Other Writing

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...

What a Father Knows

A missing scene from The Stolen Sapphire — Sal Marchetti's POV, the week after Francesca finds the empty jewelry box, before she has told him anything at all.

Sal Marchetti had learned most of what mattered in his life by watching people who didn't know they were being watched.

It was a skill men in his position either developed or died without, and he had buried enough friends who never bothered to learn it that he no longer thought of it as a talent. It was maintenance....

The Manuscript

A missing scene from The Pakhan's Librarian — the first meeting between Maggie and Aleksei, years before the novel opens.

I was thirty-nine the first time I met a man who collected truth the way other men collected paintings, though I didn't understand that about him until years later, standing in my own kitchen with a book I hadn't asked for.

At the time I only knew him as a client of Charles Pembroke's, a quiet man with a private library and a manuscript that needed a second...

This is missing scene between the walk home at the end of Chapter 8 and "Learning to Breathe" opening Chapter 9 — it doesn't touch the plot, just gives you a vulnerable Elena/Luca moment that I decided to leave out of the main manuscript. Enjoy.

I wake before the sun does, which hasn't happened since Marco left, and for a second I lie still and wait for the dread to find me the way it always does. It doesn't come.

The house is quiet in a way that used to scare me. This morning it just sounds...

What a Favor Costs

A missing scene from A Ledger of Betrayal — Christina at nineteen, the wedding where she first told Sal Conti to his face that a favor wasn't a favor at all.

I was nineteen, home from school for my cousin Renata's wedding, wearing a dress my mother had picked out and I'd complained about the whole drive to the hall. It was itchy at the collar and too formal for a reception that would end, as they always did, with somebody's uncle singing badly into a microphone nobody had...