PROVENANCE

First thing to know: we weren’t students in the way the admissions brochure wanted you to believe. We were acquisitions. Tagged, but in invisible ink. Curated. Displayed. Even when no one dared say it aloud.

We could take apart a bad thesis in seminar or translate Ovid before breakfast. Pretty tricks. Irrelevant. What they really wanted was proof the school could hunt beauty in the wild, polish it, and keep it under glass without cracking it. Branding assets with pedigrees.

The place itself was a museum pretending to be a campus. Main hall: 1920s lacrosse sticks, sterling hairbrushes, cigarette cases engraved for alumnae who had married into titles. Near the dining hall, a Grecian gold diadem glowed in a vitrine, donated by a shipping heiress who drowned — or was drowned — at thirty-seven. Every object had a provenance placard. We didn’t.

If I had, mine would read: Archivist. Dangerous. Untouchable.

We called ourselves the Furies. Six girls, all with money, all with grades, all able to weaponize either.

Cressida: old-money New England, profile stamped like a Roman coin.

Margaux: Paris-born, restitution-case art dealer’s daughter.

Lydia: the scholarship girl, hunger honed to a knife’s edge.

Sabine: Italian nobility with a Kelly bag rattling with Chanel No. 5 ampoules and loose cocaine.

Vera: Russian oligarch’s niece, Pushkin to other people’s boyfriends.

Me: the one who kept the record straight. History isn’t written by victors. It’s written by whoever owns the archive.

Our headquarters wasn’t the dorm or the library. It was the East Wing. Officially: restricted collections. Unofficially: war room. Marble floors, reliquaries, drawers that whispered when opened. No entry without a key. No key without initiation: an A on a midterm achieved by methods too refined to call cheating. Professors were like contested artifacts. Approach carefully. Document thoroughly. Damage when necessary.

Codex Accession — Mr. R

Italian Baroque specialist. Salt-and-pepper hair. Hands like Carrara marble after the final polish. The patience of a restorer. The ethics of a smuggler.

Tuesday night. Air like a museum freezer. Grey Miu Miu mini, sheer Wolfords, black satin ankle-strap Manolos. Mitsouko behind my knees, the pulse point he would have to find.

He unlocked the glass case like foreplay with gloves, each motion slow and deliberate. Drew out a manuscript, vellum warm as skin, gold leaf catching the light as if it wanted to flake.

“Translate,” he said.

Formosissima deorum. Most beautiful of the gods.

His hand slid up my thigh, palm just above the seam, tracing it like marginalia in a forbidden book. My back pressed to the coin case. The brass lip bit into my skin. His knee wedged mine apart.

He opened my skirt like a cracked-spine book. Careful with the cover, careless with the pages. The seam tore. His fingers were cold from the lock, then hot from me. Two rough strokes in, my Wolfords laddered. He didn’t stop.

The kiss tasted of metal and dust. His mouth covered mine like a seal. His grip was the way you hold a flaking painting — destructive, deliberate.

Somewhere in the distance, the hum of security lights. Shoes on marble. His palm clamped over my mouth, claiming the sound.

The marble Athena watched. Her carved mouth set in judgement. His breath was hot in my ear. “Stay still.” I stayed still. My hips didn’t.

A shadow passed the doorway. The guard didn’t look in. Or maybe he did and chose not to intervene.

When it ended, my skirt was crooked, my thigh already bruising to the color of oxidized silver. He slid the brass key across the glass like an artifact transfer. For research.

I took it with bare fingers, oil and sweat on the metal, and tucked it into my bra. The lace bit into my skin. My heartbeat stamped it there like wax.

Initial Entry

Morning. East Wing empty. I tested the key.

The lock turned like it had been expecting me.

Low heels on marble. Fingers along the vitrines. Glass cold as a river stone. Everything humming like it remembered being stolen.

A reliquary of Saint Apollonia, 14th century. A krater that once held symposium wine. Incunabula bleeding dust when opened.

I thought about Mr. R’s grip — too hard, like holding a cracked frame. Then I thought about the others:

Cressida’s scaffolding calm. Margaux’s lockpick fingers. Lydia’s ability to read people like inscriptions. Sabine unbalancing anyone with one inhale. Vera dismantling egos in minutes.

If we ever worked in sequence, no one could stop us.

I opened a drawer: the donor ledger. Calfskin. My fingers itched to turn the page. I shut it. The Furies moved only together.

That night I carried the key back to the dorm wrapped in silk, like a relic or a blade.

Accession Test

Dorm. Cressida in vintage YSL, robe parted enough to show hip. Margaux at the window, silk clinging in the rain. Sabine at the desk, chopping lines on The Oxford Classical Dictionary.

I put the key under the desk lamp. Sabine’s gaze flicked from it to me.

Margaux crossed the room. “Show me,” she said, already under my skirt. Smoke and pomegranate on her mouth. Teeth pulling at my lip until it hurt.

Cressida rolled over. “If you’re starting without us…”

Sabine fed me a line before her mouth reached mine. Coke-metal and Chanel. Nails raking my skin, dragging my bra until the lace cut in.

Cressida knelt, hands sliding up my calves. Her mouth on my thigh, tongue claiming skin, bite at the seam until it gave.

Margaux’s nails dug over my ass. Lydia shoved me down, wrists pinned, mouth hot and greedy.

