Chapter Text
“We need to bury her.”
Santiago scratches the permanent stubble along his jawline. “I know. But we can’t yet.”
Chelsea’s lips purse, flatten, and purse again, a telltale sign that she wants to argue the point, but isn’t quite sure how to do that without sounding treasonous. They’ve already had this conversation, and it remains just as unproductive now as it did two weeks ago.
They study Sulpicia’s mounted corpse impassively, waiting for her to raise her chin and grace them with a familiar, delicate smile. They wait, but of course, to no avail. Her glazed expression remains empty. Lifeless.
“I have not seen Aro in days,” says Chelsea, settling on a different topic. “It is unlike him to be away from Volterra while we are in crisis.” She selects her words carefully, but the implication of criticism still colors the oily undercurrent of her voice. Santiago doubts few others could get away with uttering such a thing.
He evaluates the state of her. There’s a tightness around her eyes, and her hair lacks a certain luster. Aro’s absence, coupled by the stirrings of fear and confusion among the lower ranks, has tested the potency of her abilities, the rubber band binding together their little shadow government of kings and pawns. If they wait much longer to take action, it may snap.
But Santiago can’t do anything about that.
“Aro will return when he returns,” he responds lightly, “and when he does, I’m sure he will have a strategy in hand.”
“I hope it is soon.”
Santiago shrugs, unwilling to speculate further. “Where is Corin?”
“She is sobbing in her room.”
He winces. “ Still ?”
“Yes.”
“Then that means, Athenodora—”
“Is a nightmare, yes.”
Dragging the heel of his palm over his face, he groans. “That’s bad.”
“That is exactly why we must do something with Sulpicia’s body. Hold a funeral, plan a procession. Anything to give Corin—and the rest of us—some closure. Anything to move on from this.”
They share a sobering look. Under Aro’s orders, nothing has been touched or altered in nearly three months. He maintains an unwavering faith that they will find more evidence despite every member of the guard having already searched the tower ten times over, crawling on their hands and knees with their noses to the floor like mutts. The order applies emphatically to Sulpicia’s corpse, and as such, remains in the same position Corin found it three months ago.
The killer had crucified Sulpicia. There’s no other way to describe it. After scraping out her brains and heart, the killer impaled her on a decorative sword and pinned her hands to the wall with sixteenth century steak knives, stretching her pale arms out in a tasteless parody of Christ. Above her head, a blood stain spells a message in large, dark brown letters.
This is your fault .
They both know to whom the message is intended.
“None of us will have closure until we know who killed her,” he says carefully.
Chelsea’s gaze hardens. “We know who killed her.”
“No, we do not.”
“Felix disappeared the day she died!” she spits. “What else could that mean?”
“We cannot know for certain what it means until he is found.”
“When do you suppose that will be? Demetri claims he is gone. Not missing, but gone. Like smoke! How is such a thing possible?”
Santiago shakes his head. “I don’t know. Like you, I have many questions, but no answers. Please, sorella mia. Place your trust in Aro. His thoughts are clouded by grief, but he will not allow us to linger like this for long. Give him time.”
She purses her lips and flattens them, pointedly choosing not to respond.
Santiago tucks a loose strand of hair behind her ear. “Do not suffer, sorella . Listen, I’ll tell Heidi to save a beautiful boy for you tomorrow. Your favorite. How does that sound?” Pulling her close, he brushes his thumb over her cheek.
After a few beats, the crease of her brow softens. “Thank you, Santi, and…I’m sorry, you don’t deserve to take abuse from me.”
“You have nothing to be sorry for,” he says, kissing her knuckles. “Now, go to your beloved. I’m sure Afton misses you.”
That lifts the corners of her lips into a subdued smile. Nodding, she pulls away, black cloak fluttering at her ankles as she glides to the stairwell. When the echo of her footsteps trails into silence, Santiago sighs. He redirects his attention to his dead friend on the wall.
In the wake of Sulpicia’s untimely demise, Aro reassigned Santiago to the tower. The purpose of his reassignment was less about preventing crimescene contamination and more about surveilling the influx of mourners, analyzing their behavior for anything strange. He’s good at that sort of thing. He wouldn’t compare it to the unique talents of his colleagues, but Aro finds it useful all the same.
