“What would Simon have to trade? I have the tiles, I have the manuscript and I have his grandson. Looks like I’m the one with the leverage.”
The man turned on his heels, grinning in the halogen light. I saw the flash of steel toward Benny’s bed. The whoosh of a bullet disguised by a silencer split the air. The man froze, then crumpled to the ground. The knife fell from his hand.
Eric appeared in the doorway exactly as I’d left him—without a stitch on. He held out a gun in his extended hand. He slanted a quick glance in my direction. “Are you all right?” he whispered.
I blinked at his nakedness. The hardness of his chest, over his abs, all the way down to a muscle that dipped low on his groin. Weapon in his hand. And not looking the least bit fazed. It was a picture I intended to hold in my mind for the rest of my life.
“Never better,” I murmured so softly that not even an Adriano could hear it.
Eric stalked over to the assassin on the floor and rolled him over onto his back. The man wasn’t dead. He pressed his left fist hard against the growing dampness on his black shirt. A trickle of blood escaped with a cough.
Eric put his finger to his lips and nodded at the cell phone. He kicked at it and it fell off the man’s waist. Eric stepped on it with one bare foot, bearing down his full weight on it and twisting his heel until the phone crunched. As he stepped off it, he kicked it across the room. Bits of electronics scattered on the wooden floor.
Eric shrugged. “They don’t make cell phones like they used to.”
The assassin squinted up at Eric. “Cabordes…I should have known. When they find out you’re helping her, the Duke will have your heart cut out!”
“Sorry. Already had my heart cut out on behalf of the Adriano family.”
“Eric?” I motioned to get his attention. “Your cover’s been blown.”
He shook his head. “No. Not yet, anyway. This man’s certainly not going to tell anyone.”
Benny mumbled something in his sleep, a waking sound as if he’d incorporated any sounds he’d heard into a bad dream. I left the lantern on the floor and tiptoed closer to him. I sat on the corner of his bed and brushed my fingers over his hair the way I used to do Lilah’s. He waved away my touch as if he either wasn’t used to the gesture or had been trained to find it uncomfortable.
“Shhh, sweetie. It’s okay. You go back to sleep.”
His sleepy eyes blinked open just enough to see my fingers over his face as I traced his delicate eyebrows with a featherlight touch. “You’re bleeding,” he said softly. He pointed to my finger where I’d cut myself on the iron crossbow arrow.
“Yes, honey. That’s what happens when you play with sharp things.” I kissed his cheek. “Now you go back to sleep and don’t wake your kitten.”
He nodded, hugged a tolerant kitten momentarily harder, then relaxed back into sleep. For that, I was grateful.
The assassin coughed again. He made a funny sound like a cross between a gurgle and a laugh. “You can’t get away from the Adrianos, bitch. As long as you’re alive, they will hunt you. Sooner or later, they will find you.”
He was right. I glanced up at Eric. “There’s another tracker on us. It’s not in the car. It’s on one of us.”
The assassin’s right hand moved. He grasped the gun in his holster and swung the weapon toward Benny. Without thinking, I threw myself over the child.
The bullet sliced through the air. I waited a split second that seemed forever. Lilah would never know, never know me, never know what I’d done, either the good or the bad.
No. Not a bullet. I hadn’t been hit. Tentatively I looked up.
Eric stood over the man, his arm still extended, still in play. The handle of the kitchen knife wobbled in the man’s chest next to his heart.
I expelled a ragged breath and pulled myself off Benny, who merely flung an annoyed hand at me for disturbing his sleep. I sat up, stiff with tension.
The assassin steadied his gaze on me. It took all his effort to focus on my face. Words tumbled out of his mouth. Raw, venomous. Stabbing to my core. Then the light went out in his eyes, long after his words hung in the air.
“The Duke…has…your daughter.”
Chapter 14
Eric, completely naked, strolled around me and picked up a blanket off the pallet I’d made earlier for Benny. He covered the body on the floor, careful to hide anything that might frighten the child when he woke.
