Rae and Wulf at the Hospital
Raphael Mirabaud
Carl von Clausewitz
and the Duke of Brunswick.
Raphael glanced at his phone as he ran between the widening glass doors and into the brightly lit hospital.
Outside, the three-quarter moon shone through the cool, night air that felt almost warm after weeks of alpine winter. The desert plants cast needled shadows from theparking lot lamps.
Raphael blinked at the brilliant neon lights inside, clearing dazzled tears from his dry eyes.
The text on his phone from Eian Summerhays read,OB wing, recovery suite 638. Will clear the way.
Planting Eian inside Wulfram von Hannover’s private security force had been an excellent idea, even if he hadn’t figured out who Pierre’s turncoat was.
Raphael jogged down the hall,watching for signage to the OB wing and wishing he’d had time for a shower or to sleep in a bed, any bed.
After the Rogues had rescued him from the warehouse in Geneva, they’d staged an assault on the Mirabaud estate that had involved walking up to the front doors and pointing guns at anyone inside, even the housekeepers. Raphael regretted terrorizing them, but no one got hurt. They’d retrievedhis passport, documentation, and official papers he’d had there, including his will.
His mother wasn’t in the house. He’d checked his parents’ room and her usual haunts. It was odd that she wasn’t there in the middle of the night.
Very odd.
He wasn’t sure what he would have said if he had found her, but he wished he knew she was all right.
He stopped that line of thought. His current missionwas to retrieve Flicka. Anything about his father or his family would have to wait.
Getting the other Rogue Security guys’ passports had involved merely a brief stop at their hotel.
He’d sent Magnus Jensen ahead to Monaco to infiltrate the palace and watch over Flicka until he could return to rescue her.
Aiden Grierwas still in place in Monaco, watching Pierre.
Flying to the US had been tricky.Purchasing tickets on a commercial flight on no notice and traveling with weaponry would have raised red flags, to put it very mildly, so Raphael Mirabaud had commandeered the Geneva Trust jet with all the arrogant authority of an heir who wanted to fly somewhereright now.With the Rogues standing behind him, burly arms crossed and still fuming with the comforting aroma of burning gunpowder,the GT flight crew had decided to file the flight plan and go for a ride.
Damn, Raphael wished that Rogue Security could afford a private plane. For long-haul missions, they’d been booking rental jets, but sometimes getting reservations could be a problem. During Wulf’s wedding in Montreux, Flicka had told Raphael when the wedding was scheduled before the other guests had been notified. The firstthing he’d done was to call their admin to book jets. Within a few hours, every available rental plane in the world had been reserved by people who couldn’t be seen arriving at a royal wedding in a car.
Raphael’s ruse to secure Geneva Trust’s plane worked brilliantly, and they touched down in the southwestern US nineteen hours after Rogue Security had rescued him from the warehouse in Geneva.Filing the flight paperwork had taken a few hours, as had refueling and taking on supplies in New Jersey.
Somehow, with one phone call from somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean, Aaron Savoie had procured yet more fantastic hummus, fresh bread, roasted chicken, and other dishes delivered to the airport to meet the plane, enough to feed the eight hungry, adrenaline-exhausted men on board with leftoversfor snacking. Aaron’s hummus delivery was a joke among the Rogue operators, right up until it was the most delicious thing the starving people had ever eaten, which was surprisingly often. While Aaron might have a darkness lingering behind his eyes that no one wanted to discuss, his ability to summon hummus was a holy gift.
During the flights, they’d bandaged scrapes and scratches, as they calledtheir minor gunshot wounds, with the plane’s rudimentary first aid kit.Eirik Vanghad been a doctor in some previous incarnation, so he checked everyone and declared the mission a success from a no-loss standpoint, his pale blue eyes missing nothing as he methodically moved from one minor scrape to a gunpowder-burned hand to a line on Aaron’s side where a bullet had scraped off some skin as itflew by.
Eirik checked Raphael’s ringing ears and shrugged. His eardrums weren’t broken, and little could have been done if they had been. His ears still rang from the blasting gunshots, audible even over the scream of the jet’s engines.
After food, medical attention, and planning, they’d slept. Raphael had claimed the couch through the fact that he’d secured the airplane, even though his longlegs hung over the end. He’d ended up lying sideways, sleeping with his feet on the floor. The guys in the recliners had fared better. The two operators on the carpeting probably got the best sleep of all, judging by their snoring that even Raphael could hear over the jet’s engines. He took it as a sign that his ears were healing.
He still wore the suit he’d been wearing the day before, whenhe’d gone from the bank to the warehouse for the shipment of girls.
After they’d touched down, cars had been waiting for them behind the private terminal. They’d rearmed themselves from the plane’s hold and driven in a caravan to the hospital, where now the company of them thundered down the tile hallway, looking for Wulfram von Hannover.
The obstetrics wing occupied the sixth floor, as EianSummerhays had texted, and a suite was situated at the end of a long hallway. Bright flowers sprawled on the walls, a reminder that the OB wing was one of the few happy places in a hospital.
As they approached, men guarding the corridor straightened and reached inside their jackets, but Eian had already started talking them down and backing them off.
Some of the bodyguards recognized Raphaelas their old friend and boss Dieter Schwarz. They stood down and moved aside. He watched, but all of the men reacted as he would have expected. Raphael only marginally believed that Pierre Grimaldi had turned someone inside von Hannover’s security team, a few bodyguards that had become a paramilitary force dubbed theWelfenlegion,but he wanted to be sure.
