i   t h e   c o n f e s s i o n   The Great Hall, Palazzo della Signoria Florence, Wednesday 18 April 1498     It’s late afternoon as Fra Girolamo Savonarola shuffles onto the raised stage at the front of the Hall of the Five Hundred. He drags his sandalled feet, scuffing the stone floor with a shush, shush, shush. Savonarola commissioned this chamber, currently the largest room in Europe. It was built to hold the five-hundred-strong Grand Council, part of the new Republic of Florence established under his authority. The vast walls are plain, not yet frescoed. Through the high windows a clear spring light floods into the room from the west. The full council watch him walk on in silence. They are seated in neat rows, but standing behind them and around them are a substantial portion of the male population of Florence. Everyone is perfectly still and listening. It hasn’t rained in Florence for a week and the men have walked dust from the street into the room. It floats above them like a scum on a broth, swimming in the warm air, rising high. Savonarola looks out at the gathered crowd…

Exclusive Excerpt from RESONANCE SURGE by Nalini Singh   Yakov stepped back. “Guess I’m jumping the gate after all.” Theo’s entire body tensed, her gaze jerking to the spikes, then back to him. Her hand lifted on the instinctive urge to grab him, stop him. “Hey.” Eyes kissed by amber meeting Theo’s. “Bears aren’t as clumsy as we look. We only run into things fifty percent of the time.” “Be careful of the spikes.” Theo didn’t realize she’d risen onto her toes until she settled back down. “They aren’t decoration and you are a bear. My source on changelings states that bears constantly overestimate their ability to be graceful.” He didn’t need to know that her source was Wild Woman magazine. A sudden grin from Yakov that made her stomach clench. “Watch this,” he said, then jogged back several meters before running full tilt at the gate. Her mouth fell open as he hauled himself up with a power and speed she’d never have expected from a bear changeling. Close to the top, he all but vaulted over the spikes and came to a firm landing on both feet on the grassy and cracked drive on the other side. Wild…

A bang. A blaze of light. Footsteps. You feel fire on your cheek and cold deep in your bones. Your hands are chained over your head and your feet dangle, barely touching the floor. You open your eyes and wish you hadn’t. “I thought you’d be dead by now,” Mr. X says from the door of the meat freezer. “Give me a little credit,” you say. “I grew up in Chicago. Have you lived through a Chicago winter? My grandmother made me play outside when it was so cold my eyelashes froze together.” “And you had to walk uphill both ways in a snowstorm to get to school?” “I didn’t go to school. I couldn’t see.” “Funny. You’re a funny guy.” Mr. X walks into the freezer flanked by two extra hench people. You are flattered that he needs four henches to protect himself from you, considering you’ve been badly beaten, and you are chained up in a meat freezer, well on your way to hypothermia. Mr. X has a cane, but no limp. A head, but no hair. He is tall enough not to be short, but too short to be considered tall. His face is as round and…

Henry felt like a complete arse. He’d spent the last few days rolling his grief around an empty estate as if he was alone in that experience. As if no one could or would understand. Lily was right, it was under very different circumstances but it didn’t lessen, or take away from the loss of her own father. He remembered the fishing accident that had taken An­thony Atwell’s life and devastated the small community of Hawke’s Cove. The vigil that had been held that morning, the sun not even broken over the horizon, as the entire town came down to the harbour, bundled against the frigid cold of the winter’s morning, with candles and a grief-stricken silence. He remembered watching the way that the people had parted, allowing Marion Atwell and her young daughter through the crowd to stand at the foot of the harbour, waiting and hoping to see who came back. The jagged sobs that had wracked Lily’s mother’s body as she’d taken one look at the captain’s face and crumpled onto the floor, while the people nearby had tried to help hold her up. Grief, aching and hot, surfaced in his chest and horrify­ingly he felt the…

THE SETUP   Outskirts of Rocinha, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil   IN THE STEAMING LUSHNESS OF THE JUNGLE, DRUG smugglers’ airstrips appear like vampires between midnight and dawn, then dissolve in gunfire or the rush of monsoons. This particular criminal enterprise was less like a runway, and more like a shaving scar. It was six hundred feet of flat umber earth, plowed and leveled by sweating cartel slaves after they’d hacked down kapok trees and hauled them aside. It broiled in the morning sun, silent except for the slithers of snakes and the howls of macaws. The only other things there were the carcass of an old Huey helicopter, the abandoned hut of a murdered cocaine boss, and a camouflage net laced with cocoa leaves that looked like mush from the sky. There was previously a fresh bomb crater in the middle of the strip, made by a Brazilian Tucano strike fighter, but it had just been repaired. The CIA had asked the Brazilian air force to please not bomb it again. At least for today. Twelve hard-looking men were standing under the net, sur- rounding three brown Land Rover Defenders parked nose to nose. They were the Package, operators…

