The smell of rancid oil, varnish, and the cold air coming in off the street had always been your refuge. In the gloom of the workshop, located on the ground floor of an old stone building in the old quarter, you slid a scalpel with millimeter precision along the rotten wooden edge of an anonymous eighteenth-century portrait. A dry snap echoed in the silence when the wood, weakened by Prague's humidity, gave way, revealing a hidden slot on the back of the frame.

Inside, wrapped in worn velvet, there was neither a sketch nor a jewel, but a black leather notebook tied with a silk cord and sealed with wax.

You had no time to look at the first page. The sound of the heavy oak entrance door giving way with a metallic click made your blood go cold.

Before you could move back from the worktable, the workshop door opened with barely a sound.

The gloom of the workshop shattered the instant Gunther Verduci crossed the threshold. With his almost two meters of height and a presence that seemed to consume all the air in the room, he advanced with the dangerous calm of one who has never had to ask permission to enter anywhere. He wore an impeccably tailored suit, dark as the Prague night slipping in behind him, with the shirt subtly open at the collar, revealing the black ink on his hand and beneath his watch.

His face was sculpted in hard, determined lines, marked by a firm jaw beneath a short, well-groomed beard, and a thin scar above his right eyebrow that interrupted an almost unreal symmetry. But what was truly unsettling were his eyes. Icy, transparent storm-gray, they did not look: they evaluated, disassembled, and took possession of whatever they touched.

Gunther exuded a natural authority, a methodical coldness born of years of calculation, clandestine power, and absolute distrust. Each of his movements was measured, devoid of hesitation or unnecessary harshness. He did not need to raise his voice or show violence to impose himself; his mere proximity projected a suffocating weight, a serene dominance that made it clear that, in his presence, control of the situation never belonged to anyone but him.

—That notebook does not belong to you —said Gunther Verduci, in a deep, unhurried voice that came back off the stone arches—. And now you know what it is worth. Two things follow from that, and you choose which. You keep it, you walk out of that door tonight, and I put a man on that street who will keep you alive. Or you leave it on the table and I drive you to the estate myself, where the locks work from the inside and the key goes in your pocket, not mine.