Page 358 of Niccolo

He glared at me some more, then turned to Dario. “8:30.”

Then he left the room.

All of us – all my brothers and Lars – stared at each other in shock.

“Holy shit,” Adriano whispered.

“Not bad,” Massimo joked. “Take in a little sightseeing while in Rome.”

“Try not to fuck Sofia while you’re in the Sistine Chapel,” Valentino snarked.

“Are we STILL on this?!” I griped. “NotONEof you has mentioned how I made Fausto lose his shit at the Council! How about some recognition forthat?”

There was a slight murmur of approval from everyone.

“…okay,” Valentino admitted. “That part was pretty cool.”

“Thank you,” I snapped.

“Still – try not to fuck her in the Vatican,” he said with an impish smile.

I wanted to be mad at him –

But it was hard to do when it was exactly the sort of thingIwould have said.

147

Though surrounded on all sides by Rome, Vatican City is a country – the smallest in the world, with an area less than a quarter square mile and only 800 permanent residents.

Benito Mussolini signed a treaty in 1929 that turned Vatican City into its own country. The treaty granted the pope territorial sovereignty, an issue the Catholic Church had been fighting for since the unification of Italy in 1870. Before that, Italy was just a handful of squabbling states, with the Vatican being one of them.

As a result of the treaty, Mussolini gained the Catholic Church’s support for his dictatorship… and the pope gained independence from the Italian government.

The Catholic Church: willing to strike a bargain with the Devil if it served their purposes.

That was the only explanation for how Dario and I found ourselves in the Vatican after hours, accompanied by Don Severino and a representative from the Church.

The representative was a somber man in a three-piece suit, probably around 50 years old. He only communicated withSeverino. He barely even looked at Dario and me as a dozen men, also in suits, searched us for guns before letting us inside.

The representative led us through the empty halls of the Vatican Museum, past untold treasures: statues from ancient Rome and Greece, gorgeous floor mosaics transplanted from millennia-old temples, and busts of Roman emperors carved while they were still alive.

As we walked, we were followed at a distance by the dozen men in suits –

The Vatican’s foot soldiers, you might say.

We eventually moved past the statuary into an astoundingly beautiful hallway with a curved ceiling.

Hundreds of paintings – not as good as Michelangelo’s work, but impressive nonetheless – adorned the ceiling, framed by carvings of angels.

However, what gave the hallway its name – the Gallery of Maps – were the 40 giant frescoes that lined its walls.

They were gorgeous painted maps of all the major cities and regions of Italy in the 1500s, with each panel 10 feet tall and a dozen feet wide. With 20 frescoes on each side, the hall was as long as a football field.

And there, halfway down the corridor, stood Fausto and Sofia.

She looked absolutely lovely in her glasses and a black silk dress.

Fausto, on the other hand, looked positively demonic as he glared at us.

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