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.

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.