The problem? Everyone’s acting strange.
Sulpicia’s murder had shaken the foundations of the Volturi, stripping their presumption of absolute power. The idea that someone could worm past their defenses and murder one of their own had been a nonsensical notion a few short months ago.
What a difference a few months can make.
Crossing the room, Santiago draws in close to Sulpicia. It should not surprise him that she remains so beautiful in death, but it does anyway. The corpses of their kind are rarely so well preserved. More often, the Volturi incinerate the bodies of their fallen brethren, scattering their remains across remote locations. Such is the custom to avoid suspicion.
Yet her beauty always paled in comparison to her keen insight. Years ago, to his complete surprise, Sulpicia approached him one evening and pressed a book of Aztec poetry into his arms. She’d somehow realized that Santiago yearned to hear the sound of languages no longer spoken, to smell the sweat and perfumes of a people who no longer existed. Heads bent close together, the heat of the tower’s fireplace dancing over their icy skin, they discussed Nezahualcóyotl and forgotten poets of the old world. Her laughter was full and warm, that night. Her face shimmered like starlight.
His chest aches to remember.
Stepping back, he whispers, “Who did this, mia regina? Tell me who has done this terrible thing to you.”
Sulpicia’s milky gaze rests on an indiscernible spot, vacant and unseeing. She cannot answer him, but that doesn’t stop him from listening.
- • ━━━━━ ••●•• ━━━━━ ••
Charlie frowns down at his copy of Viaggio Perfetto! A Solo Traveler’s Guide to Italy , flipping the thin scritta paper with fast, harsh swipes.
He’d picked it up in the airport during his layover in New York. It seemed like a good idea at the time, especially considering the fact that he hadn’t done any actual planning for this trip. A travel guide would be poor substitute for an actual itinerary, but at least it was something.
It wasn’t until he landed in Florence that he realized the book was a fantastic source of information regarding art museums; not so much about finding lunch on a budget.
Sinking into his seat, he sips his miniscule cup of espresso and watches the foot traffic. It’s easy to tell the tourists from the Florentines. The tourists ogle the enormous, antique architecture with open awe, snapping photos in every corner and courtyard. By contrast, the natives go about their business, ignoring everyone and everything. Theirs is a city whose ancient beauty they’ve already seen a thousand times, its wondrous majesty now perfectly ordinary. Boring, even.
Charlie shakes his head. Damn cop brain. Half-way across the world and he still can’t turn it off. Maybe that’ll change in a few weeks, once he’s eaten a hundred servings of spaghetti and absorbed enough sculptures to melt his brain.
Everyone encouraged him to come here. Well, not here , exactly, but somewhere —for a vacation. It started with worried looks at the station, a few more Feelin’ alright, Chief? comments from the waitresses at the diner. Then his fishing buddies asked him if he’d ever thought about therapy, and well—at that point, he knew he must’ve looked worse for wear. They didn’t even ask him that when he got divorced.
Billy was the final domino in the chain of events leading to Charlie buying a plane ticket and booking the cheapest motel in Florence. He’d invited Charlie over to watch some football on the couch and drink a few beers, but midway into the game, he shut off the TV. Before Charlie could kick up a fuss about it, the somber look on Billy’s face shut him up.
“You’re messed up,” said Billy, steepling his hands over his stomach. “You need to get some help.”
Charlie scraped a nail over the label on his Guinness, refusing to look at Billy. “I’m fine,” he grumbled.
“As your friend, I think you know how much I hate horseshit.”
“It’s not horseshit,” he lied, thumping his leg. “I’ve just been a more tired than usual, lately.”
Billy rolled around the coffee table and parked himself in front of Charlie. Leaning forward, he said, “You’ve lost, what? Twenty pounds? You weren’t a big man to begin with, Charlie.” He pointed at Charlie’s ribs to emphasize his point. “Martinez said she’s had to wake you up at your desk a few times. That one morning, she got there early and found you asleep at your desk cause you’d never left the station .”
Charlie didn’t respond. Anything he said probably would have made it worse.
“How often do you sleep at your desk, Charlie?” Billy asked. “On that note, why are you sleeping at your desk? Don’t you have a perfectly good bed at home?”
