Maxence set his whiskey glass on a small table behind himself and drew a breath to ask her what was wrong.
Simone’s natural Afro hair was a sleek halo around her thin face. She was reaching out to Maxence, her fingers nearing the lapels of his tuxedo, and she glanced behind herself in fear. Black eyeliner and eyeshadow in soft sage and glittering gold accentuated her sloe-eyed beauty, and she almost looked like an Egyptian hieroglyphic of a queen.
Rough abrasions and the darkening plum of bruises covered her slim throat.
Maxence’s heart fell as rage rose in his body. Her husband, Estebe Fournier, must have thought people wouldn’t notice the damage to Simone’s dark-bronze skin. Estebe had always been a bully when they had been at school together, and he’d been excellent at creating incidents where he could deny his guilt.
About twenty feet behind her, two men in dark suits pushed through the crowd, their eyes intent on her form.
Other men in dark suits—all with the nearly shaved heads and odd bulk of the paramilitary security profession—converged toward them from another side of the crowd.
Wait—wasn’t that—
Maxence could have sworn he recognized one of the men. Maybe all private mercenaries and bodyguards were beginning to look alike to him. Many of his friends employed dozens of them.
Maxence opened his hands as Simone rushed into his curtained alcove and whispered near his shoulder,“Help me.”
He whipped off the midnight-blue jacket of his Tom Ford tuxedo, stepped around her to block what he was doing, and dropped it around her shoulders. The distinctive way her white dress popped against her umber and ebony skin would have drawn their pursuers’ eyes. His coat changed her slim, feminine silhouette and white dress into a black-ish box, and his white shirt was visible instead of his dark tux.
In crowds, pursuers follow shapes and colors, not specific people. Changing what she looked like from behind would slow her pursuers, who were probably either her husband or his security men.
Her picked-out afro, though close to her head, was still a black, distinctive shape in the crowd, though. Estebe’s security men would orient on that.
He looked around for a way to camouflage her head as he wrapped his arm around her shoulders and hustled her through the crowd gathered around the poker and roulette tables in the pale blue and faint gold White Room.
The crowd gathered around the televisions to watch the soccer match had probably slowed Estebe’s men down a little.
The White Room of the Monte Carlo casino had a terrace but no stairs to the ground floor. That room was a dead end.
They went sideways, along the walls, toward another doorway.
As they passed one particularly boisterous roulette table where the ball had just dropped onto the wheel and the gamblers had erupted in cheers, a woman raised her arms.
Her dark red scarf fluttered behind her.
Maxence snatched the silk scrap out of the air and flipped it over Simone’s head. She grabbed the ends and held them under her chin as they raced around the edge of the room.
With that bit of disguise, they might have a chance to escape.
Maxence guided her around to the entrance to the other connecting salon, theSalle Touzet Nord.There, he led her between the jangling slot machines and another crowd clustered around back-to-back televisions playing the soccer match.
They hurried toward the casino’s main lobby and the exit to leave the casino.
“Not the front entrance,” she whispered, her voice frantic. “He has people waiting for me there.” She had tucked the red silk around her face like a hijab, altering her profile still more.Perfect.
Maxence reversed his direction and grabbed Simone’s warm hand to pull her after him, heading for another way out of the casino.
Other people might have become disoriented in the maze of windowless rooms with flashing, clanging slots and shouting poker dealers and bejeweled roulette patrons, as was intended, but Maxence had spent half his childhood summers and all of his teenaged ones in and around the Monte Carlo casino in Monaco.
Yes, he’d been a popular person to visit during school vacations.
“This way,” Maxence said, his voice low as he leaned close to Simone and spoke to her under the maddening racket of the casino’s gambling rooms.
Fortunes were being won and lost—mostly lost—as they sped between the flashing tables, the black-tuxedoed men, and the sparkling women.
One woman, hardly more than a girl, shrieked as they passed. Simone flinched, bobbling as she bumped the backside of another man at the next poker table.
Maxence wheeled her in front of himself and muttered an apology to the man as they trotted away and into the next room.
