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Chapter 1
Twelve years ago—London
The bullet missed her ear by the grace of God and a stone in her shoe.
Unwilling to tempt fate twice, Rowan Steele belly crawled across the roof of the Knightsbridge townhome, reluctant to find out if her assailant was going to try again or just come after her.
She needed a more secure location.
Now.
Not for the first time did she curse her innate fear of guns or she’d have nicked Grandfather’s World War II service pistol and stuck it in the waistband of her black pants before sneaking out earlier. A raw, choked laugh welled in her throat at the irony.
Guns she ran in fear from. Climbing London rooftops as a means to rip off the contents below? Bring it on.
A shout echoed from the street, muffled in the light fog that coated the city. When she’d arrived ten minutes earlier, she’d considered the fog a blessing, but its rapid swirl and increasing weight had her reconsidering that decision.
Who the bloody hell would be shooting at her?
And how did they even know she was up here?
Rowan kept moving, her breath heavy, even as the questions swirled through her mind faster than the fog around her body. A small nook sat between two chimneys—sitting room and study respectively—and she moved determinedly onward over the rough tiles to give herself a moment to regroup in relative safety.
Obviously the jewelry extraction—the evening’s main event—was off.
Now she just had to figure out how to get off the roof undetected.
The small space enveloped her as she slid her body between the twin columns of old brick and took her first easy breath since the gunshot. Voices still echoed from the street, but they’d grown fainter and she didn’t think it was only from the fog.
Her plans for the evening ran through her mind’s eye on the same steady loop she’d not been able to get out of her head since her first visit to the townhome six months before. Her dear friend Bethany Warrington couldn’t stop talking about her mother’s latest gift from her father—a diamond-and-ruby bracelet purported to have been worn by Queen Victoria.
While Bethany might have been dear, she was altogether too dim and had blithely provided the combination to the jewelry safe her mother kept in her bedroom as she’d fiddled her way through it three times before successfully cracking it on the fourth.
Since the bracelet was basically sitting there for the taking, Rowan could hardly ignore the windfall and had plotted how she’d get in and out when Bethany’s family took their annual jaunt to the Côte d’Azur.
On a rather huge level, Rowan knew what she was doing was wrong. Even if she could work her way past the clear directive in the Ten Commandments, she also knew by her actions she betrayed a friend.
Yet the impulse to take—to take and take and take whatever she could get her hands on—wouldn’t be sated.
And no matter how much she wanted to, she couldn’t change that simple fact.
Just like her parents.
They’d been taken from her by that same God who’d laid down those Commandments and she couldn’t quite get past the need to strike back at Him and anyone else who got in her way.
In those moments when she stole something—be it a piece of jewelry worn by royalty or a pack of chewing gum carelessly left on the edge of a desk at school—she felt.
And in all the other endless hours, she simply marked time with that sickening well of grief in the pit of her stomach that wouldn’t close, even as month piled on month to the tune of nearly four years gone.
It was that same pit of grief—and the desperate urge to fill it—that had her creeping out of her hiding place as the voices on the street below stayed quiet.
Rowan allowed those emotions to carry her along the path she’d originally mapped out. The large tree that stood in the small garden two doors down from the Warringtons’ had provided the rooftop access and it had been easy enough to work her way across the roofs until she got to number twenty-three.
It was now the work of a minute to shimmy down the back wall on the thick ivy vines that wrapped the back of the house and enter through the former servants’ entrance. A servant-free entrance due to the fact that most were on their own holiday and the remaining three in residence had been given the night off.
Rowan crouched before the door, her pick tools in hand. The lock was complicated—she’d expected no less on a home this dear—but she knew she could do it. Especially after all the practice she’d put in on her grandparents’ town house.
After completing the last tumbler, she got back to her feet and opened the door. With careful strokes, she tapped out the alarm code Bethany had also shared and watched the red light flash over to green.
Rowan stood still for one moment, drinking in the quiet air of the house. Anticipation hummed in her veins and she took the briefest moment to savor it.
To savor being alive.
Then she relocked the door and headed up the kitchen stairwell to the third floor. The hallway carpet runner was soft under her feet as she moved into the bedroom Lady Warrington kept for her own use.
Night reflected through the windows, sheening the bedroom to a bright silver as Rowan slipped into the room. She slid open the double doors of the walk-in closet and went straight for the small safe built into the wall. The muted smells of fine leather, rich fabrics and the light scent of Chanel assailed her with a memory of her own mother’s closet but she ruthlessly tamped it down.
She would do this.
And any sympathy for Bethany or her mother needed to be ignored.
Just as with the pick tools, the thin leather gloves that covered her hands weren’t a deterrent, and she quickly sped through the safe combination from memory. Even without knowledge of the combination, Rowan knew the moment each tumbler fell into place. Call it a sixth sense, subtle anticipation or the superb hearing her family regularly teased her about; the answer didn’t really matter.
Rowan knew.
On
