I admire your confidence. Be careful. xxxx
Aida’s heart jumped at the kisses.
A crash down the hall made Aida physically jump. Her hand flew to the lid of her laptop, and as it went down, she saw Yumi’s message on the open Signal screen.Finished.
She didn’t have time to celebrate. She hurriedly closed out the programs on Trista’s computer, grabbed her own laptop, and went back to her office. After dumping her laptop at her desk, she rushed out to see what the commotion was.
Far down the hall, a huge vase of flowers had been overturned from its pedestal, leaving a mess of water, pottery shards, and dahlia, snapdragon, sweet pea, and gardenia flowers everywhere.Dante stood over the chaos, strangely dressed in a faded tracksuit and a set of AirPods in his ears. He waved his hands at two sleepy maids who had just arrived on the scene.
“What happened?” Aida asked as she drew near.
Dante looked at her, horrified. “I bumped into it. I was...” He trailed off, holding his phone awkwardly. Before he turned the screen off, Aida could see it was open to a TikTok video. Social media wasn’t banned on the MODA phones, but Aida hated the idea of the company tracking everything she did and never used it while she was in the palazzo. Dante was clearly flustered to have her see him in such disarray. “I apologize if I bothered you, Miss Reale.”
“No, no bother. I couldn’t sleep. I was reading in my office,” she said. It must have been Dante who had paused in the hallway, caught by some video.
“We’ll have it cleaned up right away.”
Aida nodded and made her way back to her office. She fell into her plush desk chair and sat there, staring at the closed laptop on her desk.
After her heart had stopped its frenetic dance, she opened the laptop and logged back on, grateful to finally have some sort of network access on a personal device within the palazzo, even if she hardly dared use it. She opened Signal and typed a message to Yumi.You got what you needed?
A few moments later, Yumi replied.
Not exactly, but I have enough information to dig further. Find me tomorrow.
Aida could hardly sleep. She had sent one brief Signal to Luciano to let him know the task was complete, and afterward she lay in bed thinking about the break-in, the danger she was in, and that her whole life had suddenly been turned on its head. At some point, she drifted into dreams, and when heralarm sounded at 7:00 a.m., Aida’s only thought was to turn it off and keep sleeping. A knock on the door later that morning startled her awake.
“Aida?”
Fuck.It was Trista. Aida sat up.Does she know?
She glanced at the bedside clock and saw it was nearly nine. “I’m coming!” She swung her feet off the bed and into her slippers. “I overslept.”
Aida grabbed her robe and went to the door. When she opened it, Trista nearly fell in.
She straightened herself. “Well, out of all days to shirk your duty, I suppose this is a good one. I came to tell you the museum had a break-in last night, and you won’t be able to return until after the investigation is wrapped up.” Trista’s brow was furrowed. She was wringing her hands, clearly irritated. It must be an actual break-in and not something MODA had planned. And even better, she didn’t appear to know about Aida’s intrusion in her office.
“What did they steal?”
“They aren’t sure of everything yet, but so far, they’ve only verified two tiny marble busts on a table below the painting of Cardinal Bernardino Spada are missing. But weirder, the burglars knocked all the oranges off the trees in the courtyard, and they forked the lawn. Thousands of forks.”
Aida couldn’t keep her jaw from falling open. “Wait, they forked the lawn? Like a high schooler would? I thought that was a US thing.”
“I’d never heard of it. But the entire lawn was full of plastic forks.”
Aida kept herself from smiling at Trista’s rare admission of ignorance. “Doesn’t the museum have cameras everywhere?”
“The thieves cut the power, so they didn’t work.”
It was a lesser-known, privately owned museum, and Aida guessed they might have thought they would never need toworry about having a generator to keep the cameras from going down.
“Did they harm the Borromini?”
Trista shook her head. “But they put all the fallen oranges in neat lines on the arcade path leading to the statue of Pompey. An elaborate prank.”
“What on earth?” Aida couldn’t wrap her head around it.
“At any rate, they won’t be allowing you back in for at least the next two weeks until they complete the investigation and do a thorough inventory. You have some time to yourself. Take a vacation.”
