Midnight Angels Read Free

backs.
    “The leaps from roof to roof are short and should not pose much risk,” Gian Lucca said. “You need to reach the building closest to the Ponte Vecchio. The top door will be unlocked. Once you make your way out to the street, cross to the other side of the Arno and you will be safe, at least for now.”
    “What about you?”
    “I need to prepare,” Gian Lucca said. “I have guests arriving.”
    “You don’t need to risk your life,” Kate said, holding his right hand in hers. “We can stay and help.”
    “Better still,” Marco said, “you can leave with us. Why get into a fight when it is so easy to avoid them? A lesson clearly not yet learned by my American friend.”
    “Your concern is appreciated,” Gian Lucca said, smiling and patting his stomach. “But for me, jumping across rooftops is not the safest option.”
    “Will we see you again?” Kate asked.
    “Only if you plan on being chased again,” Gian Lucca said.
    “Then I imagine we’ll all be close friends,” Marco said. “I’ve only known her ten days and already I’ve sweated through every shirt I own.”
    Gian Lucca heard footsteps coming up the stairwell, opened the thick black door of the roof and gazed down. “I must go and greet my guests,” he said. He waved at Kate and Marco and walked back into the building, closing the door to the rooftop and locking it from the inside.
    “How many rooftops have you jumped across in your life?” Marco asked Kate.
    “Half a dozen or so,” she said, “maybe more. I had a friend in high school who was very good at it, and I would go with her sometimes.”
    “I didn’t have friends like that,” he said. “Going skiing was probably the wildest activity we ever did.”
    “How good a skier are you?”
    “One broken arm and one broken leg in three trips,” he said. “What does that tell you?”
    “It tells me I should jump first,” Kate said.
    And she did.

CHAPTER
2
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
    R ICHARD DYLAN EDWARDS STOOD BEHIND THE LARGE LECTERN and watched as the students piled into the small auditorium. He glanced down briefly at his notes and his class list and wondered how many of the eighty-three students attending his seminar on Michelangelo and his theory of art would actually apply anything they learned to their everyday lives. How many of them took up the study of Art History because it fulfilled a hunger to connect with the masters of the past, as opposed to how many slid into it as a major, thinking it would come with an easy college degree attached? It was a question Professor Edwards often posed to himself, usually on the days he was preoccupied with matters that went beyond the walls of his classroom.
    And today was one of those days.
    At the age of forty-six, Edwards ranked as one of the world’s foremost scholars of Michelangelo. He had devoted the bulk of his life to the study of a man who was born in impoverished anonymity and died eight decades later draped in both riches and respect. But it was not the works of the Divine One that weighed on Edwards’s mind this early first semester morning, the weather outside still bearing the brunt of a brutal heat wave that showed no signs of surrender. It was the note folded inside the breast pocket of his denim shirt that consumed his full attention, the one that he had printed out of his e-mail box earlier that morning and read again and again. The note was from Kate Westcott, the young woman he had raised since the eve of her fourth birthday and who now found herself on a fellowship working in the city of Florence, devoting a year of herlife to the study of his hero. It was a fellowship he had embraced with the pride of a parent, but now filled him with a sense of dread.
    “Excuse me, sir?”
    Edwards looked up to see a young man standing in front of him, his rail thin body leaning ever so slightly against the edge of the lectern, his long blond hair masking half of a face that seemed to be always on the verge of a