“I’ve been working late,” argued Charlie. “Lost track of time going through some case files.”
Billy snorted. “Oh yeah, I forgot, cause’ Forks is a hotbed of crime. You’re up to your nose in serial killers and bank robbers. You’ll catch that heist team any day now, Charlie, I just know it!”
As much as Charlie didn’t want to admit it, Billy had him with that one.
“C’mon Charlie. Tell me what’s wrong,” said Billy, lowering his voice. The frustration and concern etched into Billy’s face made Charlie’s gut twist with guilt.
Charlie didn’t want to be like this. He wanted to be happy. By all accounts, he should have been happy. His thoughts kept him up at night. Instead of sleeping, he paced the hallways and listened to the creak of his footsteps. Rarely did this routine help him shake the sickly feeling from the pit of his stomach. Passing his daughter’s bedroom often sent him spiraling down the same circular pattern of thoughts.
Bella had always been a beautiful, smart girl. Maybe Charlie was biased on the subject, but other people seemed to think so too. When she first came to live with him full-time, it felt like every citizen of Forks wanted to gush about how tall and mature his daughter had become. Neighbors stopped him in the driveway to chat about Bella. Acquaintances roped him into long conversations in the middle of the Gocery Mart, asking how Bella liked her new school and her new life.
He would’ve liked to say that he couldn’t care less about all the questions. But he loved it. He loved talking about Bella, loved nodding along with every compliment. His kid was the best thing he’d ever done in his small, stupid life, so listening to folks rattle on about her left a warm buzz in his ears.
The start of Edward was the start of…the change . Initially, Charlie didn’t mind it when the boy started hanging around. Compared to all the other dumb kids in town, the local doctor’s son seemed level-headed. Mature for his age. Sure, he was weird, but all the Cullens were weird. Charlie tried not to hold that against them.
That being said: the more time Bella spent with Edward, the more reticent she became. She started carefully dodging Charlie’s questions about her social life. On most evenings, he caught her eyes glazing over, lost in the reverie of her thoughts. Then her grades started to suffer—not by a wide margin, granted, but enough to raise the alarm. Bella’s natural warmth dimmed little by little, flattening the light around her to a dull gray.
He breathed a quiet sigh of relief when the Cullens moved away, however brief their departure. With Edward gone, he held out hope that Bella would shift her focus to school, her friends, hobbies—anything. Instead, Bella got worse. During the day, she curled up in bed and stared listlessly out the window, and at night, her muffled sobs emanated under the cracks of her doorway. The sound cleaved at his heart. Nothing he did or said could spur her from the fog, the depression that haunted their house.
Billy’s kid brought Bella back to life. Sure, Charlie had opinions about his daughter riding motorcycles and doing who else knows what with Jacob and his friends, but it got Bella out of the house, doing something other than fusing with the threads of her bedsheets. It got her to smile again.
For the first time in months, when Charlie looked at Bella, his daughter looked back.
And then Bella disappeared.
Reading the note she’d left behind had felt like being drenched with ice water, the sudden onslaught of nausea nearly doubling him over to the kitchen floor. The hasty of scribblings of her handwriting informed him that she had left with Alice…because Edward was in trouble . Edward Cullen. Where had she gone? Who knows. But she had gone to Edward. To Edward fucking Cullen.
Charlie’s relief at seeing Bella walk up the driveway four days later barely eclipsed his rage at watching Edward walk up beside her.
Charlie didn’t hate. He considered it a waste of energy, actively hating someone. The most he could muster was pointed disappointment, and that was typically reserved for the high school kids in town who got drunk off wine coolers and set fires in trash cans. Even that was a half-hearted effort. It didn’t take much to chasten high school students.
But if it were possible for Charlie to hate someone, then Charlie hated Edward. He hated the serene, unmoving expression on Edward’s pale face. He hated the way Edward corralled Bella, shadowing her every footstep like gum under her shoe. Most of all, he hated the strange pattern of injuries Bella seemed to recieve whenever she was around Edward for too long. He had written off her broken leg the year before as a freak accident, a testament to Bella’s longstanding balance issues—but after months of a compiling menagerie of odd bruises and cuts, whispers of dread echoed in the back of his mind.