Me? I sat on the corner of Benny’s bed and stared at the floor. Eric was talking, something about going outside to take care of the other two assassins who’d sure be right behind this one.
“Been there, done that,” I whispered. Not even an armed and naked Eric could raise my spirits.
Eric raised an eyebrow, then nodded approvingly. “My research had indicated you might be able to take care of yourself without my help.” He thumbed his hand at the lump under the blanket. “Hope you still don’t have trouble accepting help from others, me included.”
He meant it as comic relief, but I simply shook my head. “I don’t mind.” I didn’t look at him. I felt myself sinking into an abyss. That sense of doom. And it wasn’t from the high vibrations of the tiles under the bed.
“Come,” Eric said. “Caleb will know where his men are. We can’t stay here. We need to get moving. Now.” He stalked back into the bathroom and dressed.
When he returned, I hadn’t bothered to get Benny dressed or make any preparations of my own. I sat in the same position as when he’d left.
“Aubrey.” I vaguely heard him but didn’t respond. “Aubrey,” he said urgently. “We have to get out of here.”
I shook my head. It was no use. I had lost.
“My cover’s still safe. When we find that second tracker, you’ll be free to go to France to your friend Catrina. Take the tiles and the manuscript. Myrddin and the others will contact her soon enough. I’ll spend the day on the coast with Benny and I’ll take him back when I know for certain that his father is at the palazzo and the boy will be safe from his uncle. Benny will—” He thought I wasn’t listening. “Aubrey? Aubrey, what’s wrong?”
I didn’t move. Nothing but my eyes. “That man.” I made an abrupt gesture at the lumpy blanket on the floor. “He said Simon has my daughter.”
“So?” Eric shrugged. “You don’t have a daughter.”
“Yeah…I do.”
“What?” Eric froze. “No. You don’t.”
“Eric…Eric, it’s true.”
“That’s not what Myrddin told me. He had Max’s records on you. I’ve seen them myself. There was nothing in there about a daughter. Nothing, I’m telling you!” He clenched his jaws as if he’d been lied to and didn’t care for it.
“Myrddin didn’t know. Neither did Max.”
“Myrddin told me that you and Matthew Burns, uh…” He stumbled for the right words. “That Burns impregnated you. But you miscarried before you left Britain. You lost your baby.”
“No. Not then. I didn’t lose my baby until eleven years later when I came back to France.”
Realization shone in his eyes. He nodded. “The setup. And you couldn’t go back. How…how old is she now?”
“She’s in college.”
My eyes burned. I’d never talked about Lilah, not since I’d left the States, not since I’d left her behind. I’d never talked about her. Not to anyone. Not to Catrina. Not to Therese. Not to any of the female friends who’d disappeared. Not to my colleagues in the underworld of art. Not to a lover. Not to anyone. Not even to the private investigator who sent me photographs of her every month and a short report on her activities. I’d taken great care to contact the P.I. through a third party so there’d be no chance of interception.
I’d always wanted to talk about her. I wanted to tell someone how special she was and how much I loved her. I wanted to be like any other proud mother of a beautiful, smart, savvy, sassy, sweet, wonderful daughter who’d grown into the kind of woman I’d always hoped she’d be. I’d wanted
to tell the world about the flesh-and-blood legacy of hope and love I’d created with my mysterious Matthew. But I’d had to stay silent all these years. I’d never even spoken her name aloud.
“Lilah.” Tears ran down my cheeks. I didn’t wipe them away. “Lilah,” I said louder, but it came out as a sob. The syllables stuck in my throat and fell off my lips like a prayer to an ancient goddess. “Lilah.”
Eric opened his mouth to say something, but nothing came out. For all the weapons in his arsenal, he didn’t seem to have anything effective against tears. Finally he asked, “How did you keep her a secret for all these years?”
“When I was pregnant, Matthew smuggled me into the Highlands. He said he had to get me out of the country and we had to hide the baby or they’d kill us. He never said who ‘they’ were. But it didn’t matter to me. I was young and I believed him. Matthew, he was young, too, but he was a good man. Barely older than Lilah is now.”
