The Mona Lisa Cage (The Painted Souls, #2)

The most famous smile in the world is not a smile. It is a lock.

Florence, 1503. Leonardo da Vinci accepts a quiet private commission: a portrait of a silk merchant's wife. It should be the simplest work of his life. It becomes the only one that matters.

Something old has woken in his pigments. Something his grandfather Antonio met before him and did not survive. Something that feeds on beauty, and has chosen Leonardo as the door it will walk through into the world.

So he paints it a cage instead.

For sixteen years, across three countries, he works the same small panel and never once delivers her. The world will one day call her the greatest painting ever made. She was never meant to be admired. She was meant to hold.

The cost is everything. His painting hand. His capacity to feel beauty. In the end, everything that made him Leonardo.

A cage is only as patient as the hand that keeps it.

Five centuries later, in one quiet room of the Louvre, the hand is gone. The keepers are dead. And behind the glass, the smile has begun to shift.

Some colors were never meant to exist.

THE MONA LISA CAGE is Book One of The Painted Souls: a Renaissance supernatural thriller with the historical depth of Dan Brown, the literary horror of Mexican Gothic, and the slow dread of Susanna Clarke's Piranesi.

Read it slow. Read it at night. Trust nothing in the corners.