Light Me Up

by McKenna, Shannon

  Caro lifted it off the wall, holding it high. More laughter and bursts of applause coming from the Sala helped her as she rushed the guy from behind, slamming the painting down.

  Crack. The corner of the frame hit back of the man’s head. He teetered, and slumped to the floor.

  The picture crashed to the ground, but the noise was masked by a fresh roar of applause.

  Caro scrambled across the corridor to grab the Glock handgun sliding across the floor before it hit the wall. She sidled toward the other door, using the statues as cover.

  The second man who’d taken the far door was stocky and bearded. Clearly, he hadn’t heard the commotion over the noise from the Sala. The light reflected off the cross lit up his squinted eyes and frowning face as he raised his gun in both hands…and took aim.

  She did too. At the biggest, bulkiest part of his body.

  She squeezed the trigger. Both guns went off at once. The lights in the Sala flash-popped and went out.

  Then the screaming began.

  When Caro’s eyes adjusted to the darkness, the man she shot was staring at her. He put his hand to his collarbone. Dark blood gushed and welled between his fingers.

  He raised his gun again, as if aiming it at her, but the barrel kept on slowly going up and up until he fell backwards to the ground.

  Caro dashed away, flattening herself against the wall between two statues as the panicked conference guests stampeded out. She spotted the old lady in pink chiffon who’d shushed them, galloping out at top speed and shoving a frail old man with a cane out of her way. The old man fell down onto his knees, then his face. The big heavy guy with the stifling cologne and the Rolex sprinted out, tripped over the old guy and hit the floor screaming. Another man crawled toward them on all fours, trying to help them both.

  Then it was too many of them to see. A surging, yelling mass of frightened people in the dark who trampled the fallen gunman as they went.

  Chapter 13

  Noah canceled out the protection on the shield lenses as he shoved his way through the room, but didn’t see the distinctive, flower-like pattern of Caro’s sig anywhere.

  Some scholar was winding up her multimedia presentation. The room erupted in wild applause.

  He’d known this thing would go sideways. Known it in his balls, but he’d ignored it. And now look at him. Caro lost, and him with no gun, dressed up in a goddamn tux and running around the Renaissance funhouse from hell. What the fuck had possessed him?

  He had his own personal curse. It blew whatever Orazio’s cross was cursed with right out of the water. Evil, danger, and death followed him everywhere.

  And Caro would be next.

  Something terrible was about to happen. He felt it in the air. He had to find Caro. Get these people away from that fucking fake cross. It had to be the cross.

  The scholar was smiling broadly as she acknowledged the applause. Morelli was next to the dais now, whispering urgently into Lella’s ear but Lella just stared back at the younger man, a blank, clouded expression on his disfigured face. Mouth still open.

  Obviously frustrated, Morelli stepped up onto the dais and shouldered the woman at the lectern aside. She looked outraged as Morelli leaned down into the microphone.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, signore e signori.” His voice was hard-edged. “I regret to inform you that we have a security problem. We must now ask you all to leave the room immediately, in a calm and orderly fashion.” He repeated the same phrase in Italian and then switched back to English. “If those closest to the door could exit now, to make way for the rest of us? Please.”

  Stefano’s sig was blazing around him. A hot orange glow, well defined. Typical of an aggressive, organized person. Marked with alarm and stress, but not enough to compromise function.

  Then Noah looked at Lella…and suddenly stopped breathing.

  The glow of colors around the man’s body revealed a huge, ragged dark hole. As if black mold had eaten away at it. Someone had suppressed that guy’s brain and was remote-piloting him. There was a dark red hot spot on the side of his skull. The crawling toxic blackness seemed to ooze out of that.

  Oh shit. Lella had an implant in his head. It was fucking with him. Hard.

  Lella followed Morelli up onto the dais, lurching and stumbling. He tripped and almost fell, like a man carrying an unaccustomed weight.

  Because he was. Literally. The man was bigger than he’d been this afternoon. He’d been stocky to begin with, but right now, he looked as bulky as a linebacker.