Vera came in last, coat still on, vodka breath sharp. Kissed me upside down. Thumb pressing into my waistband, circling until my breath stuttered.

Perfume, sweat, rain. Wolfords ripping. Mitsouko gone animal.

The precision was surgical. One hand always replaced by another. No collisions. Perfect tempo.

Sabine tapped the key. “Now it’s ours.”

Not just pleasure. Rehearsal.

Condition Report

Library. Quiet as a crypt. I was supposed to be reading Vasari’s Lives. Instead, I was cataloguing bruises.

Margaux’s welts high on my thigh, red fading to lapis blue. Cressida’s bite on my shoulder, the purple-brown of oxidized bronze.

They overlapped. Layers, like ghost frescoes bleeding through plaster.

A student whispered about Caravaggio. I thought of his models — thieves, whores — painted into sainthood. Names lost. Faces surviving.

That’s the problem with provenance. Archives credit the donor, never the hands that carried the object across borders, under coats, inside bodies. I wouldn’t let that happen to us.

One day, all of us in the same room. Same target. Nowhere for them to go.

Accession Execution

Lydia found it. Donor inventories with too many lines reading “Acquired during travels in the Near East, 1911–13.” Loot dressed as charity.

Mr. R was the first mark.

East Wing. Lights low but not dark. Enough illumination for shadows to move under the vitrines. The security schedule gave us twenty minutes before the next sweep.

The ledger lay open on a stolen Flemish altarpiece. His eyes narrowed.

“This page,” I said, tapping the ink, “is problematic.”

The door clicked. Cressida stepped in first, black silk catching the light like lacquer. Margaux followed, coat gone, sheer blouse clinging from the rain. Sabine’s heels marked each approach like a countdown. Lydia’s gaze flicked to sightlines, confirming we were just out of the cameras’ view. Vera locked the door but left it just shy of a full click.

Cressida loosened his tie, pulling it through her hands as if extracting provenance. Margaux unbuttoned his shirt like unwrapping a fragile textile, fingertips dragging slow. Sabine fed him a line off the spine of a catalogue, her mouth catching his before he exhaled. Lydia pinned his wrist to a vitrine, making him feel the cold glass like a theft mid-act.

I stepped close enough for my skirt hem to brush him.

“Every mark tells a story,” I said. “Every touch leaves a trace.”

From somewhere down the hall, footsteps. Faint, but moving closer. None of us stopped.

Vera kissed him hard, hand at the back of his neck like she was fixing him in a frame. Cressida dropped to her knees, slow and deliberate, until his breath broke. Margaux’s nails scored his ribs, the lines parallel like catalog marks. Sabine’s tongue was in his mouth, her other hand already inside his trousers. Lydia whispered Latin — theft, restitution, judgement — each syllable wet against his ear. Vera’s hand moved in time with Cressida’s mouth, their rhythm syncing to the guard’s tread.

I held the ledger where he could see the altarpiece entry, turning his face so he couldn’t look away. Outside the glass walls, Athena, Saint Apollonia, and a dozen other stolen saints watched in silence.

The guard passed. The shadow moved on.

His body gave way in our hands, but his eyes stayed fixed on the page.

We let him slump against the case. Cressida wiped her mouth slow, like brushing gilt from a relic.

“This,” I said, closing the ledger, “is your condition report.”

The ledger went back to its drawer. We went back to class. Within a week the gifts arrived.

Cressida: a letter of recommendation so glowing it could have lit the archives.

Margaux: an acquisition contract for a painting her father had been chasing for years.

Lydia: an envelope of cash thick enough to silence tuition.

Sabine: customs paperwork that made certain powders invisible.

Vera: a diamond ring once catalogued in the East Wing, provenance quietly erased.

Me: unfettered access to the restricted collections. No questions.

Final Accession

The night before graduation, I unlocked the East Wing. No shoes. Hair loose. The key cold enough in my hand to sting.

The gallery lights were in after-hours mode — dim pools over each vitrine, the rest in shadow. The kind of lighting that makes glass look like water.

I moved slowly, the way a conservator inspects a collection before a loan: eyes trained for hairline cracks, warping, micro-abrasions. My reflection ghosted in each case as I passed, my bare feet making almost no sound on the marble. Almost.

The building wasn’t empty. I could hear it — the faint electric buzz of the climate system, the muffled clink of a guard’s keys somewhere down the hall. Maybe closer.

I touched the glass over the krater, the reliquaries, the Aphrodite codex. Each one humming faintly under my palm, as if it remembered being handled. Then I named the girls out loud, like a roll call.

Cressida. Margaux. Lydia. Sabine. Vera.

Each name brought an image — a bite, a bruise, a nail mark. Evidence. Marks of handling that would never appear in an official report.

Somewhere in the dark, a floorboard creaked. The sound didn’t make me stop.

If we had placards, they’d read: Provenance: Contested. Condition: Altered through handling.

I sat at the curator’s desk. Opened the bottom drawer. The ledger was still there — calfskin warm from the room, as if it had body heat. I knew every page. Which ones could ruin careers. Which ones could collapse legacies. Which ones I’d let survive.

I locked it again. Slipped the key back into my bra.

I’m not just the archivist now. I’m part of the collection. Dangerous. Documented. Untouchable.

And if anyone was watching from the shadows — guard, ghost, god — they saw me smile before I turned off the lights.