Grand Theft -

The room went silent. Dante’s smile vanished. Viktor turned to Marcus, who had been standing in the corner, watching the confrontation with an expression of deep, private amusement.

It sounded clean. It was not clean. Phase one took three months. Lina spent two weeks in Rome, posing as a graduate student researching Baroque architecture, and managed to get a tour of the palazzo’s public rooms. She counted cameras, noted the patrol patterns, and discovered that the third night guard—a man named Enzo—had a weakness for a particular bar in Trastevere where the grappa was cheap and the bartender asked no questions. grand theft

The canvas was twenty-seven inches wide, thirty-three inches tall, and worth more than the lives of the men carrying it. Viktor Nazarov knew this because he had calculated the exchange rate that morning. The painting—a long-lost Caravaggio titled The Cardsharps —had last been seen in a private collection in Palermo in 1969. Now it sat in a climate-controlled vault beneath the Palazzo Doria, wrapped in acid-free paper like a sleeping god. The room went silent

Novak’s hand moved before his brain did. He stepped forward, gripped her wrist, and twisted just enough to make her drop the tray. The espresso cup shattered on the marble. She opened her mouth to scream, and he clamped his other hand over her face. It sounded clean