Excerpt from THE FORGER OF MARSEILLE, a novel, by Linda Joy Myers   What’s in a Name? That October of 1939, autumn transformed Paris into a lush painting. The trees didn’t know of war, the leaves a magical yellow, crimson, and amber. Six weeks after war started, the people of the City of Light continued to dance and eat and sing in the streets, wearing optimism and cheer like a new dress. Except for bomb shelters spread through the city and uniformed soldiers sitting in cafés, Paris seemed the same as before the war, people going to work and enjoying the theater and cabarets, gas mask cases cast aside as they determined not to be dour simply because there was a war raging in Poland, far, far away. The most painful reminders of the war were the shuttered museums, empty of the art that made up the soul of Paris. Without Van Gogh and Matisse, Monet and Renoir, and art that spoke of culture and history, Simone felt bereft. And the Winged Victory. She’d flown to safety in the countryside where she’d be safe along with her sister, the Venus de Milo. When would the world see them again? As…

When I return to my new cave with supplies, the main cavern hums with happy voices. The others have arrived, and the sound of happy chatter is a constant hum in the air. I think Rukh and his mate Har-loh—who live at the elders’ cave more often than not—have the right of it. With everyone returning, there will be faces everywhere and no privacy. This thing between Jo-see and I will play out before all. At the thought, another surge of fierce possessiveness rises in me. Whatever she may think, she is mine. Jo-see is standing in the cave when I return, her pack at her feet. My khui immediately begins a pounding beat in my chest at the sight of her, and my blood pulses hard with the need to claim her. But her face is drawn and tired, her small shoulders hunched with exhaustion. Her khui starts to sing to mine and she looks down at her chest, confused, then jumps with surprise when I set my bundle down. “What are you doing here?” Her small human brows draw together. “They said this is my cave.” “The cave you will share with me,” I agree, keeping my tone…

THE SECOND CHANCE STORE: Pg # 17-20   To the ignorant, all charity shops are the same.   The particular smell of softening biscuits, yellowing paperbacks and aged storage heaters turned up slightly too high. The distant sound of Steve Wright in the Afternoon crackling through a portable stereo. The racks, a little too close together for comfortable browsing, laden with items at once both too old and too new to be fashionable. A bookshelf of indeterminate filing system that will reliably contain several copies of Shantaram, The Dukan Diet, and Bridget Jones’s Diary. A glimpse through an open door into a stockroom beyond, filled with bin bags, half- drunk cups of tea, and the theatrical hiss of a steaming machine.   And behind the counter, a kindly soul whose job is to scrutinize you. A generous person who has given up their time for the benefit of those less fortunate, who will probably rifle through your donations after you’ve gone and laugh at how gross they all are. An angel on earth, who will nonetheless hold up your ill- judged holiday shorts from 2009 while shrieking, “Cor, Brenda, get a load of these!”   And they’re allowed to, because…

CHAPTER ONE   Monday, 0900   It might come as a disappointment to learn that the natural habitat of the intelligence officer is not the shooting range or the gym mat, the departure lounge of a hot and dusty airport, the safe house or the interrogation cell. It’s not halfway up a ladder aimed at the draughty rear window of a foreign embassy. It’s not even the street, the simple street – narrow, damply cobbled, thick with London fog and Russian menace. No, the natural habitat of the intelligence officer is the meeting room. Spies like to talk. “You will have heard of a section called Gatekeeping,” says Charles Remnant. “In simple terms, we investigate the insider threat – the threat posed by our own members of staff, who may have been recruited by hostile foreign powers. What you will not have heard of, however, unless matters have really got out of hand, is the secret cadre of officers we refer to as Gatekeepers.” In this case, not just any meeting room, but one at the top of the building, one at the dead end of a corridor otherwise used to store broken filing cabinets and unused safes. The paint…

Chapter 1 Holly put both her hands flat on the deep sill of the hinged window of her bedroom and leaned out to see the morning light. Then she pulled on shorts and a T-shirt over her head. Flip- flops and bare feet were a common option, but this morning—like most mornings, in the early hours when it was cool—she put on a pair of sneakers so she could walk along the entire length of the seawall before the sun rose too high in the sky. The top of the wall was as wide as a sidewalk and had the most beautiful ocean view she’d ever seen. At points along the way, the waves crashed spectacularly upon the cement pilings before taking a back dive toward the Caribbean. Each big surge made a great brumpfasshh sound that made her heart feel light. Holly loved how the locals smiled their hello as she jogged by. How in the grocery store, shoppers often burst out singing together when a favorite song came on the radio, broadcast by the shop’s sound system. How music seemed to be everywhere. As constant as the competing crash of the waves. She wanted all of her guests…