Page 88 of King Of Order

What I found hit me like a punch to the gut.

Claudio and Aldo were using the showroom as a front for one of the oldest tricks in the book: using art to launder dirty money.

It played as improbable as all hell. But the more I uncovered, the more obvious it became.

I believed Chiara was privy to certain aspects of the operation, but I was unsure if she was aware of the lengths her brothers had gone to.

They might have clued her in on their small artwork purchases to distract her from their more significant deals.

Claudio had been inflating prices behind her back.

Art pieces that wouldn’t fetch more than a few thousand were, all of a sudden, sold for millions. A genius move or utter desperation?

But what was clear was how perfect it all looked on the surface—the art market’s lack of transparency allowed the brothers to hide their deals with anonymity, secrecy, and plenty of room to play around.

Transactions were happening in the dark, masked by private sales and auctions where no one asked too many questions.

Their operation mimicked similar enterprises in which buyer and seller identities were obscured, the artwork’s provenance—its history—was manipulated, or the canvas was conveniently lost.

No red flags or alarms popped up on any systems as exchanges were conducted in the shadowed reaches of the criminal underworld.

The funds flowed with smooth precision, crossing borders with ease, protected by the system designed to preserve the integrity of the art world.

Except, in this case, it was facilitating crime.

Claudio had figured out how to exploit certain loopholes.

He wasn’t only hiding money but laundering vast sums across different jurisdictions.

Moving a painting from one country to another was easy, evading scrutiny at every checkpoint.

The Tirone family had entrenched themselves in the dark art market, and Chiara had no clue how deep it had gone.

Whenever I thought about how she trusted her kin and poured her heart into that gallery, thinking it was an honest venture, I was furious.

Claudio was using her passion, her dream, to hide his filth.

It wasn’t limited to the money laundering that made my blood boil; he was doing it with her art—her healing.

I refused to let it go on.

She’d given herself two weeks off from the gallery after the funeral.

It was expected, and it’d raise suspicion if she opened her show space sooner than that, so we’d spent the last few days working from home, relaxing, fucking. Eating, rinsing, and repeating.

Now, it was 3 p.m., and she was asleep upstairs after I had rocked her to bed with my cock after a lazy lunch.

I smirked at the thought, then switched my view from the laptop in front of me to the streets outside the window that was quiet during siesta hours.

I stared at one of the paintings on the wall of her guest quarters.

It was one of hers—a modernist piece, vibrant yet chaotic, full of life and pain.

The irony wasn’t lost on me. She had created this to save herself, and now it was being used to bury the sins of her family.

Only one solution was available to me. I had to end it.

I had to shut down the Tirone family’s fraud operation before it swallowed her whole.

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