Maxence closed his eyes and breathed double-breaths in through his nose and sighed stale air out.
Small clouds puffed in the azure sky, the sun was an inferno in the west, and the small boat was predominantly white on the interior with royal blue cushions. Oak trimmed the rails and lined the floor.
The tender’s diesel engine growled. Wavelets slapped the edge of the boat as they coasted to a stop next to the towering superyacht.
The Mediterranean Sea’s salt scent filled his nose, mixed with the acrid diesel exhaust from the tender.
The cummerbund of his tuxedo was firm around Maxence’s waist, his silk socks were smooth under his toes, and the seat behind his back was warm.
He breathed the double-breaths again, feeling the oxygen flowing through his body.
He was not suffocating.
He was not trapped.
It was only a boat.
Marie-Therese was sitting a few cushions away, watching him. “You don’t have to go to this thing tonight. I have a cocktail party at nine o’clock at the palace, but I can stay until then. I can make sure Ralph sets five of his next ten movies here in Monaco. You can just stay on this tender and go right back to shore.”
Maxence didn’t succumb to weakness. “I’ll be fine, but thank you.”
She shrugged. “If it gets to be too much for you, just get in a tender and leave. You can text me on your way back to shore so I’ll know you left, and I’ll make sure I hit all the principals.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
The tender floated into the capture mechanism, which Maxence had always amused himself by thinking of as a tractor beam. Long levers lifted the small boat out of the water and carried it into a garage inside the yacht.
Staff members wearing white nautical uniforms handed Maxence and Marie-Therese out of the boat and offered them water bottles before they boarded an elevator to the upper decks.
The elevator was the size of a standard closet, so Maxence and Marie-Therese stood nearly stomach-to-stomach in the enclosed, suffocating space. They stared at the walls because they were, after all, first cousins.
The mirrors on the walls repeated Maxence’s ashen face millions of times until he vanished into the distance.
His breath whooshed in the tiny box.
Maxence placed one palm on the elevator doors to remind himself what was real.
When he blinked, the instantaneous blackness of his eyelids sliding down over the mirrors and glowing buttons jolted every muscle in his body. The horror of cold and pitching concrete under his raw legs, the choking stench of his own fear-stink clamped over his face like a wet rag, ripping hunger cramps for days, and his swollen tongue turning to cotton and filling his mouth and throat flashed through his body and were as present as if he were somehow inhabiting his nine-year-old self.
He coughed, choking.
Marie-Therese grabbed his other hand, clenching his fingers. “It’s just a few seconds, and we’ll be up on the deck.”
He counted down from ten in his head.
When he reached four, the elevator doors split apart, and Maxence staggered out.
Marie-Therese muttered, “Next time, we’ll take the stairs.”
Maxence sucked in a great draught of clean sea air and retrieved his handkerchief from the pocket inside his tuxedo jacket to blot the beads of sweat squeezing out of his hairline.
Sapphire-blue sea met the darkening sky at the horizon, far away.
He ran through a litany of sensations—the sun painting a blazing trail over the sea and the Christmas boughs and wreaths still up on every available square inch of the ship even though it was after New Year’s, to the scent of fish grilling nearby and the sour taste of bile in his mouth—to ground himself in the present.
It usually worked.
He gasped air, trying to calm himself down, though he was subtle about it because he was, after all, Maxence Grimaldi. His ancestors had held Monaco’s fortress for a millennium, and he turned to watch the setting sunlight glow on the golden stone high on the headlands above the yachts and ships in the harbor.