He tried to put his foot down. He prepared a speech, carefully practicing all his talking points in the mirror. In his mind, after Charlie laid out all his observations about Edward’s dangerous, borderline obsessive behaviors, Bella would see reason. She would weep and throw her arms around him, just like she did as a little girl, before immediately calling Edward to break up with him.
That was a fool’s errand, if ever there was one.
The moment Charlie said Edward’s name, Bella’s face hardened. She threatened to pack her things and move out early. She was eighteen now, after all. Although she didn’t say it, Charlie knew that she was drawing a line in the sand: you can see me with Edward, or you won’t see me at all.
So, Charlie folded. Of course he folded. The thought of Bella leaving, even after all these years, still welled up memories of Renée fleeing out the front door, peeling out of the driveway in the pouring rain. He avoided thinking about his ex-wife whenever possible. Avoided thinking about his emptiness in the aftermath of her departure, the stain it had left on his heart. So he folded. He allowed Edward to come and go as he pleased, seething all the while.
In a blink, Bella graduated.
And then she was getting married.
Unbeknownst to Bella (although probably not unbeknownst to the Cullen family, judging by all the unimpressed looks on their faces), Charlie had pounded two shots of Vodka the morning of her wedding, and another right before walking her down the aisle. He more or less drank his way through the wedding reception and half-remembered threatening to hunt down Edward with a shotgun during his speech. The attendees laughed at that, luckily.
Following her wedding, he didn’t see Bella for a month. Edward whisked her away to some remote island with limited cell reception, and following their honeymoon, she was laid up in bed recovering from some mystery illness. Charlie’s first eight or nine attempts to visit her were intercepted by Carlisle, who explained that Bella needed more rest before she could receive visitors. It didn’t escape Charlie’s notice that with each subsequent conversation, Carlisle’s measured voice became more and more unsteady.
The shroud of secrecy around his daughter’s well-being didn’t last long enough to drive Charlie insane, but it was a near thing. After weeks of waiting in a parked car outside the Cullen household, Carlisle called him inside.
That was the day everything changed. The day Bella changed.
The person who smiled when Charlie burst through the door certainly looked like his daughter. All the familiar features were there. The shape of her eyes, the curvature of her nose. Nothing about her suggested that she had just spent the last several weeks recovering from a major illness. The opposite, in fact. Bella looked healthier than ever.
The Bella who stood before him looked more like an artist’s rendition of herself, a rendering that someone had refined with a paint brush and a scalpel. Her eyelashes were longer, darker. Previous vestiges of baby fat seemed to have been scraped away, remolding her face into something more mature. More striking. Every freckle, every hint of acne, had disappeared. The new porcelain-esque surface of her skin revealed no trace of time’s natural blemishes.
Even hugging Bella felt unnatural. Encircling his arms around her felt more akin to embracing a stone pillar.
And then Edward carried in Renesmee.
Renesmee was ultimately the reason that, after his visit with Bella, Charlie screeched to a halt on the roadside and vomited. That baby was his granddaughter. There was no doubt in his mind—her big brown eyes were Bella’s eyes. His eyes. But how was that possible? When, and how long, had Bella been pregnant? The baby didn’t even look like a newborn. She had a full head of hair. Little baby teeth.
Edward rattled off a story about them adopting his niece, a lie that Charlie had nodded along with in a daze.
Bella watched him absorb this news. Studying his reaction.
Although she stood at his side, Bella had never felt so far away.
She was a stranger.
“Something is wrong with Bella,” whispered Charlie after several long seconds.
Fear flickered across Billy’s face, but only for an instant. It was swiftly replaced by a schooled expression. A poker face that Charlie recognized all too well. A twine of disappointment and fury tightened in his chest
“Nothing’s wrong with Bella. You just saw her a couple days ago.”
“I know you know what I’m talking about, Billy,” said Charlie, piercing Billy with a frosty glare.
Billy looked away. “I don’t.”
Charlie grit his teeth. Deadlocked again. He was used to it, by this point.
The first person Charlie had approached with questions about this whole fucked up situation was Jacob. Being Bella’s best friend, Jacob was bound to know something. Or have his own suspicions about Bella’s transformation. Hell, the kid was practically family. But when Charlie asked him if he knew what the hell was going on, Jacob avoided his gaze. Said he didn’t know what Charlie meant. That Bella hadn’t changed at all.