Eric nodded. “He was working for Max, but he was working for others like you, too. That’s what Myrddin told me. Matthew knew who you were before he ever met you. They sent him to kill you, but he saved you. It wasn’t just because he fell in love with you. He was probably in love with you before he ever laid eyes on you. Maybe that’s why he volunteered to work so closely with the Adrianos. Others like you were trying to reconnect and build a force against Max. Some of them had sons who infiltrated Max’s organization.”
“You?” I asked.
“No. Not me. But Myrddin’s trying now to rally women like you. Warriors at heart. It’s been tried many times over the past fifteen hundred years.”
“And Matthew tried, too.” I backhanded my tears and then sniffed them away.
“Yes. Myrddin once told me that Matthew Burns knew Max was onto him. That’s why he went back. To buy you time. So you could safely get out of Europe. He thought he’d be able to join you. At least, it appears that he did.”
I sighed. “I was young then. Just a hopeless romantic. I’d thought he’d come to the States after me. He never showed up at our rendezvous point. He never contacted me. Just vanished from the face of the earth. I waited for a few months until I ran out of money.” I twisted my hands in my lap. “I found a relative in the States, though. Not a blood relative. She was married one time to my mother’s cousin. She took me in and I started a new life under the name of Lauren Hartford, a name I’d found on a tombstone in a little town in North Carolina. My mother’s cousin knew some people…shady people…who were able to forge some papers under my new name. I was eighteen and about six months pregnant.”
“And afraid,” Eric added.
“My daughter was born, and I kept looking for Matthew, but I never heard from him. We were together for such a short period of time. I’m not sure how much of it was a lie or a cover story. I’m not sure I even knew the real Matthew, but I always imagined the kind of husband he would have made for me. And what a great father he would have been. He used to tell me about how he’d told his baby sister, Nonny, bedtime stories when he’d been a teen. Stories about warrior women. That’s what he used to tell her. I didn’t know he was talking about my ancestors…or his. I just thought they were stories.”
“They’re not stories. They’re real.”
“As real as Jeanne…Joan of Arc. I read the rest of Isabelle’s manuscript while you were sleeping.”
“You mean Joan of Arc’s manuscript.”
“No. It wasn’t written by Jeanne. The incunable was written by her sister. It’s an indictment against the Adrianos, about how they manipulated the pope, countries, kingdoms. Myrddin was right—my daughter is from the double bloodline, and my half of that bloodline dates back to Joan of Arc’s mother and before.”
Eric sighed. “That makes her all that much more valuable to Simon.”
“But, Eric, I don’t understand how they would know about Lilah. I was so careful. Her birth certificate has my guardian’s name on it as her mother. There is nothing to do with Lilah that has my name on it. There’s nothing that has my claim on her. I raised her as my daughter, yes, but there’s nothing in writing anywhere that says I have a daughter.”
Eric sat down on the bed beside me. He took my hand and squeezed it. Words between us weren’t important. The gesture let me know he cared. He lost himself deep in thought, then jerked his head up. “Therese!” He nodded to himself and then to me. “That’s how Simon found out who you were before. About your identity between the time you were Aubrey de Lune and the time you became Dr. Moon. The patriarch—Max—he was the one who set you up. He kept you on a leash all these years but never told Simon.” He lowered his voice in an aside. “Adriano men don’t always trust their sons. More than once, a son has turned against his father or brother if it meant taking control of the family dynasty.”
I folded my hand over Eric’s. I let him soothe the skin on the back of my hand with his thumb. I let myself take comfort in his touch.
“Max never told Simon who you really were. Simon found out only a few months ago, right before you went to San Francisco for the manuscript.”
“Therese?” I remembered Max’s secretary. I’d met her a couple of times in Paris and once in Athens when she’d made personal deliveries to me, usually instructions on a job Simon wanted me to do. Always something that was too problematic to be delivered electronically, even with Pretty Good Privacy—or PGP—protocols to safeguard the information. In spite of advances in technology, some things still didn’t lend themselves well to encryption.
