Fran composed herself as the small group descended on the room. The queen entered first, along with her husband, their gazes immediately fixing on Fran.
“Don’t you dare stand up,” Catherine announced when she shifted. “In fact, we should all sit down. All of us, everyone.” She gestured imperiously to the seats around the conference table and everyone seated themselves. Fran also settled back, fidgeting as more people entered. There were more than a dozen feet in this entourage to be sure. Stefan and Dimitri came first, then Kristos and Ari, then Cyril the advisor and another handful of guards.
Ari strode past his parents to her side, and dropped down to one knee until his face was level with hers.
“How are you feeling,” he asked earnestly. “Have you seen a doctor?”
He was so intent that Fran nearly burst out laughing. “No I haven’t seen a doctor. I got scratched by flying drywall, not skewered. I’m fine.”
Ari grimaced, clearly not satisfied with that answer, then moved to the chair next to her. He glanced to his parents. “We should have a doctor in here.”
“We will, once he’s done examining Silas,” Queen Catherine said, and her tone was severe as she regarded Fran. “He’s my relation. I can’t help but feel responsible for this…this attack on you.”
From the pained look on the faces of King Jasen and Kristos, Fran could tell that this wasn’t the first time the queen had made this statement. “I don’t think this is anything you could have predicted,” she said gently, trying to ignore the grateful glance Jasen sent her way. Instead she held the queen’s gaze. “Silas wasn’t truly going to hurt me, I don’t think. He needed someone to blame for everything that had gone wrong in his world, and I was the most likely candidate.”
“But that makes nosense.” The queen put her hands to her head. “Ari and Edeena were not going to get married. They had no intentions of being anything more than friends. Nothing was going to change that.”
“I know,” Fran said gently. “But a year ago, in the first brush of realizing that the two of them weren’t following the script he’d so carefully worked out for them, Silas wasn’t so sure they wouldn’t come around. He thought perhaps he could—push them together a bit. Make Ari see how valuable Edeena could be to him.”
Ari scowled at her. “What are you talking about?”
Stefan’s face was now lit with understanding, and Cyril’s was too, but Dimitri merely looked ready to kill someone. “What did he do?” the captain asked gruffly. “Specifically?”
“I don’t know what, specifically,” Fran said. “But he—he did something to Ari’s plane that night.” She swiveled to look at him, and though she longed to reach for his hand, she didn’t. She needed him to recall this moment the way it really happened, taking in the information and judging it on its own merits, not clouded by her leftover panic.
“I don’t think it was anything truly treacherous, like spiking his gas tank or whatever,” she continued. “Not something that could seriously threaten Ari’s life on take-off. He simply did…something, I think to one of the gauges or monitors, to cause them not to function correctly.”
“But why?” someone asked, but she couldn’t turn away from Ari. Ari, who stared at her with deep and growing understanding, everything falling into place.
“He thought that if Ari dumped into the water close to home, maybe was injured, needed to convalesce—well, Edeena would be there. She’s a trained nurse, and the two of them were good friends. If he cast her in a caretaking role…”
“Oh, my god, she’s going to kill Silas when she finds out,” Kristos interrupted, his voice stricken. “And if she doesn’t, I will.”
“He was there,” Ari said slowly. “That night, Francesca is right. He was at the airstrip. I thought it was odd, I remember now, because he hadn’t been at the state dinner. Edeena had, but she’d left early with a headache or something, and he’d not shown up at all.”
“He was waiting for you there?”
Ari shrugged. “I don’t know. I’d told him about wanting to test new equipment earlier in the week, that I was still making installations, but I didn’t think I’d fly that night. There was the storm, and I figured it was late—night even. I could fly another day. But then I got to the strip to check things out and Silas was there.”
“What did he say to you?” the king’s words were sharp, but Fran knew Ari’s answer before he gave it.
“I honestly don’t remember,” he said, wincing as he rubbed his head. “He was excited about the new instruments I’d installed. I—I must have told him about them. He encouraged me to try them out, said the storm was moving east, not west.” He grimaced. “Idiot that I am, I didn’t question what he said. I listened to the parts I wanted to hear—I wanted to get away from him, and the damn fool wouldn’t leave. I got in the plane.”
“That’s why you felt the leftover threat when you thought about that night,” Fran said. “Hewasa threat to your family—to you certainly. But maybe to others too.”
Lauren spoke up then, focusing her attention on Cyril. “If Kristos and Ari are no longer in the picture, who inherits? This Silas?”
“No,” King Jasen said firmly. “But the succession plan is not public for that very reason, to protect the potential benefactors from untimely deaths.” He pursed his lips. “If Silas was trying to kill my sons to inherit...”
“I don’t think he was,” Fran said quickly, lifting both hands. “He simply…he just wanted things to go his way.”
Ari staredat Francesca in disbelief. The man had shot at her—had shouted at her, according to the interrogation they’d completed on his men. The men said he’d been speaking in English, and they weren’t as competent of speakers, but Ari didn’t know if he believed them. Silas’s insults had only been words, however, Cyril and Stefan had said. And words that were not central to the matter at hand.
But whatever they were, they seemed to have left Francesca unfazed. She looked around with such a gracious serenity, her hair tidied and her dress straightened, that no one would never know she’d been abducted except by her missing earrings. They’d found the second one in the burlap bag, along with a cloth soaked in chloroform.
Rage knifed through him again. “He went a little too far to ensure things went his way. That gun wasloaded. You could have been killed.” he growled, then shifted his gaze to Cyril. “What’s the recourse here?”
“We need to gather more information,” Cyril began, ever hesitant, and Ari’s temper frayed further.
