Chapter 8

  The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum looked exactly as I remembered it: quiet, cloaked in old wealth and older intentions.

  Except now I knew that not all of the missing artwork had been stolen for profit. Some of it had been stolen to close doors.

  “Remind me again why we’re doing this in daylight?” I asked as we entered the glassed in lobby.

  “Because the veil is thinner in the morning,” Richard said without looking at me. “And because I didn’t feel like watching you break in after dark.”

  “How thoughtful.”

  He held the door for me. I stepped inside and felt it immediately—that hum beneath the floor, like something just below waking.

  The last time I’d been here, I hadn’t noticed it. This time, it felt personal.

  We passed through the glassed-in courtyard, humid and radiant even in winter. Tudor sat in the center on a stone bench beneath the climbing jasmine,

  looking smug and fully at home. “You’re kidding me,” Richard whispered, “he never left?”

  “Nope. Moved in like a dowager countess. That’s his third sunning spot, according to the staff.”

  “They’re letting a cat just... live here?”

  “He’s charismatic,” I said. “And possibly enchanted.”

  To be fair, we had tried to take him. After our first nighttime visit, I’d carried him back to the hotel wrapped in my coat.

  He stayed for exactly fifteen minutes before yowling like the ghost of an opera diva, knocking over a full glass of water, and clawing the carpet by the door.

  The second I opened it, he bolted—and by morning, he was back in the museum courtyard, grooming himself like we were the ones being dramatic.

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  Tudor flicked his tail and turned away now, dismissing us both like a doorman who didn’t approve of our shoes.

  Richard muttered something in Latin that sounded vaguely like show-off.

  We kept walking. The deeper we went, the colder the air became—not temperature, exactly, more... atmospheric pressure.

  Like the building was exhaling secrets slowly so we wouldn’t notice. In the Dutch Room, the tension snapped to attention.

  I stopped just inside the threshold, breath caught. The empty frames were still there—those painful, gilded voids where masterpieces had been stolen in 1990.

  But now I could feel them: absence as presence. Like wounds still bleeding. “Okay,” I whispered. “So explain it. How did the theft close the door?”

  Richard moved beside me, so close I could smell the cedar and clove of his coat. He didn’t answer right away.

  Then, softly: “Some portraits are portals. If you remove the image, you disrupt the passage way.”

  The right painting, stolen with the right blood... it’s not just a theft. It’s a seal.” “You’re saying someone blocked supernatural traffic with Rembrandt.”

  “I’m saying,” he said, stepping in front of me, “that someone used your mother to do it.” I blinked. “My mother?”

  He nodded toward one of the empty frames. “That portrait—Vermeer’s The Concert—was taken hours after her DNA flagged the Vatican’s archive.”

  I felt the back of my neck prickle. “And the others?”

  “Two were connected to ritual bloodlines. One—” he hesitated—“was linked to Elizabeth directly. Her crest was hidden in the underpainting.

  It wasn’t supposed to be visible. Not even to the restoration team.”

  I stared at the empty space on the wall and tried not to feel nauseous. Behind us, the security lights flickered once.

  And something moved through the room—not seen, not heard, but felt.

  The hairs on my arms lifted. The pressure shifted. It was like walking into an old cathedral and realizing you're not alone—like static wrapped in silk brushing the back of your neck. My skin tightened, breath caught. The air turned syrup-thick and wrong, as if the molecules had been rearranged by something that didn’t belong here.

  Richard’s hand moved instinctively to the small of my back. Steady, warm.

  “Hey,” I said. “You okay?”

  He didn’t move his hand. “I don’t like this place. Things feel very intense and dangerous.”

  “You’re the one who brought me here.”

  “Because I trust you,” he said. His voice was low, and something in it snagged my breath. “Well,” I said, trying to stay flippant, “I still haven’t decided if I trust you.”

  He turned then. Fully. And the look in his eyes made my skin go warm and tight. “Don’t,” he said, “pretend you don’t feel this.”

  I should have stepped back. Instead I swallowed hard and whispered, “Feel what, exactly?”

  Before he could answer, Tudor meowed sharply from the far end of the room—tail high, ears pinned.

  Something unseen moved past us again—cold, electric, like walking through grief. Richard dropped his hand, jaw clenched.

  “We need to keep moving.” “But what was that?”

  “Not everything announces itself right away,” he said. “Some things wait.” He offered his arm.

  And I—because apparently I’d lost all survival instincts—took it.

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