Cardinal Julio's office was smaller than one would expect from the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. A large oak desk on which stood, a little forlornly, a large laptop, walls of books, and a fantastic view of the Vatican Gardens dozing away in the dusk. A pile of newspapers and reports on the desk, all reporting on the 'red wedding,' the 'blood wedding', or the matrimonio sanguine. Cardinal Julio seemed preoccupied with the subject for several days now.

A medium-sized man with a trimmed black beard stood at the window. Commendatore Mauro Adami greeted him briefly and cordially.

"I've heard that your family has already been investigated in Italy," he said, "and that the investigation wasn't entirely official."

"I see," Nikki said, nodding slowly, "and what was that?" There was no way she would reveal anything that Adami might not already know.

"Your mother Elizabeth Rizzoli's hunt for a man who called himself Legion. The exorcist Alvaro della Torres was somehow involved, who unfortunately took his own life afterward."

Nikki took a deep breath. She knew Elizabeth's story and the official version from the BPD reports: "That's true. And then there was Tomasso Tremonte, his student."

"I'd heard about him too. But he seems to have disappeared from the face of the earth."

Julio cleared his throat. "Let's get to the point. No one here has fallen off the face of the earth, but they've died in a way as if the powers of the underworld were involved. Aurelia Sforza. I told you: she was suddenly covered in blood and then collapsed dead in front of the altar of the Sistine Chapel."

For some reason, Ashlyn suddenly seemed very interested in the investigation. "There was no outside influence?"

Adami looked at her closely and pushed out his lower lip. "No, and this is puzzling. She seemed to be bleeding from every pore of her skin, but according to the paramedic, she had no external injuries. According to her family, she didn't have a pre-existing condition either."

"Then we need to autopsy the body," Nikki said, looking at her sister. "We need to find out why she suddenly bled so much and what the source of the bleeding was. If it was internal, the toxicologists can determine if anything was administered."

She couldn't help noticing Julio's squirming. "The family doesn't want an autopsy," he said.

"The family," Adami added, catching a punishing look from the cardinal, "is Paolo Visconti in particular. Or it's his wife, Donatella. In any case, they don't want the old man to have his beloved daughter cut open."

Nikki looked at him wide-eyed at first, but then she crossed her arms in front of her chest. "Well, I guess we'll have to find out the cause of death. But she's not his biological daughter."

"No," said Julio, "she's the daughter of Donatella, Visconti's second wife. But she's become like a daughter to him."

Nikki made a face. "What if we autopsy against the family's wishes? Apart from that, it's not up to the family to decide but to the court. It's not about a pathological examination."

Adami shook his head almost desperately. "That would come out. Besides, the Papal States, under whose jurisdiction the incident took place, have not yet agreed to an autopsy." He scratched his head. "And what do you mean secretly? We can hardly do this on a countertop with a kitchen knife. Besides, Rome is a bunch of gossip. Here, the walls have ears. And the Visconti have always heard everything so far and would use their influence. We are also on the territory of the Vatican, a sovereign state in its own right. Therefore, canon law applies here, so officially, only the Vatican can order an autopsy unless it is certainly requested to make a statement by a Roman court. But it doesn't look like that, does it?" He looked gloomily at Julio. The cardinal shook his head.

Nikki looked at Adami long and hard. "So you're not officially investigating either?"

"Halfway. I've taken on the case as a favor to my good friend Julio, and I have nationwide responsibility for it so that no one can get in on us and anything gets out. But the Holy See is still responsible." Adami smiled a little sarcastically. "The family is trying to be discreet about this terrible event."

Nikki took a deep breath and let her eyes wander over all the newspapers. The more red and black the newspapers had in their color scheme, the more lurid the headlines were.

The Blood Chapel

The wedding of the devil

Satan in the Sistine Chapel

The curse of the Visconti

"Discretion, I would say, looks different," she murmured more to herself.

Adami nodded, the corner of his mouth downturned. "Yes, but one hopes that the whole thing will die as long as nothing is said and no new information emerges."

The officer looked at him insistently. "It's also possible that the media will make their own story. A vacuum rarely remains unfilled." She remembered the stress she had just experienced with the media in Boston and across America because of the God of Blood. "Why don't you tell me about the background?"

"Shall I?" asked Julio, and Adami nodded. They all took a seat at Julio's large desk. "Paolo Visconti is an old patriarch of the famous Visconti family. He married very late in life and had a daughter."

Nikki nodded with furrowed brows and licked her lips. "But that's not Aurelia, the bride who died?"

"It isn't. Despite his wealth, fate has not been kind to him. His wife Laura, born Alberti, was also a noblewoman but nowhere near as famous as the Visconti. She died when their daughter Carina was fifteen years old."

Nikki nodded slowly and swallowed hard, looking at her sister, whose lips pressed together. Both women could relate to the family's fate in an eerily familiar way.

The officer cleared her throat. "Where's Carina now? We need to talk to her, too."

"Unfortunately, that's not easy, but we'll get to that moment." Julio glanced briefly out the window as he shifted the papers on the desk from left to right. "The elderly gentleman found solace in the arms of Donatella Sforza, whom he married some time ago when he was already over seventy. Donatella was around forty at the time. She had or had two children. Ottavio and Aurelia."

"Sforza is also high nobility, isn't she?" Ashlyn remembered one thing or another.

