Page 61 of Fastest Kill

Bitch, she thought, but kept her mouth shut because Gabriella was dead, and Dario and his brothers weren't broken. They were batted around the edges by their upbringing, but who wasn't?

Frederica turned away from the photos. "I suppose we'd better start looking for the bee before Serapis gets on the phone to harass us."

Dario nodded, the softness receding from his face, and the focus returning. "Serapis said Niccolò hid it here, where no one would ever find it."

"That narrows it down to the entire house."

"Not necessarily," Dario said, already moving toward a set of double doors at the end of the hall. "Gabriella inventoried everything. Jewelry, art, furniture. She had a ledger for it all. If it was valuable, she knew about it because of the crazy amount she paid on insurance. So he must have hidden it in a place that was his alone. A place she never went out of respect for him."

Frederica followed him as he pushed open the door to a library, and the scent of leather and old paper washed over her. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves lined every wall, crammed with volumes bound in leather and cloth. The ceiling was a dome of midnight blue, painted with the constellations of the zodiac in tarnished silver leaf. Dario pushed open another narrow side door that led into a tidy office.

In the center of the room, a large mahogany desk stood like an altar, its surface clear, save for a green glass banker's lamp. Two worn leather armchairs faced a cold, black fireplace, and everything was neatly arranged in a weird kind of time capsule.

Frederica scanned the study before turning back to the library. There were countless hiding places. Behind books. Taped under drawers. Inside a hollowed-out volume. It would take hours.

"We start here," Dario said, his voice resonating in the quiet space. "This was his sanctuary. She hated this office and said it was morbid because it had no windows."

"It's the safest room in the house then," Frederica pointed out. "Especially if he was practicing magic."

"Makes sense why he favored it now that I'm a bit older." Dario walked to the desk, his fingers ghosting over the polished surface. "I used to hide under here when I was a kid. He'd be working, on the phone, yelling at someone in Milan or London. I'd set up my toy soldiers on the rug. He never told me to be quiet."

"I liked toy soldiers too," she replied with a smile.

"I'm not even a little surprised," he chuckled, and some of the tension around his eyes eased.

Frederica left him to the study and began with the bookshelves, pulling out a book at random. It was Herodotus's Histories. She shook it. Nothing. She ran her fingers along the shelf behind it. Just dust. This would take hours. Days.

"Think like your father," she said, not looking at him. "You're hiding something small and precious. Where does it go?"

Dario was silent for a long moment. She heard him moving around the desk, the soft slide of his hands on the wood.

"It would be somewhere clever," he said finally. "He loved puzzles. Tricks. Things with hidden compartments. This desk is like a puzzle box. He built it himself with his father when he was a teenager."

Frederica turned. Dario was crouched down, running his hands along the underside of the desktop, his brow furrowed in concentration.

"He used to hide biscotti and sweets in the secret drawers for me. Said if I could find them, I could eat them. It took me a week to find the first one," he said, a fond smile on his face. "Gabriella tried to replace this desk with something modern once, and he almost divorced her. In retrospect, he should have gone through with it."

Frederica went back to the books, giving him space. The rhythmic slide of volumes being pulled from the shelf and replaced was the only sound. She worked her way along one wall, a systematic process that required no thought, leaving her senses free.

She listened to Dario's quiet breathing, the whisper of his fingertips on the wood. He was tracing the carved legs, the panels, the joints. He was searching not just for a hidden compartment, but for a memory, a connection.

She was halfway down the second wall when there was a faint, sharp click.

"Frederica," he called. "I think I found something."

"Something good?" She placed a copy of Paradiso back on the shelf and turned.

Dario's hand was resting on a small section of the ornate side paneling, which now stood ajar. It wasn't a drawer she could see from her angle, more like a thin slice of the desk itself had swung open. It was perfectly flush, the seam invisible unless you knew exactly where to press.

"Gabriella never found this one," Dario said quietly. "I never even found this one."

He reached inside and pulled out a slim, leather-bound journal, the color of dried blood, its pages held shut by a simple leather tie. It was worn at the corners, and the cover softened with use.

Dario just stared at it, resting on his palm. "This is his journal. I remember him writing in it all the time."

Frederica was anxious for him to open it up, but the look on his face stopped her from pressing.

"Fuck, I don't know if he would like the idea of me reading this," he said as he untied the leather with unsteady fingers and opened the journal to the first page. "Damn, I haven't seen his writing in so long. This is…weird."