Page 163 of Valentino

The cap cracks. The plastic crackles under his grip, and he drinks it all the way down, throat working like a man finishing water after a long run in the sun.

When it's empty, he sets it back on the table with a care that's almost tender, the way you'd put down something borrowed.

I look at him sitting there with death already moving through his blood, this man who slept beside Amanda and sold the information that put her on Aldo's floor, and the rage I've been holding slips its grip for one second.

I spit on him.

It catches his cheek, and he doesn't wipe it away. He just closes his eyes.

The door locks behind me with a sound like a sentence ending. The guard down the corridor keeps his eyes on his wall, a professional.

My footsteps carry me out past the checkpoints and into the Roman night, where the air tastes of exhaust and coming rain, and I should feel finished.

The scales should feel balanced.

Instead, his answer works through me slower than any poison.

There was no one. I only ever talked to Aldo.

Dying men polish their sins, but they rarely invent new mysteries on the way out.

If he told the truth, then someone else gave Enzo that route.

Someone close.

Someone who still knows where Amanda sleeps.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

Amanda

The audio guide tells me Michelangelo didn't even want this job.

I stand in the middle of the Sistine Chapel with my neck tipped back at an angle my chiropractor would bill extra for, and a polite British voice in my ears explains that the greatest ceiling in human history was painted by a man who spent four years complaining about it.

He wrote a poem about how much he hated it. His neck seized. Paint dripped in his eyes. He called himself no painter, signed the letter, and climbed back up the scaffold to make God anyway.

Honestly? That's the most relatable thing I've ever heard about a genius.

We've been walking since eight this morning. The Forum, the Pantheon, a gelato place Valentino swore was the only acceptable gelato place in a city of four thousand gelato places, and my feet have filed a formal complaint with management.

None of it feels like enough.

We could walk until my sneakers dissolve and Rome would still have another church, another fountain, another alley that smells like espresso and old stone, and I want all of it. I'm greedy for this city the way I used to be greedy for likes, except this actually fills something.

The chapel is packed. Hundreds of tourists shuffle shoulder to shoulder in the dim light, everyone whispering, everyone's head tipped back like a field of sunflowers that found God instead of the sun. The air holds the warmth of too many bodies, with something cooler underneath. Stone. Plaster. Five hundred years of people breathing in the same room.

Every few minutes, a guard's voice cuts through the murmur.

"Silenzio. No photo."

Nobody listens.

Forty phones go up the second he turns around, and the murmur swells again. I keep mine in my pocket. Six months ago, I would've spent this entire visit hunting the angle, the caption, the proof.

Now I just look.

The British voice tells me about the moment of creation, and I find it on the ceiling. God reaching. Adam barely bothering. Their fingers are not quite touching. All of creation hanging in a gap the width of my thumb.