violent ends
LEXI
Inside Juliet’s House, the staircases were wooden switchback steps connecting rectangular holes in the stone floors.
As the three security guys and I clomped up the stairs, I saw them standing on the second floor.
Aymeric had ascended the narrow staircase before me, alert, but watching was his job.
Looking for the attackers was his job description for eight to twelve hours all day, every day.
No one can fruitlessly search for something that long and maintain a high level of vigilance, especially since we were in the comparatively safe environment of a closed museum at eight in the morning with empty streets outside.
Aymeric had blinked at the wrong time, and he raised his small baton a second too late.
When he’d seen the other men, squat goons like boulders of light grey granite veined with pink scars, he’d turned back to me and hissed, “Run!”
But four more hit men swarmed up the staircase behind my bodyguards, and they kettled us on the wooden-railed steps surrounded by medieval stone.
Knives, daggers, stilettos.
Silent steel raked skin, pierced flesh, poured blood.
Aymeric defeated the two men who’d been waiting for us above with a few quick blows of the stick and a switchblade he’d plucked from his belt.
Whether they were dead or unconscious, neither of us stopped to check. Blood spewed from the throat of one man like a gallon of milk chugging onto the floor.
Aymeric shoved me aside as he attacked down the stairs, flying and falling with weapons glinting, and I ran up.
The third-floor windows were barred, but one set of bars was loose. A wooden parapet enclosed with safety wire ran underneath the windows to keep anyone from jumping.
I shoved the bars.
The metal rods clattered to the wooden ledge below.
As I clambered out, a yank on my wrist almost dragged me back inside, but I let my arm go limp and escaped.
I fell and leaped to my feet. I ran along the wood to the end, shoving and squeezing between the bars and being real glad I wasn’t wearing pretty sundresses or tailored suits like Clementine. Denim jeans were saving my life.
The wooden ledge was three stories up. I’d break my whole body if I jumped to the empty asphalt-paved courtyard below.
Instead, I sucked in my stomach to squeeze between the wires. With a tilt of my hips, I jumped off the side of the wooden walkway and kipped in the air to swing myself underneath it.
I was twenty-one, and against all odds, my high school had had a playground and monkey bars. Unlike most adults, it had only been three years since I’d played cutthroat monkey-bars tag instead of eating lunch.
Air rushed past my arms as I fell.
The hard shock of landing on Juliet’s stone balcony jarred my arms and legs, and I scraped and banged my elbow on the wall.
My purse was gone. That stupid white bucket purse from my wedding to Jimmy had been dangling on my wrist, and that’s what the guy had grabbed up there and I’d let go to get away.
No! Jesus, the money, Nico’s credit card, my wallet, my phone, all of it.
Dammit. Oh, dammit.
Men yelled above.
Footsteps thundered on the wooden stairs.
I stood on Juliet’s balcony.
Inside the house on the second floor, six heaps leaked blood.
One moved, a little.
Aymeric was still.
Feet and legs appeared on the staircase from the third floor, none wearing the black suit pants and trail-running sneakers that all of Nicolai’s security people seemed to sport like a uniform.
Khakis, black sweatpants, green fatigues.
All wore heavy black boots.
I turned back to the balcony and the courtyard.
One more time.
I rested my stomach on the balcony stone rail that was over a foot thick and swung my legs over, and I shoved off and fell.
Landing on the pebbled pavement was a crash, and I rolled to my feet.
Iron bars gridded the arch where I’d come into the courtyard.
The portcullis in the arch was down.
I was boxed in with them.
There were so many of them. I couldn’t lead them back to Nico and his few security guys. They’d kill Nicolai, too. I couldn’t let them kill or kidnap Nico.
Not when I could get away.
I could try to warn him, though.
I yelled, “Nicolai! Run! They’re coming!” as I bolted across the courtyard.
But no one was standing on the other side of the gate.
Where the heck was he? Where were his guys?
Terrible thoughts rammed into my mind, but I refused.
No.
No, Nicolai wasn’t already gone or dead. No.
I’d lose these goons, and then I’d find him.
The terra cotta wall on the other side of the courtyard was the Teatro Nuovo, the New Theatre, the route most tourists took to enter Juliet’s courtyard during regular visiting hours.
I sprinted and caught the theater’s door, flinging it open and barreling inside.
The men who’d attacked us were tall with long legs and probably in better shape than me. If I ran straight through to the sunny street on the other side, they would run me down on the empty early-morning streets.
But this was a theatre.
And I was a theatre kid. This place was mine.
I ran for the auditorium house, and then down the aisle between the scarlet velvet seats to the red-curtained stage, and then backstage.
The House Manager’s lighting control panel was right where it should be, stage right, in the front wall on the other side of the proscenium arch. I slammed the faders all the way down.
Darkness crashed through the seating area like a tsunami obliterating the building.
You could be your own shadow daddy when you controlled the lighting design.
Men’s shouts filled the darkness, and slams, and crashes, more yelling and shouts.
Sounded like someone fell over the seats in the dark auditorium. Oops.
They thought they’d put a dagger in me, just like how Juliet Capulet had died.
Au contraire. If they wanted a duel, I’d see their Romeo and Juliet and raise them The Phantom of the Opera.
There must be a grand chandelier around there somewhere I could throw at them.
I knew I was dallying too much at the Stage Manager’s panel, but the spiral staircase to the narrow balconies of the catwalk system was just over in an alcove behind the wide gauze of the scrim. The dim backstage lighting would guide me there, and I could climb up it in a flash.
But first, what could I throw at them?
Footsteps in the house between the rows of seats, shouting, fumbling, seats flapping, cursing.
This electrical box was just the house panel, not the control booth for the stage’s lighting system. I couldn’t drop the lighting battens on them from here, no matter how gratifying it would be to watch a steel rod holding thousands of pounds of fresnel and leko lights crash down on them.
Seconds had passed while I stood there.
I ground my teeth.
Time to go.
I turned and started for the stairs to the catwalks.
The pulley system lined the wall, the thick ropes and wheels to lower set pieces and flats in the fly space above onto the stage.
I started yanking handles as I passed.
Sets crashed to the stage floor, blasting sound and air as they smashed into the wooden boards.
More men’s shouts. Closer, now.
Some of those pulleys held lighting battens, too, if I could read the dang white labels with spidery writing in the near-dark to figure out which ones they were, but I just opened the safety handles I could reach and ran.
Footsteps pounded the stage floor with hollow thuds.
Ropes zinged through flywheels, and more set pieces fell like boulders raining destruction from above.
But the footsteps were coming closer.
I poured on the juice, powering my legs to sprint with everything I had toward the spiral metal staircases leading to the catwalks above the stage and the house. They wouldn’t be able to catch me in that black metal maze floating over the stage and house. The cats were my home.
I grabbed the cold metal banister and whirled around it, finding the steps with my toes, and leaped upward.
A hand slammed over my mouth, choking my scream.
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