CHAPTER THREE
“We need to rejoin the party,” Dante said, glancing at his watch.
He felt her stiffen, his rejection like a bucket of cold water poured over her, and he felt like the lowest form of life. He wanted—no, needed—to take Liv in his arms. To love her and return the words she’d given him freely. But what good would it do him when his future had just changed so drastically?
Trying to lighten the mood, he skimmed his hand down her naked hip. “We’re here to work, remember? Simon Locke could already have the Picasso and be long gone. It would be quite embarrassing to get caught with our pants down while he makes off with millions in art. We have the rest of the night to finish what we started here.”
Liv cleared her throat and said, “You’re right. We’ve already wasted too much time when we could’ve been searching for him. But I still think we need to have a team in place to intercept him if he tries to take the painting while they’re loading it onto the truck for transport. Everyone knows that’s when the painting is at its most vulnerable.”
“The team is already in place, darling. But I don’t think we’ll need it. He’ll strike tonight.”
“Hand me my dress, please,” she said.
He could hear the hurt in her voice, but she’d iced it over, moving strictly to business. He reached around the bar and turned on the lights, taking in his fill of her before he reached down to grab her dress off the floor. She stood before him in glittering heels with the sapphire dangling between her breasts, her hair falling around her shoulders and the evidence of their passion slicked on her inner thighs.
He found a towel behind the bar and handed it to her so she could clean up, and then he passed her the dress.
“Does it look too wrinkled?” she asked, pulling it on and turning so he could zip it up for her.
“It looks like it’s been in a heap on the floor,” he said, smiling for the first time. “But maybe no one will notice. They’ll probably be too busy looking at the bite marks on your neck.”
Her hand reached up to touch the area in question, and she shot him a look that normally would’ve made him want to tease her more. Riling her up was one of his greatest joys, and it almost always ended in pleasure.
“You don’t look much better, Ace,” she retorted, eyeing him from the top of his head to his shoes. “And you certainly can’t go out there like that.” She waggled her eyebrows and dropped her gaze below his waist, and he felt the blood rush to his face as he put everything back where it belonged and zipped up his slacks.
The only thing he’d removed was his jacket, and he’d done that before she’d come into the room. Even his bow tie was still tied.
“They have a steamer in the bathroom,” she said. “I need to get some of these wrinkles out before going back out onto the floor. There are too many people here who know us. I don’t want to be the top item in the society section tomorrow.”
“I think it’s too late for that, love. Too many people saw us on the dance floor. There was no mistaking what we were planning to do. Fortunately, there were several other couples looking to do the same—I’m sure many of Carmaux’s rooms are occupied at the moment.”
“A terrifying thought,” she said cheekily. “You’d expect better from the upper crust.”
“No, I wouldn’t,” he said. “Putting all debauchery aside, you should have plenty of time to steam your dress and meet me back downstairs. It’s still early, and I believe Carmaux is set to make a grand speech soon, so everyone can applaud his generosity.”
“Well, I’d certainly hate to miss that. I do love to applaud people who have done absolutely nothing to earn their money while they lord it in front of others.”
Dante grinned. “Love, I believe you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth as well. You reek of the finest British boarding schools. The only difference is that your father chose to increase his inheritance by working.”
“Because that was the easiest way for him to avoid my mother. And wealth doesn’t make him any less dead. Death doesn’t discriminate.”
He couldn’t help but take her shoulders and pull her into a soft kiss. The hurt on her face had been too much for him to bear.
“I’m sorry, love,” he said, kissing her this time on the forehead.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said, pulling out of his embrace. “Like you said, we’ve got a job to do. The most pressing matter at the moment is getting out of this room. There aren’t any doors.”
“It makes it much easier when someone is caught cheating if they can’t escape,” he said. “Carmaux takes his cards very seriously.”
He went to the poker table and felt beneath it. He pressed a button, and the same panel of the wall she’d entered through opened up. She waited as Dante turned off the lights, and then they slipped back into the library.
