Free Assassin's Heart by Monica Burns Page B

the Middle Ages, all of them Praetorian. Even the great Galileo had not escaped their wrath, as his trial had taken place here.

    She tensed as she saw a clergyman enter the nave and move to the front of the altar. Immediately, she closed her thoughts off, but not before the man turned to study the place of worship. She inhaled a sharp breath of trepidation. Capture meant her death. She was too old to be used as breeding stock, but the Praetorians would try to cull every piece of knowledge they could from her before they killed her.

    Despite her aversion to showing the Carpenter disrespect with the pretense of penitent worship, she stopped at the ornate fount a short distance into the nave to avoid drawing any attention to herself. Better to pretend than be found out and possibly lose her life. Dipping her fingers into the water, she genuflected in the direction of the altar with an unspoken apology. Somehow, she didn’t think the Carpenter would mind.

    The pretense done, she quickly skirted the back row of pews to follow the aisle along the north wall. She moved with the speed and silence she’d learned in early childhood. From the moment they could walk, the Sicari learned how to move with great stealth and quickness. It wasn’t just because of what they did—it was how they’d survived over the centuries.

    Even though she was in her mid-fifties, she was still in excellent shape, which played to her favor when it came to avoiding detection or capture in a Praetorian stronghold. Marcus had always enjoyed hiding right beneath their enemy’s noses. It was a game to him. A deadly one. Particularly in this place.

    But she had little say in the matter. As Marcus was the reigning Sicari Lord, she had to
    obey him. At least he hadn’t commanded they meet at the site of Nero’s Circus. It would have meant braving entrance to what was hallowed ground to so many of the Church’s faithful. It would have been much more dangerous. The Praetorians were great in number at the house of the man who’d denied the Carpenter. As she hurried down the north aisle, she saw a small tour group admiring the architecture of the flying buttress on the opposite side of the church. In one of the front pews, an old woman and a child knelt on the prayer benches. Mindful of the potential threat at the altar, she quietly darted to the left and past the beautiful Rise n Christ started by Michelangelo centuries ago.

    Past the statue and the choir area behind the altar, she found the spiral staircase leading down into the crypts. Whenever she met Marcus in one of these places, t his part of the journey was her least favorite. All the rotting death behind the walls abhorred her. The fiery cleanliness of a Sicari burial ritual was far preferable to putting a body into the ground to feed the worms.

    At the end of the crypt’s corridor, she paused. Nothing other than her own breathing filled the silence in the dim passage. Reassured that no one had followed her, she slid her fingers along the top edge of the stone ridge that bordered the crypt she faced. Just as Marcus’s message had told her, she found the slight bump in the stone directly above the intersected P and X of the Chi-Rho symbol.

    The moment she pressed the stone trigger above the Church’s ancient symbol for the Carpenter, the crypt’s roughly hewn facade rolled to one side with a quiet rumble. She quickly slipped through the narrow opening and tugged on the iron lever inside. The grit beneath her fingers was a reflection of how long it had been since someone had used this secret Sicari hiding place. Still, the stone slid softly back into place behind her as if time had not aged it at all.

    All this intrigue and danger. Why Marcus didn’t pick an open venue where the danger would be far less puzzled her. She wondered if he did it as a form of punishment for past transgressions. His or hers, she couldn’t be sure. Blind, she reached to the left, her fingers fumbling to find the