Okay, fine. If Jacob didn’t want to betray Bella’s confidence, so be it.
He brought his concerns to Carlisle next. Looking back, he should have known better than to think that Edward’s adoptive father would give him anything in the way of answers. But he tried, nonetheless. What Charlie had neglected to remember was that Carlisle had mastered the fine linguistic art of speaking in circles. Every question Charlie asked was met with a gentle smile and a cajoling tone, peppered with the implication that Charlie must be going through a rough transition now that he’s an empty-nester. Charlie left the conversation more irritated, and more confused, than he had when it started.
After that, Billy’s refusal to engage made a certain kind of sense. It confirmed Charlie’s hypothesis.
He was being stone-walled.
His daughter, his friends, and her daughter’s new family shared a secret, and they all steadfastly refused to share it. Those were the facts. The why of it all stumped him. What motive could Billy and Jacob have for refusing to share that secret with Charlie?
Charlie’s eyes narrowed. “As your friend, I think you know how much I hate horseshit.”
Billy winced at having his words thrown back in his face. “You have to trust me on this. Your daughter is happy, she’s healthy. You don’t have to pick this hill to die on.”
“I think I do, actually. I don’t understand why no one’s telling me what’s going on.”
“That’s because nothing’s going on. C’mon, brother, you’re acting crazy—”
“ I’m not fucking crazy! ”
As he screamed it, Charlie’s beer shattered in his hands.
A brief, stunned silence followed. They stared at the shards of glass on the carpet, watching the beer stain darken to a sickly brown. Blinking, Charlie lept to his feet.
“Jesus, I’m so sorry Billy,” he said, dashing to the kitchen for a towel. “I shouldn’t have lost it like that. I’m sorry.”
Billy leaned over to pick up the pieces and sighed. “Don’t apologize. Please, just—just don’t apologize.”
An uneasy atmosphere lingered long after Billy turned the game back on. They tried to return to normalcy, making empty observations about the players and the ref’s calls, but nothing could restore the mood. At the end of night, Charlie squeezed Billy’s shoulder and Billy told him to send a text when he made it home. It was their way of telling each other that their friendship would survive this.
The next day, Charlie booked a flight to Italy.
Okay, so maybe Billy—and everyone else—had a point. Charlie needed a vacation. He needed to get out of his own skin, shake up his routine. Maybe if he toured a few museums and soaked up the sun a few thousand miles away from his hometown, he’d feel less like he was losing his mind.
Florence, Italy wasn’t his first choice. Charlie would have much preferred to sink his feet into the sand of a tropical beach somewhere quiet, a spot where he could crack open a book and listen to the gentle cadence of the ocean. Italy seemed less a place to relax and more a place to spend too much on gelato and wine. The record number of tourists year over year wasn’t an attractive prospect either.
The real reason he chose Italy was because of a hunch.
After Bella moved in with the Cullens, Charlie set to the task of cleaning up her room. She left most of her things behind, abandoning old belongings and swapping out her entire wardrobe. It made his chest ache to think that she didn’t want to keep anything from her old life. He dealt with the thought by shoving her stuff in boxes and stacking them in the garage.
He worked his way through Bella’s room impassively, trying his best to shut his brain off and hum Black Sabbath to pass the time. Tucked between several essays and biology assignments in her desk drawer, a smooth, thin document gave him pause. Charlie’s hands shook as he lifted the piece of paper, reading and rereading the printed text.
It was a boarding pass to Italy, dated during the window when Bella disappeared.
- • ━━━━━ ••●•• ━━━━━ ••
Charlie stands, stretching his back with a grunt. Florence awaits.
If someone were to ask Charlie exactly what he was looking for, Charlie wouldn’t be able to give a satisfying answer. Enlightenment is the response he supplies himself. Enlightenment and relaxation. Neither feel attainable, at this rate.
As he meanders the cobble-stone streets, Charlie passes a series of cafés and shops operating inside detailed, faded structures. He wonders how many times these buildings have been emptied and repurposed. Hundreds of times. Maybe more. Embossed with the likeness of angels and saints, the towering effigies of Florence watch over the city; impartial observers who would remain long after Charlie was dead.
