Maxence’s mind roiled as he stepped down the stairs, his motorcycle boots stomping on each tread.
God grant me sobriety and chastity, but not yet,St. Augustine had prayed.
Please, Lord my God, I beg you as I have begged you for many years, hollow me and let me become an empty shell. Let me have no desires, no senses, no future, and exist without time. Let me want nothing and feel absolutely nothing with all my heart. Allow me to move through the world, soulless and empty, and my husk will do Your work becauseI cannot stop.My soul is shredded. I want to go with her more than I want to live, and my brother, Pierre, may kill us both if I walk away from the Church and become a threat to him.
Max’s backpack swung against his spine, and he walked into the lobby. His mind was so turned inward that his eyes did not see except to step around the table and benches where they had eaten supper the previous night.
Last night, Dree had been sitting beside him in that booth. The side of his face had been bathed in her warmth, and the occasional brush of her soft clothes against his had drawn lines of sparks over his skin beneath.
And now she, too, would walk away from him.
As she should.
He was a target at the bottom of a pit, surrounded by enemies pointing weapons down at him. Dragging someone else down there was not an option for him. That’s why all of his “slips” were during times when he had eluded his security detail and was free.
No wonder his “slips” were rare, and why evading palace security was one of his most highly developed skills.
The Jumla district of Nepal was so remote and Max was so confident he must not be under surveillance that he remained lost in thought as he approached the counter to check out of the little inn, and he missed the three men standing, motionless, near the door.
He shouldn’t have overlooked them.
Their gray-blue military fatigues weren’t the flashy hiker apparel of foreigners traipsing about the Nepali countryside in late December, and the odd bulges under their uniforms indicated they were armed.
A man near Max’s shoulder said, “Prince Maxence, Your Highness, we’re here to escort you to Monaco.”
That voice was familiar, and Max’s skin rippled under his tee-shirt and jeans from the impact of the man’s voice.
Max didn’t allow his body to jump, but he tensed.
He turned his head and looked down into the gray, nearly colorless eyes of Quentin Sault, the director of Monaco’s security services who answered to Maxence’s older brother, Prince Pierre, even though their uncle was the titular sovereign.
Two commandos wearing winter fatigues guarded the doorway.
This was it, then.
Max wasn’t sure why or whythen,but they had come for him.
Sault was thoroughly Pierre’s creature. Pierre must have decided to execute Maxence, and he’d ordered Quentin Sault to do it because Sault followed Pierre’s orders,allhis orders, even the most vile.
That was why Sault and his soldiers were in Nepal. Pierre must have given Sault that final order.
There was no other possible explanation.
Sault stood at Max’s side.
The other two commandos guarded the inn’s front door, which was the only escape from the room other than a frantic sprint up the stairs and a probably futile attempt to leap through the glass of one of the second-story windows.
But if Max made it upstairs without being shot, which room would he choose to lead the assassins through? Because surely, these men would not leave witnesses alive.
Would the sacrifice be a father of five young childrenandhis childhood friend from boarding school, or Dree?
It wouldn’t be Dree.
But those were both unacceptable options, so Max wouldn’t run.
That left the option of fighting his way out.
A fight would pit three highly trained, probably heavily armed, military men against one moderately trained unarmed man who did not practice his self-defense skills.