  The rotting dark hole in Lella’ sig grew larger by the second. Something was happening inside the man’s brain right now, like an aneurysm, or a stroke.

  And what the fuck was that red spot on his skull? It glowed like a hot coal. Flaring brighter…

  As did Noah’s horrified realization.

  Fuck. Orazio’s cross was not the bomb.

  Lella was.

  Chapter 14

  “No need for alarm!” Stefano’s voice strengthened as the crowd’s agitated murmuring swelled.

  A burst of gunfire cut off his words, and the room erupted.

  Pandemonium.

  Shit. Some crazy fuckheads he couldn’t see were shooting into the densely packed crowd.

  Screams. Falling bodies. The crowd surged toward the exits. Noah fought his way toward the front, channeling his panic into a brief burst of electromagnetic power, enough to blow the lights out.

  The screaming redoubled.

  There was still a sickly green glow from the emergency lights, but it was dim enough now to keep him from being shot for a minute or two. The dimness also made the sigs glow brighter, and he needed every advantage he could get.

  Lella swayed on the dais, his face shiny. Everyone else who’d been up there had bolted except for Stefano, still yelling orders no one could hear over the noise from the frantic guests bottlenecked at the two exits.

  Stefano yelled angrily in Lella’s direction but the man just stared into space, positioning himself exactly where his explosive-packed vest would do maximum damage and kill nearly everyone there when it blew.

  Lella’s mouth hung open, eyes unfocused. He pushed open his suit jacket, slowly lifting up his hand in a jerky, robotic gesture. He made a clumsy stabbing gesture with his finger toward a cord dangling from his shirt. He missed it. Fumbled. Tried again. Kept on missing it. He stretched out his hand after each attempt, away from his body, as if trying to remember how it worked.

  The cord had to be the detonator. One pull and they and the whole building would be blasted to kingdom come.

  One pull.

  One chance.

  Noah still had Vilardi’s knife. He threw it. It flashed through the air…thunk.

  Lella’s hand twitched convulsively, pinned to the black panel behind him. Blood welled around the half-buried blade.

  Lella gasped hard, like a man waking from dreadful nightmare. He twisted to stare at the knife piercing his pinned hand, blood dripping onto his head from above.

  He started to scream. Colors surged violently in his sig. The black hole flickered and wavered, growing smaller as the man struggled to retake control of his own will.

  Then his free hand once more began its jerky, stabbing movements toward his detonator cord. The black hole was growing again.

  Lella fought hard, but he was going to lose. All of them would lose.

  Noah leaped onto the dais and dove for him.

  Chapter 15

  “Pull the cord!” Konig screamed into the headset transmitter. “Pull it!”

  Nothing. Lella wasn’t responding. Nothing and no one was responding. Even the livestream was useless now. Just chaotic darkness, moving shadows, screaming.

  The one clear memory he had out of the button cam on Lella’s jacket, while he could still see out of it, was a glimpse of that man’s face coming t
oward him. Morelli’s mystery guest. But now his eyes were glowing a strange, bright yellowish orange that looked almost spectral in the dimness.

  This colossal disaster was that son of a bitch’s fault. And he would pay. Vilardi was supposed to have taken care of him but he hadn’t been up to the task, the useless piece of shit.

  Noah Gallagher, that was the man’s name. With his wife, Caroline Bishop. Russo had sent him files on the two of them. Ostensibly, the man was not a cop or a spy or a government agent. He was just a rich biotech entrepreneur with a thriving company, famous for its cutting edge innovation. No ties to Konig’s business at all. At least none that he could see.

  Baffling, but it changed nothing. The man had to die screaming. Konig would be unable to sleep until he did. Things needed to be put back into balance.

  His balance.

  At least the video feeds in the Sala were no longer focused on Lella’s hideous face. Konig had been sick of looking at it. But things were completely out of control. Konig had made sure that Lella’s command frequency could be activated from much farther than he had been, in his bedroom in the west wing. So what the fuck had gone wrong?