Shivering, Charlie shakes the thought. Vacationing in an ancient city keeps reminding him of how temporary he is.
Tourists swarm all the historical sites within walking distance. Charlie struggles to weave his way between the crowds, frowning at the lines wrapped around particularly famous museums and chapels. He might as well be at Disneyland.
After an hour’s worth of glancing between his travel guide and road signs written in Italian, Charlie takes refuge under the shade of a wide veranda and leans against a pillar. He’s getting no where fast. Taking a nap and researching an actual itinerary for Florence might be the thing he needs to start fresh tomorrow.
Right as he’s about to call it a day and make the walk of the shame back to his shoebox motel, the sight of an empty entrance down the street brings him to a halt. It’s a large, public building. But no one goes inside. He watches several tourists stroll within a few feet of the doors, hesitate for a beat, as if entranced, and then walk away.
Huh. That’s interesting.
Charlie pushes himself away off the pillar and crosses the street. When he arrives at the entrance, he sees that its large glass doors are cracked forward, blasting a pleasant breeze of air conditioning to the outside world. On a stone plaque beside the doors, the words La Galleria d’Arte Volturi are printed in an ornate, cursive script.
He recognizes enough Italian by this point (a feat that fills him with a small kernel of pride) to realize that he’s looking at some kind of art gallery. Since there’s no signage to indicate that the property is closed, Charlie walks in.
A woman standing near the reception desk glances up sharply the moment the door swings open. At least, he’s pretty sure she’s looking at him. The enormous pair of sunglasses dwarfing her face hides her eyes. The rest of her expression is obscured by her absurdly large wide-brimmed hat that tilts up when she tears her gaze away from her phone to stare at him.
“Uh, buongiorno ?” ventures Charlie. “I’m sorry, my Italian isn’t all that great—do you know if this place is open?”
She doesn’t respond for so long that he reaches for his translation pocket book. As he begins flipping through the pages, she says slowly, “...yes, it is open.”
“Oh,” says Charlie, “what’s the word, uh, grazie . I’m going to have a look around.”
The woman only stares back. He gives her a few seconds to see if she’s going to formulate something else to say, but she remains silent. Nodding goodbye, he treads into the gallery.
Artwork from every era decorates the halls. It’s an eclectic collection, an amalgamation of modern paintings and antique murals and everything in between. Watercolor horses prance beside surrealist melting clocks. Renaissance sculptures share hallways with neon green graffiti.
With a start, Charlie realizes the gallery organizes the art by themes, not by period or culture. That’s why everything is so…distinctive. There’s a room for families—images of men, women, and children pose together, revealing snapshots of their daily lives. In another room, warfare coats the walls. Dead soldiers and horses litter battlegrounds. A shrewd artist had captured the complex swirl and of fear and rage on the face of a young man as he raises his sword and awaits an oncoming army, waiting either to kill or to die.
Charlie doesn’t spend much time in that room.
The rest of the gallery, however, he enjoys immensely. Figuring out each theme becomes something of a game as he circles the rooms, and he often finds himself stopping simply to marvel at the craftsmanship on display. Maybe there’s an arts district somewhere in Washington he can visit when he gets back. Maybe he could even get Bella to go with him.
Shaking his head, Charlie moves to the next exhibition.
A metronomic thud filters through the archway, reverberating off the porcelain tiles. The source of the sound quickly becomes apparent as Charlie enters the exhibition: a gargantuan mechanical dragon is suspended from the ceiling. The subsequent rise and fall of it’s wings elicits a powerful drumming sound, pounding the air. The dragon, at first glance, seems to hover, but upon closer inspection Charlie realizes that razor thin wires uphold the snout and spine.
Charlie gives the dragon installation the proper respect it deserves by staring at it with his jaw hanging open for several minutes. Laughing lowly, he drags a palm over his face and continues his tour.
It takes him longer to figure out the theme of this exhibition, but when he does, it hits him all at once.
Monsters.
Shadows with red saucers for eyes loom over hillsides, the veil of their presence enveloping the villages below. A creature with a lion for a head and a man’s body kneels before a king, ignoring the horrified onlookers of the court. In the next, a winged creature rips a man’s heart out.
