Getting Wilde Read Online Free

few moments after you. They have since been joined by a fourth gentleman. They lost you when you entered the church, then re-grouped once you stepped outside again. One of them has a newly-bandaged neck. Yes.” Armaeus noted my flinch. “I suspected that was your doing. Give me the seal, Miss Wilde.”    
    “But how’d they find me?” Without answering, Armaeus abruptly turned deeper into the crowd, towing me along with him. Then, with a movement so fast I had no hope of stopping it, he reached into my jacket and slid the Ceres seal free.  
    Something inside me deflated a little, as I realized I’d been violated without even getting dinner first. Pungent or not, my prince of coins back at Le Stube had been on the hook for at least eighty thousand euros for this little snatch and pitch, and I really, really hated to see that money go. “You’re paying for that, you know. And for the record, it’s gotten really expensive.”  
    “Keep moving.” Without breaking stride, Armaeus opened the velvet bag and withdrew the heavy gold disk, slipping it into an interior pocket of his own jacket. He then tucked the seal’s pouch into the pack of an oblivious passing tourist. I saw the young man plow energetically into the crowd, and didn’t miss how half the Swiss Guards’ heads swiveled to watch him go. The pouch had been bugged? By the guards ? How did that make any sense?  
    Armaeus steered me into a side street, but it was too late. The crush of tourists rapidly dwindled, and I could hear the boots of multiple men striding into the street behind us. Even if the Swiss had LoJacked the seal, my prince and his buddies were following us by sight alone. My brain bumped back online. “Hey,” I protested. “Hang on a second. Those guys might actually be here to make good on this job. I need to talk with them.”  
    “They are not interested in talking, Miss Wilde. Or in paying you.”  
    Irritation flared, and I stopped short. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. And that money is import— shit !”  
    A sudden flare of semiautomatic rifle fire peppered the brick wall over our shoulders as Armaeus ducked low and pulled me into a side street that was little more than an alley, but at least it was heading in the right direction: away from the crazy men with guns.  
    “Three streets over,” Armaeus said, his words unrushed over the clatter of my thrift-store boots and his million-dollar loafers. “A driver will transport us to safety.” Behind us, I again detected the dulcet tones of my contact as he snarled something in French. Armaeus glanced back, his teeth glinting white as he grinned. Then I heard my contact’s cry of confusion.  
    It was the last sound he ever made.  
    A second round of gunfire punctuated the night, the sound of the silenced weapons like the breathy popping of balloons, overtaken by the shouts of pain and the crunch of bodies falling to the ground. The Swiss Guard flowed into the street behind us, and Armaeus yanked me close. Every one of my nerve endings lit up like a neon sign at his touch, but I knew better than to resist this time. The man could move . And sure enough, with each of his strides now, the pavement shot beneath us like a rushing torrent.  
    The Swiss Guards’ angry Italian dwindled into the distance, and the buildings around us blurred. Trapped in that strange cocoon of movement, however, my mind refocused my cards. It always came back to the cards, and the cards had predicted Death. Now, Death was all around me, shimmering in the night.  
    The cards had been right on the money, in fact—first the exploding Tower, then the Magician, then Death. All of them appearing in rapid succession, each more alarming than the last. The only card left was—the Devil.  
    What did the Devil card mean this night? More lies, more deceit? Or was its appearance simply a marker, a warning that I was about to head into the underbelly of society, down the well-trod rabbit