  Lella had one job to do in front of the surveillance cameras, TV cameras, and livestreaming smartphones aimed his way. One simple task that a goddamn toddler could have aced. And Lella was fucking it up.

  Konig jabbed at the screen of his phone, boosting the command frequency to the maximum. Anything above that would permanently obliterate Lella’s brain function.

  Not that Konig gave a shit at this point.

  “Vilardi? Russo? Naimo? Where the fuck are you?” he barked into the headset. “Get the lights back on! Come in! What the fuck is going on in there?”

  No response. Dead, or they’d jumped ship.

  If they weren’t dead, they soon would be. He’d pay extra to make sure that the experience was painful and prolonged. Useless shitheads.

  He was furious with himself for making a plan with too many elements outside of his control. Neurosurgery was not his forte, but that cooing hellbitch Sondra Laera had convinced him that it was the way to go. He’d studied the video documentation of Lella’s imprisonment and clandestine surgery. Impressive. Seemingly foolproof.

  Konig had always admired ruthlessness. Skilled savagery got things done. Laera had assured him that the command frequency would put Lella under his full control.

  He’d believed her, and handed over a staggering amount of money for her services—tens of millions he’d spent on this complicated masquerade so far.

  And out of nowhere, a fucking knife through the hand had revived Lella’s conscious will. At the worst possible time.

  That bomb had to explode. Lella had to be vaporized, or his implants would be found during the autopsy—and traced. All of Konig’s meticulous plans would fail.

  Konig hesitated for less than a second before he pulled the Beretta pistol out of his briefcase. He burst out of the room and ran toward the Sala dell’Annunziata.

  As he ran, he tapped his phone, upping Lella’s command frequency once again. Well beyond the upper limit. As high as it would go.

  No matter what happened tonight, if he was going down, he wanted Lella writhing on the floor. Bleeding out of every hole.

  He deserved at least that much satisfaction for all his trouble.

  * * * *

  The force of Noah’s attack sent one of the tall panels behind the cross toppling backwards. He and Lella tumbled back along with it.

  Lella ripped his wounded hand free with a shout, rolled over, and lurched to his feet, climbing over the downed panel to grapple with Noah. His face was streaked with blood, his one eye wild and unseeing. He howled incoherently as he attacked.

  Noah stayed in tight, taking a fuckton of head-ringing punishment from Lella’s powerful fists but he didn’t give an inch. He had to stay close. No ducking down, no dancing back. His body was the only barrier between that detonator cord and Lella’s other hand. He had to keep those hands busy.

  Lella rushed him in the dark, crowded space, knocking him up against the back of another panel. Noah struggled to hold on, taking kicks and punches until he got a grip on one of Lella’s thick wrists. He yanked and dragged the man forward, trying to keep Lella stumbling and off balance with one hand, blocking his punches and kicks with the other.

  The guy bellowed like a wounded bull and charged, driving Noah before him toward the French doors to the balcony. He was huge, desperate. Completely insane.

  The charge smashed the two of them right through the glass, splintering the wooden frames, and they thundered headlong toward the wrought iron railing, locked together.

  Oh fuck. Here it came.

  Do or die.

  He said a prayer. Not for himself. For Caro.

  He saw her beautiful eyes in his mind as they pitched over the edge.

  Chapter 16

  Noah hung by one arm from the balcony railing. The wrought iron bar burned his clamped hand as he struggled to break Lella’s death grip.

  The other man dangled below him, clinging desperately to Noah’s wrist with one huge, meaty hand. His single eye rolled wildly up to Noah’s face, then down at his legs, which jerked and kicked a good forty feet above the cobblestone courtyard below.

  Lella flung his head back, screaming and flailing. His brain implant, stabbing deep. Whoever was mind-fucking him was punishing him hard.

  Lella jackknifed in the air, bellowing. He groped at his chest with his bloodied hand. Trying to pull the cord? Not gonna happen.