“Why don’t you go out first and head straight into the washroom? I’ll wait in here for a few more minutes just to be safe.”
“Damn,” she said. “I left my gun in the poker room.”
“I’ll get it for you,” he said, turning back to the secret passageway. “Go ahead—I’ll meet you downstairs when you’re presentable.”
She nodded and opened the door a crack, peeking out before she went into the hallway, closing the door behind her. There was no time to grab her gun. The second hand of his watch was ticking away, and he used the few minutes he had to make sure all the tools he needed were easily accessible.
The Whistler sat on the shelf, exactly where he remembered it, and he stripped the canvas from the frame, rolling it gently and placing it in the transport tube hidden down his pants leg. And then he replaced the painting with a small version of Dogs Playing Poker, and put it back where the Whistler had been on the shelf.
He checked his watch one more time and went to the door of the library, waiting for the hour to strike. The watch vibrated at the exact moment that all the lights in the château went out.
“Excellent timing,” he said, opening the door of the library and stepping out into pandemonium. He took a small penlight from his pocket and turned it on.
The washroom door beside him was jerked open and Liv appeared, her dress still disheveled, though she’d managed to do something with her hair to get it out of her face.
“It’s Locke,” Liv said.
She grabbed his arm to steady herself and yanked off her heels, tossing them aside, and he wanted to kiss her again, knowing it would be the last time. But there was no help for it. Losing her was the only alternative to death or prison, and he’d accepted his fate.
“I’ll take the bottom floor and the ballroom,” he told her. “I’ll be able to muscle my way through easier than you. You take this floor and the servants’ wings, especially toward the kitchens. He’s going to know this place like the back of his hand. If you go all the way to the end of the hall, there’s another staircase that leads down to the kitchens.”
“Be careful,” she said. “I just have this feeling. . . .”
“You too.” And then he gave in to the urge and pulled her in for a quick kiss. “We’ll get him this time,” he promised her.
He let her go and headed down the stairs, trusting that she was already heading in the opposite direction. There was no time to think of her now. He still had a job to do. He pulled a pair of black-framed glasses from his pocket and slipped them on, clicking the small button at the right corner of the frame.
The infrared images appeared in the lenses, and he was able to see clearly as he maneuvered the rest of the way down the stairs and through the crowd that was rushing to get outdoors, falling over each other and not caring who they took down with them.
He pushed his way through them, noting that the security guards had set up a perimeter around the paintings, but there were weak spots. They couldn’t see any better than anyone else. All they could do was stand there and apprehend anyone who ran smack into them, which, fortunately, happened to be several people.
He slipped between two of the security guards and moved behind them to the corner of the room where they’d hung the Degas. It was a lovely nude preparing for a bath, the colors rich, the strokes both smooth and chaotic, as was the painter’s style. They’d set it in an ornate gold frame, and there was a velvet rope placed about three feet in front of it to keep people from getting too close. But it was what was behind the velvet rope that gave him a slight pause.
Red lines crisscrossed the floor and would sound an alarm if they were touched. They hadn’t been visible to the naked eye. He pulled the transport tube from his pants, and slid it across his body so the tube rested across his back, leaving his hands free. Then he took the pack of tools from the inside of his jacket, where pockets had been specially altered so the jacket fit without showing lines.
He opened the pack and pulled out two discs the size of a half-dollar. He knelt on the ground and found the source for the sensors, then stuck the discs to the wall on either side of the originating source. He clicked the button on the left corner of his frames this time, and the discs began to move in unison, replacing the source and diverting the crossing red beams so there was a clear space he could walk through. A thief was only as good as his equipment, and his equipment was the best. He’d paid a fortune to make sure his supplier only supplied him.
Dante moved the velvet rope aside and stepped in front of the painting. He expertly snipped the alarm wires behind the frame and took it from the hook. In a matter of a minute, he’d stripped the painting from the gold frame and cut the canvas from the wood it had been nailed to. He pulled the replacement picture from the tube at his back, the adhesive already in place, and attached it to the frame, then hung it back on the wall; the Degas was rolled up and put into the tube. He replaced the rope and pressed the button on his glasses again, so the discs no longer diverted the sensors. And then he took them from the wall and walked back into the crowd.
