodyguards. One is staring outside the front door, and the other can’t see my hands through La Rosa’s spine. Giovanna looms nearby, trying to subtly watch me out of the corner of her eye, but if Campbell comes in from the other side, it shouldn’t matter.

God, I hope it doesn’t matter.

Campbell returns with a thick envelope and a pen in one hand. They said the syringe would be hidden underneath, so I carefully slip the paperwork from their fingertips, not wanting to disturb their grip. La Rosa glances at them for a split second, but his eyes are drawn down to the contract as I whip my signature across the bottom, deciding at the last minute that Jane has fantastically messy handwriting. It hides the tremor in my fingertips.

“Do we have a deal?” I hold up the bill of sale with one hand, then offer La Rosa the other.

His eyes bore into mine like a diamond-tipped drill, cold and impossibly sharp. My throat tightens, but I beg myself not to flinch. Campbell told me that in the Mafia, women are the ones who deliver the promise of death from one capo to another. Will La Rosa see the Galicis’ treason written on my face? The end is right here, and they’re already dressed for a funeral.

“We do.” He takes my hand in his to shake.

I wait for doubt to run me through. Regret, revulsion, some last Hail Mary, but it doesn’t come. I should see a man, yet all I see is an obstacle. My art poisoned his mind with deceit, the same way Campbell is about to poison him in the flesh.

Premeditation, through and through.

Campbell’s wrist turns. I squeeze La Rosa’s fingers back, burying my nails deep into the center of his palm.

Confusion and anger flare across his face, and I pull away with a fluttering, apologetic laugh. “I’m sorry, Miceli. The way your wife keeps looking at me—”

His anger explodes, but it’s unleashed on Giovanna as La Rosa snarls something at her in Italian. She snaps back with equal fervor, gesturing with her empty champagne glass, and amidst their bitter spat, Campbell retreats to the other wall.

“Forgive her,” La Rosa says to me. “It’s getting quite late in the evening.”

“No apology necessary.” I offer him the pen. “For the contract and the check.”

He signs both in due course, and I’m handed the key to more money than I thought my work would ever see. Of course, Jane doesn’t have a bank account, so I won’t be cashing it, but I’m flattered anyway.

La Rosa gives me his address after I promise to deliver the paintings in the morning, and he takes Giovanna out by the arm, followed by the twin shadows of his bodyguards. When the gallery door swings shut, I almost collapse, trying to remember the right way to breathe. Campbell’s hand is suddenly against my back, grounding me.

“Did you do it?” I gasp.

“I did.” They press a kiss to the top of my head. “Now for part two.”