Victoria Worth

The Atlas

A missing scene from The Mistress He Bought — Arkady Fyodorov's POV, the Saturday thirty years earlier when he first met Margot Kessler, then twenty-five, in her father's workshop.

I had no patience left that Saturday, and I remember being irritated with myself for it, because a man who has none has usually spent it somewhere it wasn't owed.

The atlas needed to be ready by Thursday. I had told Walter Kessler that on Monday, and again on Wednesday, and he had answered both times with...

The Blessing

A missing scene from The Life She Funded — twelve years before the novel opens, the day Massimo Rinaldi asked Carlo Benedetti for his blessing to marry Caterina Rossetti.

Carlo Benedetti had learned, over three decades of building an empire out of ledgers and loyalty in roughly equal measure, that the requests men were most nervous to make were usually the ones that told him the most about their character. A man who asked for money showed you his need. A man who asked for territory...

The Garden No One Uses

A missing scene from The Perfect Revenge — set during the two weeks at the monastery, before the Asterion.

Natalia reached the eastern terraces before the sun did.

She had learned the monastery's schedule in her first three days on the island. The light arrived in stages, first the bell tower, then the upper walls, then the terraces in descending order, as if the morning were reading the site from top to bottom. By the eighth day she could stand at the head of the path...