Page 24 of The Medici Return

But he was still on edge.

A woman appeared from one of the side chapels.

She hesitated at the iron gate, looking both ways before emerging. Tall. Lean-limbed. Pageboy hairstyle. Snug denim jeans and a casual check shirt. His alarm bell triggered louder and he moved toward the iron gate. The woman kept going. Away. Toward the front of the massive church. Never looking back. He glanced inside the dim chapel at the wall paintings and its darkened stained-glass windows. In one corner a body lay supine. A face he recognized. From Stephanie’s email. The man he’d come to meet. He hustled over and saw a knife wound to the chest. He knelt down and checked for a pulse.

None.

Then everything just escalated.

A form sprang from his left, wielding a knife.

Long, wide, serrated.

The man pivoted off the balls of his feet, the knife sweeping in a circular motion of intense readiness. Cotton reacted and rolled to his right, away from the attacker, and came to his feet, swinging around to slam his right foot into the hand with the knife.

But it did not release.

Thankfully, this was not his first rodeo. So he swung with his right fist and pounded the man’s temple, which had the desired effect, stunning the senses and causing the guy to stagger back. He wrapped his right arm around the neck in a vise grip, thentransmitted the full weight of his body through a knee into the abdomen. Ribs cracked. A grunt signaled pain. The hand with the knife moved up and out.

Not good.

The arc could be trouble.

Make the call. Do it.

Releasing his grip on the throat he clamped onto the guy’s arm and brought the hand down and in, puncturing his attacker’s chest with the blade.

Breath swooshed from lungs.

Muscles relaxed.

A small rivulet of blood seeped from the corner of the mouth, and all resistance ceased as the body went limp.

Dammit. He needed this guy alive.

“Oh, my God,” a woman said loudly in English.

He glanced up. The same woman from earlier stood out in the ambulatory.

“You killed him,” she yelled, her voice echoing across the nave. “He killed him.”

Then she ran.

He headed after her.

People were reacting to her words, emerging from the pews and into the side aisle. The clap of their feet echoed off the towering ceiling. Across the nave he spotted the woman. She saw him and reached beneath her jacket.

A gun appeared.

She leveled it his way.

He dove to the ground between the pews, flattening himself and crawling beneath them.

A loud pop filled the nave.

Above him a round whined by, smacking off stone. Voices rose, people panicked, all now heading for the exit in a rush.

He rose up.