As Nicholas cautiously opened his eyes, he was immediately struck by the lavishness of the place. The majestic Roman design of the ceiling above him stood in stark contrast to the jumbled state in which he found himself currently thinking. Even though he had the sensation of a heavy weight pressing on his stomach, he was unable to get himself to care about the woman who lay beside him. It was simply another brief encounter in what seemed like an endless string of lonely nights.
For him, Florence had turned into a city of excess; it was a place where he buried his sorrows in his job during the day and threw caution to the wind in pursuit of pleasure in the evening. It seemed difficult to fill the gap that Isabella's disappearance had created, so he turned to superficial distractions in ord