Charlie can name some of the monstrous beings among the collection, but not all. The dragons, werewolves, and demons he recognizes. He recalls the names for everything else by searching the recesses of his mind, trying to remember long forgotten myths and legends.
One of the paintings stumps him more than the others. In it, a woman in a yellow dress holds a man down on a bed while her sword rends his head from his body. Spurts of blood fly from his neck and trickle down the sheets, his face frozen in blank surprise. The woman, by contrast, looks only vaguely annoyed by the gory display.
Neither figure looks particularly monstrous, at least not in the traditional sense. He begins to wonder if this painting was miscategorized when a lilting voice cuts through his thoughts.
“A fascinating work, is it not?”
Charlie definitely does not nearly jump out of his skin at the question, but he does turn around.
His response catches in his throat.
Under the low lights, the man’s pale complexion seems to glow. Everything about him glows. Inky, almost dark blue hair falls over his shoulders, an uncommon luminous color. His sharp suit reflects subtle swirling patterns that only become visible under the direct gleam of the light.
Because of the man’s round sunglasses, Charlie can’t tell if the man is looking at him, or the painting. He clears his throat.
“It is interesting,” Charlie agrees. “I’m trying to figure out who the monster’s supposed to be in this one.”
The man smiles, and its blinding. He steps beside Charlie. “There is a story behind this painting.”
“Yeah?”
“The artist was a noble woman,” he says, folding his hands behind his back. “During that era, it was one of the few indulgences that noble women could pursue. She was rather good at it, in my opinion. One day, a man of a slightly higher station entered her home while her father and brother were gone. He brutalized her. At that time, justice for such acts was paid in fines. The man paid a fee to her father and such was the end of it.”
Charlie frowns. “That’s awful.”
“Quite. But do not fret, the artist had her revenge. She painted the likeness of her rapist as Holofernes, a murderous character from a biblical story. She painted herself as Judith, the woman who decapitated Holofernes and saved her people as a result.”
Gazing up at the scene, Charlie focuses on the woman. The expression on her face no longer looks like annoyance. Now, he only sees cold rage.
“She immortalized him forever as a monster,” says Charlie, slowly, “and herself as a hero.”
The man’s smile widens. “Precisely.”
Charlie studies the painting, awed. He takes a minute to fully absorb it all before turning to the stranger. “Thank you, I love learning about stuff like that.”
“I’m the one who should be thanking you. It’s been too long since I’ve discussed the art in my gallery. It soothes the soul to do so.” The corner of his lip quirks up at that, as if he’d just told himself a joke.
Charlie’s brain stalls. “I’m sorry, did you just say that this is your gallery?”
Extending a hand, the man says, “Aro Volturi. Delighted to make your quaintance.”
Even his name sounds expensive , Charlie thinks as he reciprocates the gesture. “Charlie Swan. Happy to meet you too.”
There’s a split second where the muscles in Aro’s face go still when their hands touch. It’s a surprisingly firm, cold handshake, like holding a granite statue. Aro’s lips part, and Charlie finds himself watching them, admiring their expressiveness.
Aro’s face relaxes a split second later. “Charlie, do you have an hour to spare? I’d like to give you a private tour.”
Charlie blinks. “Oh, sure. I’ve got time.”
“ Renata ,” Aro says sharply.
Charlie really does jump this time when the woman he met earlier with big sunglasses and an even bigger hat steps out of the shadows. “Yes, sir?” she says.
“Close the gallery. Make sure no one else wanders inside. Mr. Swan is a wonderful surprise, but the next visitor might not be.”
Renata inclines her head and spins on her heel to follow the instructions. Something about the exchange feels like a reprimand. “I knew I shouldn’t have walked in,” says Charlie. “I probably missed the sign telling me to take a hike. My Italian is shoddy, ya know? It’s not her fault.”
Aro chuckles and takes off his circular sunglasses, revealing long lashes and dark crimson eyes.
Charlie goes rigid. That...can’t be natural. No one has eyes like that.
He thinks of the Cullens and their matching sets of golden eyes.
No one has eyes like them, either.
“Think nothing of it,” says Aro. Charlie tries to keep calm as Aro’s palm closes over his hand. “I’ve been needing a suitable distraction, you see. And you’re simply perfect for the job. Shall we?”