I say that with love, as the twenty six year old black sheep of the family.
I cock a brow. “That doesn’t sound particularly productive.”
She brightens. “Maybe, as the royal family, we should declare that the nuclear threat to our nation is viable. And that we should, as a nation, move underground. We can all become mole people. Ooh! This factory can be the base from where we start the revolution!”
She wiggles her delicate blonde eyebrows and grins. She looks classically Danish: light blonde hair, bright blue eyes, with a smattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose. She’s always full of her unique sense of humor, although it is a bit morbid.
“Mole people, huh?” I repress a sigh and look away, out the window as the city falls away behind us.
My best friend Erik looks back at both of us from the passenger seat of the SUV.
“Annika, we will be at this factory for a grand total of four hours, tops. I don’t think we will have the time to overthrow the government.” He runs a hand through his dirty blond, close cropped hair, shifting in the passenger seat. All six and a half feet of him is barely confined in the front seat and he doesn’t look comfortable.
Coming in just an inch shorter than him, I can sympathize. Annika is tall for a girl, but when she walks between Erik and me, she looks downright dainty.
She throws Erik a grin. “You don’t think that’s enough time? Maybe you’re just not as efficient as I am.”
Erik rolls his eyes. “I’m much more efficient than any of you Løves. That’s what being raised as a non-royal amongst royals does to a person.”
I frown a little. “Erik, when we were growing up, you went to the same palace tutors as I did. You played the same sports. You even joined the same military regiment as me. Don’t act like you’re exactly a normal person.”
He smiles coolly at me. “And yet… one of us will be a king and the other will not.”
My neck heats. He has always had a funny knack for putting his finger right on the pulse of the issue.
Annika wrinkles her nose, looking at me. “All I know is that you both owe me big time.Momsewanted to send Lars or Finn along with you on this little trip, even after the disastrously bad way they handled things at the easter egg hunt. I convinced her that I am the superior choice.” She grins, showing her teeth. “You’re welcome.”
I ignore that. Of my four siblings though, she is unquestionably my favorite. It doesn’t hurt that Annikaknows exactly when to put on the saccharide smile and when to keep her mouth shut.
Unlike Finn, Lars, and Anders…
“How are my little brothers doing these days?” I ask, looking at her out of the corner of my eye. “Is Anders back from Malaysia or Madagascar or wherever he went?”
“Morocco,” Erik chimes in. “He’s been in Casablanca.”
“He’s just come back.” Annika looks bored. “Lars and Finn have been relatively quiet too. I think Finn is doing some survival fitness thing in the Swiss Alps… and you should know better than I where Lars is. Didn’t he go to New York with you two?”
Erik chuckles, which earns him a glare from me.
“We had to leave him there in our rush to get back,” I say evenly. “Duty called back here at home.”
Annika smirks and rolls her eyes.
“Speaking of being the heir to the throne… I hear that we are going to meet Margot today.” She purses her lips. “You remember Margot, don’t you? Pink hair? An ass that won’t quit? Hooked up with you and somehoweverybodyin the world found out about it?”
My eyes narrow to slits. “Yes, I remember.”
Erik adjusts his mass in the front seat, sliding a look over at the driver. The driver doesn’t even look at him, just keeps his eyes on the road. Erik shrugs.
“I would rather we deal with the situation like this than have some royal fixer have to go clean it up afterward.”
He makes eye contact with me when he says the last bit. My neck heats again.
He’s referencing the same thing that my grandmother did. The time when I was nineteen and acting out, drinking a lot and doing a lot of cocaine. I called Ida while I was strung out on drugs and desperate becauseI’d ended up in a motel with a girl who lost consciousness.
The royal fixers swept in and cleaned everything up. I was sent to dry out in Spain; Mathilde, a hard-core party girl and sometimes friend, ended up in a coma that lapsed into a vegetative state.
I look at the driver, my mouth twisting. There are a ton of things I feel on the topic of Mathilde, but I’m not willing to risk saying any of them out loud in front of the driver. Besides, Annika doesn’t even know.
