Lorna Tedder Read online

  Lorna Tedder

  DARK

  REVELATIONS

  Published by Silhouette Books

  America’s Publisher of Contemporary Romance

  THE MADONNA KEY series was co-created by

  Yvonne Jocks, Vicki Hinze and Lorna Tedder.

  To all who have attended my famous Sunday Night Gatherings: I am forever grateful to have had you in my life and in my home. Without you, I might never have learned firsthand about sacred geometry, radiological electromagnetic energy fields, the Nolalaln High Order, geological healing frequencies, geopathic stress, dowsing or ley lines. There is so much around us that is unseen and so much yet to see!

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Coming Next Month

  Prologue

  Once, in the early fifteenth century, there lived a maid of Orleans who saved her king and led his people to victory on the battlefield but offended the priests and died at the stake. From the blood of her mother rose another like her, whose name was obliterated from all lips but who secretly wrote of their mission and hid away a dangerous legacy, in hopes that one of her descendants would one day save the world….

  Chapter 1

  Late summer

  San Francisco, California

  Hanging upside down is for bats and Spider-Man. Not for an Oxford-educated literature professor like me. Then again, I was no longer a professor. I was nothing but a thief. One in a lot of trouble.

  It wasn’t the first time I had been in that position. Wouldn’t be the last, either. But then, life doesn’t always turn out according to plans. For me, it never has, but I make them anyway.

  Tonight’s assignment was to be my last job for the Adriano family, a decision that normally only an Adriano can make. They don’t exactly offer a hefty retirement plan, though it’s rumored they always pay for the funeral—whether or not there’s enough left of the employee for a coffin. I’d heard everyone from high-tech security specialists down to kitchen servants murmur the same epitaph: Once an employee, always an employee.

  I intended to break that rule. Soon.

  I flexed my bare feet hard, twisting them around the rope and held my breath. Only the crooks above my heels—where Achilles took his poison—held fast to the line strung between the rooftops. My tendons tensed and burned. Twenty-three stories of gravity called to me, but I refused to look down. The smell of garbage and exhaust rose from the street below, stinging my eyes and nostrils. The wind between the hotel buildings swatted at me, whining in my ears so loudly that I could barely hear the sound of the angry traffic below.

  I didn’t worry that anyone would notice me hanging by a thread in the night sky, stripped down to a cat burglar’s black leotard, belt and bare feet. Too many things had gone wrong already on this job—enough that I had to wonder if I’d been set up. The Adrianos simply did not make mistakes when they gave instructions. If anything did go wrong, they were always careful not to be responsible. That’s what employees were for.

  With a deep but steady breath, I rotated one ankle, looping the rope around my foot. It wouldn’t keep me from plunging to my death, but it was a step in the right direction.

  The muscles in my calves ached and burned. The human body, no matter how well maintained, simply isn’t meant to hold this form for twenty minutes. Especially when one knee is weaker than the other from being bashed to hell and back.

  Still, a setup didn’t make sense. Why would the Adrianos want me to fail? I was their best acquisitions consultant—a lovely euphemism for a thief—and tonight’s prize was considered a very important artifact, even though I wasn’t deemed important enough to know what was in the package I was to confiscate.

  Yes, okay, so my last mission had been botched, thanks to an Interpol agent named Analise Reisner. But as far as the Adrianos knew, it wasn’t my fault I hadn’t retrieved the Madonna statue and instead had nearly lost my life when I’d followed Analise in search of the statue and had wound up helping her get away from some truly scary Adriano henchmen. The Duke himself had agreed I wasn’t to blame and had paid me a handsome fee for my efforts despite his severe disappointment. None of the henchmen had lived to tell tales.

  Why then had he had his underling—a soft-spoken henchman who’d identified himself by phone as Eric Cabordes—give me follow-up instructions for this job? My training days were long over. Details on the job usually came from the Duke himself or, on rare occasion, from his youngest son, Joshua.

  Even after all my loyal years of service—like I had a choice!—I sensed I was on shaky ground. I liked to think that the Duke treated me differently from other employees, that he had developed a fondness for me. I was hoping to parlay that fondness into some special treatment I’d heard didn’t exist—release from his employ. Truth was, maybe his soft spot for me was in my imagination. Maybe I just wanted somebody to appreciate me for me, somebody who didn’t demand I earn his love. So far, I’d lost the only two people who fit that description.

  With a deep breath, I tightened and relaxed my calf muscles. My good leg was starting to cramp up. Not good.

  I couldn’t afford to make a mistake and return to Italy empty-handed a second time. Not and face the wrath of the Adrianos! Sure, to most of the world they were dashing philanthropists with a direct link to the Vatican, the White House and every remaining royal family in Europe. To those who knew better, either firsthand or from studying history, failing them meant misery, not hazard pay for injuring your leg.

  I gritted my teeth against the pain in my knee, against the doubts that plagued me. It’s times like these—when a heist goes badly—that I think of the little girl I left behind, of the man who was her father and of what might have been.

