“Silence!” He hissed and despite herself Fran froze, her eyes on the gun, the gun that wasn’t shaking, wasn’t wavering, no matter how old Silas was. The count was former military—obviously former military—and he was pointing a gun at her.
Relax, relax, she implored herself. A lot of men carried guns, even back at her father’s bar. Most of the time it was for show, the weapons never loaded. That had to be what was going on here, too. Silas was acount. He wouldn’t shoot her—he wouldn’t.
Taking a deep breath, Fran squared her shoulders. She stepped deliberately to the side and Silas followed her with the gun. “So now what?” she asked quietly. Steadily. “You’re going to kill me, Silas?”
“Don’t call me that,” he growled, but the gun stayed on her. The gun and the glare of a man she was beginning to realize was profoundly, intensely unstable. As if the bag and the chloroform hadn’t been a clue.
She tried again, schooling her voice to its most soothing register. “Okay, then what—”
“Be still!” he snapped. “You have no understanding of your place. I looked up your life, you know, your pathetic life in pathetic Michigan. Your family has done nothing of merit—there’s barely any information out there about them. Your house is an anonymous pit of squalor in a development little more than a shantytown. You have no sense of your history because youhaveno history. So how dare you trot yourself in front of an actual prince, preening like some little dog in heat, when he’s still trying to recover?”
Sudden anger flashed through Fran, cooking her from the inside. “You don’t know me, Count Saleri,” she said, as calmly as she could. “You don’t know anything about me.”
“I know everything Ineedto know. You’re a cheap, American, gold-digging whore.” He fairly spat the words, and in that moment, Fran saw him, truly saw him.
And she knew this man. Not specifically Count Saleri, martinet of some tiny little hamlet in a kingdom halfway around the world, no. But a grouchy old man who’d let life get the better of him—yeah. She knew that guy. The kind of man who’d taken in every good thing and spilled out nothing but bad from it, who’d dragged defeat from the jaws of victory so many times, he was sure life itself was out to get him. She blinked and didn’t see Silas Saleri in front of her any more, she saw Bill Lakshi, the drunk at the corner of the peeling counter, blearily taking a swing at anyone who drew near. She saw Mark Hayward and Bob Gutz, leaning over the pool table cracking up over their own dirty jokes as they spit tobacco juice into glasses she’d have to wash later. She saw Dave Cline, right before he left to go beat up his wife for the last time. The night he later got in a truck and killed himself when he’d run off the bridge.
And not just himself, either.
No, that would have been too much of a kindness.
Silas’s voice rose, cutting across Fran’s thoughts. “I saidlisten to me, you stupid girl. You don’t know anything about nobility. You don’t know anything about class. If you really cared for Aristotle you would leave him alone to marry someone of his station, someone who could expunge the shame that you disgusting people have already brought this country, infiltrating the royal palace like you own it when you arenothing. You aredirt. I should kill you now to rid us of the plague you’re bringing to our shores.”
Another flash of anger cut through Fran so quick, so hot, that all her fear suddenly blanked.
Her head came up with a snap. “You talk a lot of shit, you know that?” she asked, and it wasn’t Francesca’s voice talking any more. It wasn’t the Summa Cum Laude psychology scholarship earner, the earnest, hard-working student dedicating herself to serving with serenity, composure and compassion.
No. She was Frannie Lambert now, with calloused hands and bitten off fingernails, bruises on her legs and shoes two sizes too small. She was Bert’s little girl with the big laugh and the battered knuckles and she shouted back at Silas loud enough to be heard all the way back to that tiny little bar in that tiny little town that had been everything to her. Everything and nothing in the end.
“Big man with the gun,” she sneered, and even her voice sounded young—so young, so belligerent, so furious in the face of senseless tragedy that had changed her life forever. “You try to kill Ari too? When he dumped your daughter and told you to go kiss his ass, that he was going to marry who he wanted? I saw the way you stared at him in the ballroom, and you know what I saw in your face? I saw guilt. Guilt and relief and maybe a sneaking satisfaction that whatever you did to him, nobody’s gonna catch it after all. But he is going to catch you. You wanna know how I know? He’s going to catch you because heknowssomething went down at that airstrip. He knows something went wrong that he hasn’t quite remembered yet.”
“Shut up,” Silas growled, but Frannie couldn’t shut up. Wouldn’t shut up. She’d been shut up for too damned long and she’d had it with staying quiet.
“Iknowyou Silas,” she said. “I know exactly who you are. What’d you do, spike his gas tank? You were there that night; I’d bet money on it. You were there and you crippled his plane. Crippled it and watched Ari take off knowing you were sending him to his death—and why? You werethatpissed he didn’t want Edeena?”
“Ididn’tcripple his plane,” Silas roared, waving his gun at her with his own flash of fury that finally broke through Fran’s bluster and made her back up a step.
What the hell was she thinking? This man had a gun!
But Silas was caught up in his own memories now. “If Ari had flown like a military pilot instead of like a carnival sideshow, he would have been fine—dropped into the water, yes, injured probably. But fine! And close to home. Edeena is a trained nurse, they’d been friends since they were little. She was perfect for him! Perfect for him and perfect to nurse him back to health until he could see the value she brought, the grace and standing and class. Andfinallythe Saleri family would be part of the throne as we always should have been, instead of on the outside, one station less royal, when ours was the older and truer bloodline and has always been!”
Silas pointed his gun at Fran again, more menacingly this time. “Instead Aristotle didn’t have the grace to even die right! He came back with another piece of American filth and now he won’t look at anyone else.”
“He came back and he’s going to marry me, you jackass,” Frannie jeered, so shocked at what Silas was saying that she couldn’t do anything more than egg him on.He’d—he’d tried to harm Ari? Deliberately?“He’s going tomarryme and we’ll have amillionbabies and you’llneverget to the throne.”
“You stupid bitch!”
Fran saw it coming, the jerk of his hand, the lurch of his finger as it squeezed the trigger. Saw it coming and still couldn’t believe it, couldn’t move—couldn’t react. The bullet that crashed out of the gun—Son of a bitch, the thing was actually loaded!—and buried itself in the wall over her shoulder.
Horror and fear swamped Fran again, pushing her beyond anger, beyond anything but panic-stricken survival…and another set of skills she’d learned the hard way. She knew guns and what they could do in the hands of sloppy drunks or rage-fueled lunatics. She couldn’t stand back and make herself a target. The bastard couldn’t get a clean shot off at her if she was inside of three feet of him, and for the love ofGodif she was going down, he was going down with her.
She launched at Silas with all the strength of the dozen lives she’d fought through up to now, teeth and nails and fists and feet ready for a brawl.
“What the hell!”Ari pulled up short in the manicured park, the interior courtyard of the Visitors’ Palace eerily still in the wake of the gunshot. Dimitri raced by him, grabbing his arm.
“Center building, storage building. No muzzle flash—they’re in one of the interior rooms, nothing in there,” Dimitri barked. The captain had his gun pulled, and they took off running as someone else breached the courtyard, running fast toward them from the direction of the ballroom.
The door to the storage building was locked but no match for Dimitri piling into it, its flimsy fastening breaking on impact. Inside the space was a long tee’d off hallway, two men standing to either side of the door at its end. They didn’t move as Ari and Dimitri raced up, but their weapons were on the floor in front of them, their faces stoic.