It had taken mere minutes from the time the lights had gone off until now, and he headed through the open doors into the courtyard, where he’d climb the château walls to the top so he could meet death head-on.
THERE WAS A floor-to-ceiling window at the end of the hallway, and the moon cast a soft glow through the panes, giving Liv enough light so she could see what was in front of her. She maneuvered down the hallway, keeping her senses open. The party guests were in a panic, their voices rising, and she recognized Donner’s voice yelling for everyone to file out in a calm and orderly fashion.
She had confidence in Dante, and she had confidence in her agents. She had to trust them to do their jobs. And she’d do hers. It was important to follow her instincts. To think of every possible outcome.
That was a lot easier said than done. The physical description they had of Simon Locke was more than a decade old. The problem with competing agencies was they never shared information. There wasn’t a global database of combined resources, no matter how easy movies and TV shows made it look. Everyone was territorial. And when she’d asked Dante to check MI6 files on Locke, she’d expected him to tell her no. He’d have been within his rights, as the information was classified.
He’d sent her a file, including his own personal encounter with Locke in a Belgian prison. But it was outdated information. They had no idea what Locke looked like in the present day. Finding him in this crowd was literally a shot in the dark.
Liv hadn’t bothered with a handbag for the evening, and she regretted the decision to leave it behind. Her cell phone was in Dante’s coat pocket, and he also had her gun. Her skirt made moving difficult, so she hiked it up, deciding it was already well past ruined, and tied the train in a knot so it hung just above her knees.
Urgency filled her and she started running before she reached the end of the long hallway—then stopped in her tracks, her eyes adjusting to the blinding lights as the electricity hummed back on.
Voices rose and there were screams, and then a shot rang out. She took cover beside an eighteenth-century grandfather clock on the wall opposite the stairs that led down to the kitchens.
Liv’s heart thudded in her chest as she peeked around the clock to see the man with the gun. Plaster from the ceiling had fallen around him. He was looking down over the balcony railing, not at her, keeping the gun up so everyone below could see it. He was one of the security guards, but it didn’t take her long to realize he was more mercenary than security guard. His job was to protect the painting, and if there was no painting, there’d be no paycheck for him. And it was more than obvious he was willing to use the gun if necessary.
“Everyone sit down on the ground where you are,” he shouted in French, and then he repeated it in English. “The Degas has gone missing.”
Liv raised her brows at that. She should’ve realized the Degas was more in line with Locke’s recent acquisitions. She’d studied every case file on Simon Locke spanning more than two decades, and there had definitely been a shift in the things he stole. It had been years since he’d last hit a museum, tending to go for private collectors. He didn’t always steal the most valuable thing in a collection, which told her he was stealing either for a specific client or for himself and had precise personal taste.
“No one is going in or out of here until we find that painting,” the guard said. “If you saw who took the painting, raise your hand and a security officer will come to you.”
Liv didn’t waste time. Moving silently, she took a step toward the stairs that led down to the kitchen—but something stopped her. It’d make sense for him to try to get lost in the crowd and confusion. But her gut was telling her something different. He wasn’t down there with the others, waiting it out and pretending to be a victim. Either he was long gone, or he was trying to escape in a way that no one else would attempt. She had nothing to lose.
Directly opposite of the staircase that led down to the kitchens was another staircase to her right that went to the upper floors. She took a chance and ran up them, and then up another level and another, until the staircase grew narrower and the rooms less ornate—the doors plain. This part of the château was unused and stale, caught in a time period that was a couple of centuries old. The other side of the hallway was lined with thick-paned windows that opened outward to let in the breeze.
She stopped to listen, but heard nothing but her pounding heart. And then she saw a quick flash of something through the windows—a glimpse of black caught by the moonlight. Staying in the shadows, she sidled to the far end of the windows, and found a small door, only a couple of feet high and wide. She turned the knob, then pulled harder, cursing under her breath; the door was stuck with age and swollen from weather.
