Chapter 1
August 2011
Florence, Italy
The Prince of Florence stood on the first floor of the Uffizi Gallery, contemplating murder.
A crowd of the city’s human elite swirled around him—men in tuxedos, women in floor-length gowns—as the arrogant, insufferable Professor Gabriel Emerson filled the Renaissance structure with his insipidity.
The Prince had killed before. He was discriminate in his choice of victims and only on rare occasions did he take pleasure in it. This was going to be one of those occasions.
He was fleet of foot and cunning in the extreme, his supernatural strength compounded by his intelligence. No doubt he could reach the American professor and break his neck before anyone noticed something amiss.
The Prince fantasized about sprinting across the floor, executing the professor, and fleeing through a window before any of the one hundred guests paused in sipping their sparkling wine.
Human beings were easily deluded. Probably they would credit the professor’s death to a sudden, spontaneous stroke, having no idea what stood in their midst.
The Prince’s body tensed at the tantalizing thought, the muscles in his forearms contracting beneath the sleeves of his expensive black suit.
A swift death was not in keeping with the magnitude of the professor’s crime, which included considerable insult in addition to personal injury. The Prince prided himself in his commitment to justice (as he defined it), so he discarded the possibility of a quick execution.
The professor must be made to suffer and that meant his beautiful wife must suffer, also.
She was standing near her husband and wearing a red dress, the color of the garment acting like a flag before a bull. Certainly, she’d captured his attention.
He stared intensely, taking in every aspect of her figure.
As if she felt his eyes, her gaze moved to his.
She looked away quickly.
Mrs. Julianne Emerson was younger than her husband, petite, and in the Prince’s view, much too thin. Her eyes, which by all accounts were very pretty, were large and dark. Her face put him in mind of Renaissance paintings—elegant of neck and cheek.
The Prince indulged himself in admiring the professor’s wife as the fool droned on and on in Italian about how she’d persuaded him to share his copies of the original Botticelli illustrations. His ignorant remarks only fanned the flames of the Prince’s anger.
They were his illustrations, not the professor’s, and they were original, completed by Sandro Botticelli himself.
Clearly, the professor, in addition to being a thief, was a Philistine who couldn’t tell the difference between an original and a copy.
The Prince began constructing new and elaborate methods of torture, combined with a primer in art history, while ignoring the professor’s wordy praise for his wife’s philanthropic work with orphans and the homeless. Too many human beings hoped their deeds would cover their sins and save them.
The Prince knew too well the futility of good works.
The Emersons trafficked in stolen property. They had acquired artwork the Prince had tried to recover for over a century. In addition, they had the temerity to march into the Prince’s city, offer his illustrations to the Uffizi, (while claiming them to be copies), and make a spectacle of themselves. It was as if they had constructed the most detailed and elaborate way of inciting his ire.
Now their lives were forfeit.
The Prince continued to stare in the direction of Mrs. Emerson, his gray eyes unseeing.
Then, something caught his attention. For no apparent reason, the young woman blushed, gazing with longing and love at her husband.
In that instant the Prince was reminded of someone else—a woman who had looked at him with the sweet blush of youth and a heart filled with longing.
The old memory twisted inside him, like a snake.
“My challenge to you this evening is to enjoy the beauty of the illustrations of Dante’s Divine Comedy, and then to find it in your hearts to celebrate beauty, charity, and compassion in the city Dante loved, Firenze. Thank you.” The professor bowed as he concluded his remarks. He walked over to his wife and embraced her, to the sound of loud applause.
The Prince didn’t applaud. In fact, he scowled, muttering a curse about Dante.
He appeared alone in his contempt, the only member of the crowd of Florentine elite who did not clap. Certainly, he was the only one in the room who’d actually engaged Dante in direct conversation and informed the Poet he was an ass.
The Prince took no pleasure in the recollection. He disliked Dante then and now, and he hated the world Dante constructed in his magnum opus.
(The Prince did not consider the incompatibility between his love for Botticelli’s illustrations and his hatred for the text they figured.)