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That had all been normal.
    I lifted my head. Claire instantly turned her face away.
    Interesting. My little episode had not gone unnoticed. Many assumed it was a small seizure. Which I guess, in certain respects, it was.
    She was still shadow-free.
    I studied her a minute longer, helpless to look away.
    Pale. Delicate. Carved porcelain.
    Fragile. The word popped into my head. Which seemed like a lie. Claire was anything but fragile. And yet . . .
    A powerful surge of protectiveness swept me. My heart thudded in my ears.
    I swallowed.
    Why? Why her?
    And more importantly, what secrets did her missing shadows hide?

Five

    Claire
    T he Colonel broke up our meeting a little after noon.
    The men instantly stood up and started into typical male posturing, each jockeying for position.
    Pierce rolled his shoulders and said something schoolyard-pithy to Dante. Dante grunted back, gave a steely alpha warning look and turned away.
    At which point, Natalia immediately attached herself to Dante, angling her upper body toward him in subtle invitation. Well . . . make that not-so-subtle, given how far she was leaning.
    Sheesh.
    The last hour of the meeting had just been housekeeping. Pierce, being Pierce, had demanded to be first to examine the sketch. The Colonel had looked none-too-pleased with Pierce’s bossiness, which was just fine by me—let Pierce pour gasoline on his own funeral pyre—but the Colonel relented and gave the first slot to him. Pierce would have all of tomorrow to study the sketch at the Colonel’s villa just south of Florence.
    I was assigned the day after that, when I would gather the small samples for age analysis and send them off to the University of Florence. Turns out, I was the only one both Pierce and Dante trusted to conduct the sample. They made it amply clear they didn’t trust each other.
    Dante and Branwell D’Angelo would view the sketch in three days. Surprisingly, Dante had seemed unconcerned about the delay. I would have expected him to be more . . . pushy. Instead, he acted like a guy who had a secret inside-track, unconcerned about the competition.
    Obviously, given the unorthodox nature of this job—Contest? Audition? Circus?—juggling access to the sketch was going to be tricky.
    For right now, I had a little under forty-eight hours to do some research. I was genuinely excited to assess the piece. Anything linked to Michelangelo Buonarotti would have important historical and artistic significance, not to mention resuscitating my tattered professional career.
    I gathered my notes together, eager to get out of the room. I hoped to use the Colonel’s Sandbox Rule as an excuse to avoid all further contact with Pierce.
    My phone buzzed. Text.
     
    Don’t think I have forgotten you. I long to drag my nose along your neck and memorize the smell of your skin.
     
    My adrenaline instantly spiked; my skin crawled.
    I closed my eyes. Forced my breathing to slow down.
    It was okay. I was okay. They were just words. They only had power if I let them.
    I hated this unknown cyber stalker.
    After everything went down with Pierce posting that video, the haters had crawled out of the woodwork.
    This particular person was tenacious and had been harassing me for months.
    That was almost the worst part of the whole video fiasco.
    I was the victim in the whole situation. The one who was cheated on, lied to, man ipulated.
    But after fifty million views, I was known the world over as the psychotic ex-girlfriend Pierce had been fortunate enough to dump before it was too late.
    A chip off the old block. Unstable and crazy, just like Lisabet and John-Baptista.
    Twenty-eight years of (generally) rock-steady behavior gone in less than forty-eight hours. The masses never want to hear about the straight-laced child of tabloid-fodder parents—the one who keeps their act together despite all odds.
    No. People want to watch the train wreck. In detail. Millions of times over.
    And then write you nasty emails/texts/tweets