“Not really—a scratch.” She lifted her hair off her shoulder and he blanched at the blood on her neck. A soldier strode up with a clean cloth and he took it, pressing it gently against her skin. She didn’t seem to notice. Instead, she was staring mournfully down at her dress. “It’s ripped,” she said, and once again, her voice cracked on a half-sob.
“It can be fixed,” Ari said. He lifted his gaze to Dimitri but his captain seemed as confused as he was.
“Shock,” the man mouthed silently, and Ari nodded. He shouldn’t leave her.
Francesca chose that moment to look up, irritation flaring in her eyes. “You’re kidding me, right?” she said, staring at them both. “I’mnotin shock. I’m barely hurt.”
“You were abducted, drugged, carried to an unknown location and accosted by a man wielding a gun,” Stefan observed dryly. “You could do with some shock.”
“He was an old man with bad aim,” Francesca said. “You both are fussing like you’re my nannies. Look!” She pointed across the garden. “There are the girls. Get me to them and I’ll be good.” She fixed her gaze on Ari, then shifted to take in Dimitri and Stefan. “Truly. I’m being selfish. The faster you can get the party wrapped up, do whatever you need to do there, the faster you can come back to me and tell me how brave I am. Deal?”
Ari stared at her, his heart in his throat. He didn’t know exactly what Silas had told Francesca in the storage room, why she was so insistent that he spare Edeena from the truth, but he had a solid guess. The rest of his memories had slammed home when he’d burst through that last door to find Francesca with Silas.
He could remember Silas at the airstrip now, that night a year ago. He’d not thought anything of it, at first. Silas knew planes, it was one of the things they had in common. They were both out at the airstrip a lot.
But he’d never thought Silas would damage his plane.
Now was not the time for recollections, however. Not with a ballroom full of guests who’d seen entirely too much drama in the royal family for the past few weeks. He squeezed Fran’s hands and realized they still weren’t shaking. She seemed poised, calm, carefully controlled. The way he’d seen his mother appear, countless times, as she stood by his father’s side after receiving the worst of news.
“You sure you’ll be okay?” he rumbled, and Francesca nodded definitively.
“Just as soon as I can get to a mirror,” she said.
22
Fran held it together all the way to the bathroom—the real bathroom in the Visitors’ Palace, which was nowhere near the long hallway she’d gone down before. Nicki, Lauren and Emmaline clustered around her, unraveling her hair from its pins and shaking free the dust and bits of drywall.
“I swear I think I’ve gotten the short end of this stick every single time,” Emmaline was grumbling now, untangling a particularly vicious snarl from where Fran’s hair had gotten tangled in the bag. “Lauren gets attacked by a jealous ex, Nicki rescues a prince, Fran gets shot at. All that happened to me was having my name dragged through international media. It’s not fair.”
Lauren snorted. “Ex-boyfriends have an expiration date,” she said. “The internet lasts forever.”
“I can’t believe this mascara hasn’t run,” Fran said, holding on to the one link to sanity to which she could still credibly cling. “Whatever brand this is, we should buy stock.”
“He shot at you.Shot,” Nicki said, shaking out the train of Fran’s dress. “I can’t believe you got shot at by an old man in a tux. Or that they let him in with a gun.”
“Member of the family,” Emmaline sighed. “It’s a very tradition-tied monarchy, and the right to bear arms is one of the oldest honors. Granted, they may be making some changes to that now.”
“Either way, we need to get you cleaned up, Fran,” Lauren said, tilting her head. “I need more pins, but I think I can salvage this.”
“And this tear really isn’t anything that can’t be covered with embroidery,” Emmaline said. “There’s already so much on the gown as it is. For now, the folds of the gown hide it well enough, especially if you’ll be seated. Which you should be. Seated that is. You probably shouldn’t be standing now.”
Fran started lose track of the conversation, and allowed herself to be pushed and pulled, powdered and patted, until at last Nicki, Lauren and Emmaline were satisfied. Then she let them lead her back down the hall until they found a lit conference room, a tray of water andtsipourositting conspicuously on the table, along with an assortment of cheeses, grapes and crackers.
“Is anyone else hungry?” Nicki announced. “Because I’m starved.”
They sat Fran at the head of the table, and didn’t argue when she pushed away the blanket they draped over her shoulders. “I’m not an invalid, seriously,” she said, though she happily accepted the drink Lauren poured for her, along with the bottled water Nicki pressed into her hand.
You’re all right. You’re okay.Now, Fran knew, she needed to pull it together. She couldn’t unravel now. The act wasn’t over yet. She wasn’t safe.
The girls engaged her in lively chatter for a few minutes more, talking about their own evenings—the talk with the cooks who let drop the queen was already planning an engagement party for Emmaline and Kristos “sometime in the near future,” their individual dances with Dimitri, Kristos—and Nicki’s almost-dance with Stefan.
“He’s the worst,” Nicki said, though her grin was filled with affection. “He didn’t want anyone talking to me in that dress, but he couldn’t talk to me either. He couldn’t take any time to dance with me, but the one time I danced with one of Dimitri’s men, he stared daggers at me across the room. I couldn’t win!”
“Oh, I think you’ve won all right,” Lauren teased. “And was I right or was I right about that dress? You don’t even need to tell me. I was so right.”
Nicki laughed. “You were right. You were also right about the stilettos. Fran, I wish you had those when those assholes came at you with that bag. You would have completely taken them out.”
“Someone’s coming,” Emmaline warned, though at first there was no sound in the hallway. A moment later, however, they heard the distinctive step of a dozen striding feet.