"You can bet your life on it. If you've been to any museum in Florence, you can't help but stumble across some Renaissance painting that either depicts Sforza people or was commissioned by Sforza people. Or both. The rich and powerful back then used artists to make the impact they wanted. The artists back then were what PR consultants or social media managers are today."

Nikki looked at her sister one more time and furrowed her brows. "We probably need a PR manager like that right now," she said, and Ashlyn nodded as she understood the reference to Mike Fisher. "But on with the story. So Donatella and Paolo got married, but Aurelia was already born before that?"

"Yes. Donatella brought Aurelia into the marriage. A classic patchwork family."

"And Visconti's biological daughter? What was her name again?"

"Carina. He always called her Carina, meaning the pretty one. And then fate struck again. First, his wife died. And then his daughter disappeared."

Nikki furrowed her eyebrows and slid forward in her chair. "In what way?"

"Shortly after the wedding of old Visconti and Donatella, Carina was kidnapped."

"And then?"

"She disappeared. Until today."

Nikki slid back again and drew her eyebrows together, her eyes moving back and forth. Something that happened when she was thinking hard. "Just like that? There were no attempts to free her? No ransom demands?"

"Yes, there was, and it was said to be in the millions. Did the ransom demand only have one effect?"

"What effect?"

"The money was gone, and the daughter remained missing. The kidnappers never came forward again, and the girl's body was never found. We still assume she's dead."

The officer nodded slowly. She knew from her own experience what role time played in kidnappings. After the first seventy-two hours, the likelihood of the kidnapped person ever reappearing diminished rapidly, and after years, there was usually no hope at all that the abductees were still alive, especially if the kidnappers had received a ransom without releasing the victim.

Nikki pressed her lips together. "That sounds very strange. Of course, ransoms are paid, and the victim is still not released, but with the prominence of the two families?"

Adami finally spoke up. "Old Visconti did everything he could to find his biological daughter. That wasn't just talk; you can be sure of that. Carina was his everything. You have to imagine that: He loses his wife and then his biological daughter."

"But he had a new, younger wife," Ashlyn intervened. She hadn't to imagine all the scenarios; she had already experienced them herself several times.

Nikki gave her sister a chastising look.

Adami nodded slowly and frowned a little. "That's true, but he was still desperate. He even paid a second ransom, but that didn't help either. No sign of life from Carina. The daughter remained missing. So Aurelia Sforza became a kind of daughter substitute for him. She became his biological daughter. It was only fitting that Aurelia Sforza and Vincente Visconti got on very well."

Nikki frowned a little and made notes in a small notepad she always had. Something she had copied from Elizabeth. "Vincente Visconti, the groom, was who? The son of Visconti?"

Adami hesitated for a moment and shook his head. "No. Visconti only had one child, that was Carina. Vincente was what who again?" He looked at the cardinal.

"Vincente was the godson of old Visconti. He was also a Visconti, but not descended from the main line."

Nikki took a deep breath, nodded slowly, and furrowed her brows. "A bit like the Middle Ages," she said. "You marry nicely among yourselves."

"That's exactly what I said," Adami replied, looking at the cardinal again. "In any case, Aurelia became like a daughter to old Visconti. He also held Vincente in high esteem, so it was a dream couple who got married a few days ago in the Sistine Chapel- or wanted to get married."

The officer asked, "Did they love each other, or was it more of a political wedding?"

"It's not up to us," Julio replied with a frown, "to judge that."

"Well, it's possible," said Adami, raising his shoulders. "The wedding wasn't entirely unintentional, anyway. Maybe old Visconti talked himself into something. People always romanticize reality to make it easier to bear."

"The way the wedding turned out in the end, it's rather difficult to romanticize," Ashlyn replied, raising her shoulders.

Adami nodded in agreement. "That's true. But it's rather medieval that the daughter of a widower's new wife is now marrying the widower's godson. Isn't it?"

Julio looked at the floor and then at Adami. "I'll repeat it: it's not up to us, Mauro, to judge."

The whole thing seemed strange to Nikki, too, but she decided not to investigate for the time being. "The chapel," she said, "is there anything we should see?"

"You were just there."

"Yes, but maybe you saw something else we couldn't see after the cleaning team went in."

"We interviewed the guests, of course," Adami replied with a slight frown. There's smartphone video footage; I'd happily show you that." He pointed to Julio's laptop.

Nikki straightened up in her chair and smiled briefly. "Excellent, we'll look at that in a minute."

"There's not that much to see," Adami replied, "apart from the fact that it looks alarming how the bride is suddenly covered in blood and then falls to the floor dead."

Nikki pursed her lips and looked at her Italian colleague. "Which brings us back to the first point: If we want to find any culprit, we need to find out the cause of death."

"As I said, the family won't like that," Julio replied, "but we can try."

"Where is the family now?" the officer wanted to know.

"They are in Rome in their second home, although it's more of a villa. It's near the Villa Borghese. Depending on traffic, it's a ten-minute drive over the Tiber Bridge and past the Piazza del Popolo."

"We'll watch the video here first," Nikki said with a furrowed brow as she chewed the inside of her cheek, "then we'll visit the two families first thing in the morning after Ashlyn and I have rested a bit." She looked at Julio. "Maybe you can give the family a heads up that we'll pay them our respects in the morning."

Julio took a deep breath and looked at his watch. "That should work."

Adami went to the laptop and looked at the cardinal with a furrowed brow. "May I?"

The cardinal took a deep breath and pointed at the device. "Of course, show them the work of Satan in our chapel."