Which was exactly the point. They didn’t know her at all.
She focused on Stefan. “When Emmaline first attracted Kristos’s notice, you ran identity checks on all of us, pulling up information that was readily available, maybe going a level or two deeper, to make sure we were no immediate threat to the royal family. In my case, you found what I wanted you to find.”
Stefan’s brows shot up, but Fran lifted a quick hand. “I have no doubt that you would have pierced my identity quickly enough, though that one has served me the longest. The others would have fallen in quick succession.”
She forced herself to look at Lauren, then Nicki, then Emmaline. There was no outrage or shock in their faces, at least not yet. There was merely confusion. “I was born not Francesca, though it’s always been a beautiful name to me,” she said quietly. “But my birth certificate says Frannie. Frannie Lambert. I was the child of Gus and Maribeth Lambert and I lived about five miles from a bar on the outskirts of Piketon, Ohio. The bar was my father’s, and it’s not there anymore, but Bert’s Bar and Grill was known by about every biker in Ohio and any of the clubs rolling through as well.”
As she talked, Fran could hear her voice change cadence, slipping back into the same rhythm that’d spiked when Silas had challenged her. She knew that voice, and while she didn’t welcome it, it added a measure of comfort that she couldn’t pull from anywhere else. “Mom and dad split when I was three, and she remarried and lived in the next town over. I stayed with Dad so she could…I don’t know. Focus on her own life or whatever. I spent the next several years of my life on the countertop at Bert’s, or playing in the dirt yard behind the bar. It wasn’t a bad place. The men were rough but they respected Dad and they considered me no more interesting than a puppy. I was simply the newest feature in the bar.”
As she talked she could picture it. The faded newspaper clippings and snapshots tacked behind the bar, the dollar bills with markered-in notes on how or why they’d been donated to the “wall of shame.” The men—and it had been almost all men, with their long, thinning hair and bulging forearms, most of them bearded or trying to be. The women were few and far between, which was okay because her dad usually employed women as servers and back up bartenders, and any time a girl came around his staff members complained they got lower tips.
Her dad had run the place, cooked the cheeseburgers and hot dogs and pulled the beer. He didn’t serve wine and he didn’t serve hard liquor. You went to Bert’s for beer and a burger or you didn’t go at all. He always told Fran that going simple cut down on his expenses, but honestly she didn’t know if he could cook anything more complicated than cheeseburgers and hot dogs. She hadn’t minded though.
“When I got to be about seven years old, someone reported me as not being in school, so I split my time between school and the bar after that. Dad could never take me and it was another few miles up the road, so I got good at running negotiations. I’d get a biker to take me home if it was late and dark, or to take me on to school after dad opened up the bar. He opened early, six a.m., and there was usually someone sleeping it off in the back shed. Sometimes I guessed wrong about who I could trust, but never so wrong that I got hurt. And as I got older, I found the same kind of kids on the playground. Most of them with more money than I had, but that wasn’t saying much.” She shrugged. “Mom eventually wanted custody, though her husband creeped me out. Dad fought it and threatened to take her to court, though that was a bluff. He didn’t have any money. Worked, though, and that’s what mattered.”
The next part was the important part, and Fran blinked, trying to keep her voice steady through it all. “We had our share of troublemakers, and one of them, one night, left to go…home. When he was done with what he did there, he took his truck out of the garage to head back to Bert’s. Never made it. My dad had left early that night, I don’t know why. He was broadsided by that same man before the guy ran off a bridge.” Fran shook her head. “Never saw it coming, they told me. I sure didn’t see it coming either.”
She sighed. “I was only fifteen though. I wasn’t going to live with my mom and her sick-o husband, and I wasn’t going into foster care. I looked old for my age and, well, I knew some things. Some people.” She glanced over to Ari but she couldn’t fix on his face, the pageant of her own memories crowding him out. “I learned new things too. How to make fake IDs, create disappearing trails. How to turn the internet into its own identity factory. I learned how to find out who’d died and who’d simply disappeared, who’d lived and run and lost themselves. I used that information for myself, but…” she swallowed. “For other people too, sometimes. People who needed help.”