  Noah swung the man’s body as hard as he could. Kicked him, shook him. Lella punched back, getting in a vicious jab to the groin before Noah managed to slam a knee into his face.

  They dangled, struggled, and fought ferociously. Noah kicked him in the head, the neck, the face. Slammed his foot down on Lella’s shoulder and pushed down, hanging on desperately to the balcony railing. Yelling at the pain, the effort.

  Screaming agony in his shoulder. One…more…kick…

  He broke Lella’s grip. The man fell with a hoarse scream of terror as Noah pulled himself swiftly up and over the railing. He dove headfirst inside the smashed, splintered French doors and hit the floor, hands over his ears—

  Boom.

  The Palazzo shook to its very foundations. Every window in the building shattered.

  Noah lay there, deafened and stunned. He heard screaming. It sounded far away.

  Caro.

  He rolled over onto his side. Broken glass crunched as he got to his knees and then staggered out onto the balcony to look down into the courtyard.

  Blast marks gave off an acrid, hell-dark smoke. Lella lay in the center. Parts of him, anyway.

  A low grunt came from inside. He turned. Stefano Morelli was struggling up onto his knees in the frame of the French doors, his face bloodied from the flying shattered glass.

  Noah stumbled toward him, glass crunching under his feet. He sank down and seized Morelli by his lapels.

  “Stefano,” he said. “It was you who threw Lella off the balcony. Sei stato tu. Caro and I were never here. We were never on your guest list. Never even met you. Got that?”

  “Che?” Morelli stared at him wide-eyed, shocked and uncomprehending.

  Noah gave him a quick shake. “I can’t handle the publicity. It would get my group killed. I need you to cover for me. You figured it all out, Stefano. You threw Lella over the balcony before he could detonate his vest inside. You’re a fucking hero. You got that?” He waited, and shook the guy again. “Please!”

  “But I saw—”

  “You saw nothing. I was never here. I have to go find Caro now. Tell me you fucking understand me!”

  “Capisco,” Morelli forced out. “I understand.”

  “And you’ll do it? You’ll be the hero?”

  “Sì.” Morelli’s v
oice shook.

  “Great,” Noah said. “Then I’m out of here. I was never here to begin with. Good luck, and thanks. I owe you one.”

  Noah stepped over Morelli, clambered over the toppled panels, and ran for doors, still searching for Caro. Several people were crumpled on the floor, groaning. Others yelled for help. One woman hunched, sobbing, over an old lady in a glittering diamond collar who lay curled on her side, not breathing, eyes empty. A man dragged himself toward the door leaving a thick streak of blood on the marble floor behind him. A woman in a gold evening gown crawled on her hands and knees while a man crouched next to her, trying to calm her down in a voice that shook uncontrollably.

  No Caro. Not anywhere.

  He got out into the corridor. His heart almost exploded with relief when he saw the swiftly revolving blaze of Caro’s sig reflected off the walls, even before she emerged from between two statues and ran toward him.

  They collided in a tight embrace. “Oh, my God. Noah.”

  “I’m here, angel.” His voice was rough with emotion. They had to get the hell out of there, but he just couldn’t let go of her quite yet.

  “What the hell just happened?” Her voice was muffled against his chest.

  “Lella had a suicide vest. Later for that. Let’s get out of here.” He stepped back and gave her a once-over, to assure himself that she was OK.

  That was when he saw the gun in her hand. He stared at it, astonished. “Where the fuck did you get that?”

  “Took it off one of Lella’s guys. Smashed his head with a painting.”

  “Ahhh…OK.”

  “I shot the other one,” she went on. “With this. Got him in the neck. Son of a bitch was trying to shoot at you. That was right before the lights went out.”

  Holy shit. Noah was struck speechless for a moment. “Ah…thanks.”

  “Anytime.” Caro slid the gun into her evening bag, which amazingly was still slung across her body. “I should probably get rid of it, but not yet. This place is crazy.”

  “True enough,” he agreed readily. “We’ll deal with the gun later. Let’s go.”