Therese had been young and pretty, in her mid-twenties. She was more of a courier, really, than a secretary, and I had no doubt that she could use her looks to slip through the tightest of security. Therese and I had become friendly, if not friends, and had shared lunch on several occasions. After Max was hospitalized—Therese had told me he’d actually died and Eric had confirmed it—Therese had been moved to a different position within the organization. I hadn’t seen her since.
“A few months ago, Therese asked Simon what to do with Max’s files on Aubrey de Lune as well as some other women. He’d left some files with Therese instead of in his office. Therese didn’t know Max hadn’t intended for the files to go to Simon. Max had been shot. He’d retired from the family business, so it made sense that all his personal files would go to Simon. Myrddin saw those files years ago and recreated some of them from memory. He tried to keep those files out of Simon’s hands, but he failed.”
“That’s how Myrddin knew who I really was?”
“Yes. That’s how Myrddin knew all about you. And how I knew all about you. And eventually how Simon knew all about you. But, Aubrey, there was nothing in those files about a child born to you. Nothing at all to indicate you and Matthew ever had a daughter. So if you took great care in hiding her as you say you did, I don’t know how Simon would have found her. He didn’t find her through those files. I know that. I’ve seen copies of them myself.” He slipped an arm around my shoulder. “They can’t possibly have your daughter.”
“I can’t take that chance.”
“It’s probably a bluff.”
“Maybe. But I still can’t take that chance. We have to go back.”
“What about the tiles? The manuscript? You’re just going to march back to the palazzo and hand those over?”
“No.” I shook my head. “Never. But I’ll hand myself over if I can set my daughter free.”
“Aubrey! Think about it!” He grabbed my shoulders and bent into my face. “You don’t want to go back there.”
“No, I don’t want to go back. But I don’t have a choice.”
“You always have a choice, Aubrey. Always. Life is always about the choices you make.” He let go of my shoulders. He sounded as if he was channeling Myrddin. “Sometimes they’re good, sometimes they’re bad. But you do have choices.”
“Eric, if Simon has my daughter and I don’t do something about it, then I could not live with that choice. I want nothing more than to get as far away from life with the A
drianos as I can get, but my top priority is and always will be my daughter’s safety.”
He clamped his mouth shut and thought for a second. Then he nodded. “I know. I do, Aubrey. I know. If I were in your position, I’d do the same thing. I…I never had the choice. The choice was made for me. But, Aubrey, if Simon gets that manuscript and those tiles, do you realize how many people might die?”
I wanted to say I didn’t care, that I cared only about Lilah. But I couldn’t. Not honestly.
“You know,” I said, “Joan of Arc had a secret weapon. And I don’t mean the tile ring she wore. She had a sister. A twin. An identical twin.”
“You told me about the sister.” He shrugged. “I don’t remember reading about her.”
“You wouldn’t have. That’s because when she was captured, part of her punishment was that no one would ever speak her name or write it. Years after Jeanne was burned at the stake and Isabelle escaped, Isabelle lived in seclusion, courtesy of some priests who hid her from the Adrianos. Her punishment from the Church was that ‘her name be obliterated from the annals of man.’ The pope that the Adrianos installed decreed that no one would ever utter her name. Not a scribe, not a husband, not a child. The only one who could was her. So she learned to write. And she, not Joan of Arc, is the one who wrote this manuscript.”
“An identical twin?” Eric raised an eyebrow. “Useful, I suppose.”
“Very. She’s the one who, when Jeanne was wounded on the battlefield, stood in Jeanne’s place, inspiring the troops so that they thought Jeanne was invincible. She was taken, too, tortured like Jeanne, but she escaped when she jumped from a three-story window. Jeanne wasn’t so lucky. The inquisitors took their rings, the ones with bits of the tiles in them. Isabelle had given her ring to Jeanne to wear, so both rings were confiscated.” I motioned to the mosaic under the bed, then flipped my hand in a grand gesture at the tiny tiles on the chest by Benny’s bed. “The eyes of the child.”
Lorna Tedder Page 18