Time was of the essence, so she braced her foot against the wall and yanked as hard as she could. The door flew open, almost knocking her over. She crawled through the opening and found herself on the watch wall that surrounded the entire château. Centuries ago, there would have been guards placed strategically to warn of intruders, but now it was vacant, and some of the stones were crumbling.
She started running in the direction she’d seen the dark figure go, and it wasn’t long before she found the remnants of a man’s evening dress scattered along the way—shirt, pants, bow tie. Sharp pieces of stone dug into her bare feet, and she barely slowed as the watch wall came to an end. She calculated the distance to the turret directly in front of her, fear mingled with the excitement of the chase.
Determination and something she couldn’t explain drove her. She made sure the knot in her skirt was tight so it didn’t hamper her, and then she leaped from the watch wall to the turret, her hands grasping the ledge. She swung her leg over, her skirt hiking to her hips, and then the stone crumbled away beneath her hands and she was grasping nothing but air until something hard clamped around her wrist.
She grasped onto his wrist with her free hand and used her legs to help him lift her over the edge of the turret. And then he let go of her and walked away, and she realized she’d just caught Simon Locke. Though, in reality, it had been him who caught her.
THEY’D REACHED THE end of the road, at least the only one available to them on the rooftop of the château. There was nothing beyond them but the steep cliffs and the turbulent Mediterranean. The wind whipped her hair into her face and her hands burned where they’d been scraped by the stones. Her feet were raw. But Liv pulled herself to her full height and faced him down.
He was dressed in a black bodysuit—a type she’d never seen before. The suit seemed to have some kind of rigid material inside it, almost like its own skeleton. A black mask covered his face entirely, and built into the eyeholes was was a goggle-like material. There was a long tube strapped to his back, and she knew he had the painting.
“Give me the painting,” she said in French. “You’ll never leave the grounds with it. You’re outnumbered and outmatched this time.”
He cocked his head as if he didn’t understand her, so she repeated herself in English. But still, he only stood there. She took a step forward, and he took a step back. And then they repeated the dance until he stood right at the edge of the turret.
“You can’t expect to win every time, Mr. Locke,” she said.
“Of course I can,” he said, and reached up to pull off the mask. “But winning one game has made me lose another.”
The bottom dropped out of her stomach, and pain like she’d only experienced one other time in her life reached up and grabbed her by the throat.
“I-I don’t understand,” she said, looking around frantically, expecting the real Simon Locke to come out of the shadows and tell her it was all just a joke. “Where is he? You can’t be him. I’d have known. Wouldn’t I?”
“Don’t be hard on yourself,” he told her. “You’d only have known if I’d wanted you to know. But if it’s any consolation . . . I love you too.”
She shook her head once in denial, her brain slow to process what she was actually seeing. She’d heard people talk about time standing still, but she’d never experienced it. Her body and mind weren’t functioning; she was beyond emotion. Beyond tears or demanding reasons why. There was nothing left in her but the emptiness of betrayal.
He dropped the mask, and the wind blew it off the turret, spinning it once, twice in the air before it plunged toward the rocks and sea below. His hair whipped in the breeze and his gaze never left hers as he took another step toward the edge.
She shook her head again, realizing what he was doing, and she opened her mouth to scream but nothing came out.
“It’s best for everyone that it ends this way,” he said. “You’ve been the best part of my life. And you’re the only thing I’ve ever loved more than my life as Simon Locke. But I can’t have both. So I’ll have neither.”
Her lungs burned and she stared in horror as he spread his arms out and fell backward, right over the edge.
“Dante!” she screamed.
She ran toward the edge, falling to her knees, and tears clouded her vision. She hadn’t realized the turret had been built on the very edge of the cliff, as if it had been carved from the cliff itself.
There was nothing but endless blackness, and the sound of the waves crashing against the rocks below. For the second time in her life she knew what it felt like to lose part of herself. And she vowed it would never happen again.