Page 104 of City Of Thieves

I watch him walk to the edge of the terrace to make a call, his black T-shirt stretched taut across his thick web of shoulder muscles. Even at nine p.m., it’s baking here. The night air is heavy and swollen after ten days of burning sunshine, and across the Tuscan valley, there’s a gathering storm on the horizon.

When I glance back at my daughter, she’s watching him, too.

She and Renzo are inseparable. It’s like she knows, deep down in that big heart of hers, that he was the one who saved her.

It turns out he had a missing piece as well. She dances like a firefly around his darkness, making everything brighter. He’d take a bullet for her as fast as he’d take one for me.

I have no idea how something so wonderful came from something so ugly, but it did, and I thank the universe for that every single day.

“What does Daddy do?” she asks suddenly.

“He keeps us safe,” I say with a smile before poker-facing her. “The color orange, huh? How about carrots?”

“Hmmm.” She frowns in concentration before bursting out with, “Oranges!” As if it was the hardest answer in the world.

She’s still giggling when Renzo rejoins us.

“Everything okay?”

“It’s perfect.” He drops a kiss on the top of my head as he tosses his phone back onto the table. “Where are we at?”

At that moment, the sky splits in half, and a sheet of white lightning races across the sky. Anastasia whips around in excitement as all the local farm dogs start yapping. Ten seconds later, the first clap of thunder sounds.

Jumping off her chair, she races to the edge of the terrace for a front seat view. Circling the table again, I climb onto Renzo’s lap and snake my arm around his neck as he pours us both a glass of whiskey.

“My mom called earlier,” I tell him. “We have an opening date for the museum.”

He lifts his glass and takes a swig. “When?”

“June seventeenth… Wanna be my date?”

His dark eyes flicker across my face. “Dolcezza, you only have one date for the rest of your life…Me.”

I lean down to whisper my reply, and he kisses me fiercely, driving his tongue between my teeth, claiming me, and sealing my love for him, all in the span of the three seconds Anastasia has her back turned to us.

Nine months ago, I returned to Moscow, bound by love and purpose, not hate and chains. There was a town on the outskirts with a name that was ten letters long and long overdue a visit.

I sold my gallery soon after we’d shipped most of Petrov’s recovered artifacts to the US. My mother and I decided to found a private museum for the collection in Manhattan and open up the gates of our history to everyone.

Like Renzo once said to me, ‘art isn’t something to fucking lose yourself in. It’s where you find what you’re looking for.’

I found him searching for a painting, and then I found myself.

As for my father, he starts his campaign for the Presidency next year, and the world is quaking already.

A loud squeal has us both rising to our feet in alarm.

“I felt rain! I felt rain!” Anastasia rushes back to us, her eyes shining in the darkness as if she’s found lost treasure herself.

In the distance, I see the hazy outline of a rainstorm, and five minutes later it’s right above us. It’s not as violent as the storm a year ago, but it’s enough to soak us to the bone.

Instead of running inside, Renzo pitches our daughter onto his shoulders. “Close your eyes and tip your head back,” he tells her, just as he once told me. “You, too,dolcezza,” he adds, catching my eye, that familiar jolt of electricity passing between us again.

Because we stand in the rain together now.

All three of us.

Whatever the weather.

The End