The tears were falling now but she couldn’t care about her mascara anymore. She’d never told so much at once to anyone. She’d never told all of it, ever. But Ari had to understand, finally. They all did. “One life led to the next, and to the next. I eventually faked an older ID so I could get my GED without anyone asking questions, then re-fashioned it with a different age to take the standardized tests and enroll in college. The scholarships came unexpectedly, and that’s how I managed such a nice school that no way could I afford.” She flattened her hands on the table, looking straight out at nothing. “Once I managed that, it was a matter of building the new life around me. The blended family in Michigan, the dog. The hot dog parties.”
Nicki’s soft voice cut in. “You made up the hot dog parties? We would have had hot dogs more often if I’d known that.”
The interruption was so unexpected that Fran blinked, and finally her eyesight seemed to clear. It was no longer her father standing at the end of the bar, her mother’s sneering face with her husband leaning too close, the countless parade of weathered, slow-eyed bikers in front of her. It was Nicki and Lauren and Emmaline, sweet Emmaline, whose face was tracked with tears. It was the king and queen sitting so close together their shoulders touched, their hands firmly clasped as if no storm could ever part them. It was Cyril gazing without any expression at all, Stefan with his eyes on Nicki, and Dimitri grinning at her like she’d given him a favorite birthday present. And beside her, still beside her, there was Ari, staring at her as if she was still his whole world.
“Are you finished yet?” he rumbled and she coughed a startled laugh that came out more like a sob, her voice choking when she could speak again.
“I’mnotfinished,” she said. “Everything about me is a lie. My passport, my high school transcripts, my college application. Grad school wasn’t because this ID finally took, this one could finally help me. But I broke laws, I—” Fran stopped, waving a hand at him. “Stop looking at me like that!”
Ari shook his head at her, but he still didn’t stop gazing at her with his heart in his eyes, which meant he still didn’t get it. But then he started talking and it was even worse.
“You haven’t said anything to me this night that is a problem, Francesca. Why would you think it is?”
“Because I’vebrokenthelaw—American law, probably international law. I’m pretty sure I bent a few of Garronia’s laws as well, and I’ve only been here a few days!”
Beside Ari, Dimitri snorted. “I want to see some of those IDs you’ve fashioned. We could use that skill.”
“Dimitri,” the queen’s voice was a warning, but it was still too warm, too loving, and Fran felt the hysteria rise up again within her.
“Stop it!” she practically begged Ari, but he simply shook his head.
“I don’t know what you want me to say to you, Francesca.”
“But I’mnotFrancesca, that’s the point!” Her voice was desperate. Then again, so was she. “No matter what identity I take on to show the world, I’llalwaysbe the girl with the skinned elbows and worn out clothes, who learned to fight in the dusty back lot of her dad’s bar while bikers cheered her on. You—you forgot who you are, for a while, but now you’ve remembered and that’s truly who you are. A good person. A noble person. I’vealwaysknown who I am no matter how much I wish to forget it, and I’ve never wanted to be her.” She bit her lip to keep the tears from falling again, to no avail. “I’m Frannie Lambert, while you…you’re the crown prince of Garronia.”
“I am,” Ari said, eyeing her curiously. “Would you prefer I become a fisherman or a net maker? Of did you prefer me as Ryker Stavros, pilot at large?”
“No!” she retorted. “That’s not who you are, and who you are is amazing.”
“Then how can you imagine that I want you to be anything than who you are?” Ari asked gently. “The woman who looks at me with so much caution in her eyes, whose hands held mine when they were shaking and never let go? Everything you’ve been through makes you everything you are and I love every last part of it. I love Francesca Simmons and I love Frannie Lambert and I would love every person that you were in between. Because you’ve made even the ugly, broken and painful parts of you more beautiful than anyone else could, simply because they are yours.”
He reached over and passed his thumb over her cheek, and his smile became one of wonder. “And how do you keep your eye make-up from melting even when you cry?”
A female staffmember stepped forward as Francesca hiccupped a laugh, pushing a box of tissues toward her. The box was a little short; the woman had clearly been crying too.
“I can’t—I don’t know,” Francesca finally said, his redirect working, at least for the moment. “I kept adding more and more layers to it, and now I think,” she looked up at him with a faint air of horror. “I think it might be permanent.”
“We’ll have to have far more formal events in the castle, then.”