  But my memories were a danger to fine concentration. For this moment, it was all about instinct. About survival. About how to hang on to a rope no wider than my little finger and propel myself upside down until I reached the hotel’s penthouse window. Fortunately it wasn’t the hardest job I had ever had.

  I sucked in a deep breath and grabbed for the rope with both hands. I pulled myself up again, fighting the wind for balance, and held the rope gingerly under my crossed knees. Not the best or fastest way to move from one building to another, but I hadn’t had much choice.

  The information on the security of the hotel next door—the one with the higher vantage point that would allow me to propel down to the neighboring hotel’s penthouse—had been faulty. Error number one, and it had cost me two hours to get past the metal detectors and security guards with the barest of my gear. Knowing the stealthiest ways in and the quickest ways out of a job site was vital, and I was no longer sure if I could trust anything Eric Cabordes had told me.

  And yet I dared not balk at this job now. That would get me killed. Or—my worst nightmare—they might hurt my daughter to punish me. If they found out about her. And I wasn’t so sure they didn’t already know.

  Stuck in midair, I inched toward the window, stopping to rest after a few feet. My calf muscles twitched from the earlier strain.

  My knees trembled. I was exhausted but running on sheer adrenaline. My bare palms had started to sweat.

  The rope jerked and I dropped several feet in a split second. One of the strands had caught on a metal edge along the railing above sha
rp enough to chew halfway through the rope as my weight pulled on it.

  I glanced at the penthouse window, twelve feet and a good one-story drop below me. I wasn’t going to make it! But I had to. The Adrianos had a long history of getting what they wanted, particularly when I was the one getting it for them.

  I shook my head and held on tight. I thought of my lover’s green eyes, which I would never see again, the same eyes my little girl had inherited. I never should have accepted this job. Never. I should have retired last week, changed my name yet again and spent the rest of my life living my dream—lecturing in some remote university and living the safe, boring, legitimate life of an academic. But there was always the lure of one more job, especially one that paid a half million dollars plus expenses. The Adrianos thought I did it for the money, but I had other reasons. And, too, there was the refusal to admit that my body had aged a year in the last twelve months and that I desperately needed time off to let my knee heal properly.

  I breathed in the aloneness of nothing but night air around me. If I fell or if I failed, I didn’t want anyone watching. But that’s always been my preference. Succeed discreetly, fail anonymously. I’d simply be a shattered corpse found on the street below and later identified through my fingerprints. The local cops would pity me that I had no obvious family or friends to miss me. Later, the Interpol agent who’d been on my ass for the past few months would show up to claim my body, and if anyone mourned me, she was as close as it would come. Catrina Dauvergne and my other acquaintances in Europe would never even know what had happened to me.

  I felt the rope jerk in my grasp and flung my head back to see what had happened at the secure end. I watched in horror as the rope frayed toward nothingness.

  Both feet hugging the rope, I pushed off, propelling myself forward as hard and as fast as I could toward the penthouse window. The rope swirled into a spray of fiber and snapped, and I fell hard against the wall below the penthouse window, banging my shoulder against the dirty brick. Still I held on, and the rope was caught securely above me.

  I cursed under my breath, then remembered I had a three-hour window to acquire the package and I was two hours behind schedule. I didn’t have the luxury of licking my wounds. Best if I didn’t waste time.

  I hauled myself up the rope to the window. My hands stung with blisters, some of them bloody. I ignored the pain and focused on the window.

  Fortunately at this height the windows didn’t have bars or external security of any type. Unfortunately they couldn’t be raised enough even for a five-foot-two-inch woman like me to squeeze through. If I’d had my tools with me, I would have been following my plan and inside already. But then, so much of life is about improvising and simply doing the best you can with what you have. Especially if what you have is faulty intel.

  I’d chosen this particular window based on the blueprints that had been faxed to me. Why then didn’t the blueprints match the building I clung to? Error number two. If I ever met this Eric Cabordes, I was going to give him a piece of my mind…or the back of my hand across his face. No, maybe I’d simply report his lack of thoroughness to the Duke and let him explain how dangerous little mistakes can be in the middle of a job.

  Given what I knew of the blueprints and what I now knew personally of the building, access through the window was probably a bad idea. I’d expected to make a quiet entrance into an unused bedroom, courtesy of my glass-cutting tools, but the unforeseen metal detector had rendered that plan useless. I could crash through, counting on the element of surprise to aid me, but by the time I emerged from a guest suite, the crash would have been heard and every alarm in the building would have been activated. I would be trapped.

  Do I really have a choice? Get caught, get killed or let the Adrianos make me wish I were dead.

  Wind whistling in my ears, I grasped the rope and shoved backward with my shoeless feet, then swung against the window, my shoulder meeting it hard. I braced for the splintering of glass, for the burst through the window into whatever waited on the other side, for the surge of adrenaline I felt every time I broke and entered a building. Instead the window merely crunched under the force of my body. Then slowly a few shards of glass fell inside.

  I smiled to myself. American architecture is stronger than that of Europe’s centuries-old castles and inns, ones I normally smashed right through to get to whatever artifact needed extracting. I’d have to remember that next time—if there was a next time.

  Still grasping the rope with my knees and one hand, I used my fingertips to tap out an area large enough for me to step through. I didn’t worry about my fingerprints on the glass.

  Why should I? They know who I am—my current identity at least—and I’ve never been caught. Yet.

  Then again, I’d never received my instructions from anyone except a blood relative of the Adriano family.

  The suite was a showplace indeed. Plush velvet curtains, hardwood floors, chandeliers burning brightly. According to Eric’s research, the safe had been concealed behind a tapestry in the main room, somewhere beyond the closed door of the suite I’d slipped into. All I had to do was open the safe, grab the package and take the fire escape downstairs to where my taxi waited on a side street.

  I paused, bare feet acknowledging the coolness of the floor as I listened for sounds of life. The penthouse was supposed to be unoccupied tonight, but given my luck in the past few hours, I expected to find a surprise party waiting for me, complete with balloons and whistles. I crept forward, unlatching the door and opening it only enough to peer through. The main room appeared to be as empty as it was opulent, with a large tapestry demanding my attention.

  Opening the door a little more, I eased through, my ears trained for sounds of disaster. The only noises were the wind from the broken window behind me and the desperate sounds of a man grunting and a woman faking an orgasm in the master suite. Yes, someone was home tonight. Error number three.

  I cringed. The occupants were too busy to notice an intruder, but those weren’t sounds I wanted to hear right now, whether or not they were real. I hadn’t had a romantic liaison in over two months. That was strictly my choice, of course. I still had a couple of lovers in France who would have welcomed me with open arms, but I’d become disenchanted with them. It was just physical, for them and for me. Try as I might, my heart wasn’t in it.

  My reflection, lean and petite, stared back up at me from the spotlessly shined oak floor. I still had what it took, whether it was to get a man into bed or to acquire his most precious possessions. Tonight would certainly be the latter, particularly since the man of the house was already otherwise engaged and I couldn’t stop thinking about the only man I’d ever loved.

  I scanned the room, noting the elevator across from the fireplace and the huge spray of lilies on a marble table, all fit for a palace. The fire escape was behind the window on the far side of the room. Good. So far, so good, even with occupants.

  Padding across the room to the tapestry, I admired it from top to bottom. Sixteenth-century. Flemish. At least ten feet across and hanging from a jointed rod that could be swung away from the wall. The garden scene had faded over the years, and the lovers who had modeled for the tapestry were long since dead, their immortality left to the patterns of thread and dye as surely as famous lovers in literature lived forever on the page.

  Against my better judgment, I reached for the tapestry and brushed my fingertips over the pattern of flowers and lovers on holiday. It’s artifacts like these that call to me, that seduce me like a siren luring sailors to the rocks. There’s something about old treasures that have outlasted generations of hearts that loved them and hands that fought for them. Something about their luck to withstand the ravages of elements and time where their human contemporaries could not. Something about the way they link modern society with all of its technological marvels to simpler medieval times and concerns as surely as a time-travel machine, if one existed.

  It’s treasures like these that I steal fo
r hire. But an artifact even more precious than this one stole me away from my only daughter—a relic from the hand of Joan of Arc herself, and a promise that my lover was still out there somewhere, waiting for me to find him and love him again. My little girl had grown up without me. Of all the things in my life that I’ve done wrong for whatever good reason, giving up my daughter was my greatest regret. Even if I’d done it to save her life.

  The moans from the master suite continued as I swung the tapestry away from the wall to reveal the walk-in safe, a fancy computerized one that was supposedly impenetrable. The tapestry tempted me, but I was familiar enough with the era to know that it was a legitimate sale and so not of interest to me. What was in the vault behind it was a piece of artwork that had been stolen from the Adrianos in the seventeenth century and moved throughout Europe and Asia to keep it hidden from its rightful owners. It had found its way back into old Max Adriano’s hands when he’d been a very young man, only to be lost in Nazi raids. Whatever it was, Max’s son—the Duke—considered it one of their most valuable acquisitions.

  What is it? I wondered. The source of their power? Their pedigree?

  I stifled a chuckle. Duke Simon Adriano, the distinguished sixty something man who’d hired me for no less than thirty-five jobs, would have admonished me for my sense of humor. His youngest son, Joshua, would probably have laughed at my insolence. But the remaining son, Caleb, would have wanted me publicly stripped and flogged and gladly would have done the job himself.

  Caleb. I shuddered. One more reason not to get caught or screw up my mission. Simon kept his son in check. “And when it comes to Caleb and his father,” I whispered, smoothing the threads of the tapestry to make room for my safecracking work, “I definitely want the elder Adriano protecting me.”