Erin opened her eyes and looked at Vic. Her wife’s oldest friend. The woman who had been there since before the wedding, before the assassination attempt, before the children. Vic who swore too much and rode horses like a demon andhad once threatened a paparazzo with a riding crop outside the palace gates. Vic who loved Florence like her own.
"If it's Arthur and Cecilia," Erin said, and her voice dropped to something that was almost a whisper, "they won't hurt her. They need her alive. She's the heir. She's the piece on the board that gives them leverage. They're not monsters. They're strategists."
She wasn't sure if she was saying this for Vic or for herself.
"They won't hurt her," Vic repeated, and it sounded like a prayer.
"But if I find out otherwise." Erin's jaw set. "If Arthur has touched her, I will end him. Not through the courts. Not through diplomatic channels. I will find him and I will put my hands on him and he will understand what it means to threaten my family."
Vic didn't flinch. She didn't try to talk Erin down. She just nodded once, her eyes fierce, and said, "I'll be right beside you."
The room was silent. The monitors hummed. Somewhere in the building, a phone rang and was answered.
"Get me those financial audits," Erin said to Helena. "And get me everything you have on Arthur's movements in the last six months. Everything."
She sat down for the first time in four hours. The chair creaked beneath her and her legs trembled and she gripped the edge of the table with both hands and held on. The rage was still there, hot and bright and enormous, but beneath it the fear was growing, a cold current running under the fury, pulling at her, reminding her with every passing minute that Florence was out there somewhere and the sun was going down and her little girl was spending her first night away from home in the hands of strangers.
Erin pressed her damaged fist against the table and let the pain anchor her. She would not sleep tonight. She would not eat.She would sit in this room and she would watch every screen and read every report and chase every lead until Florence was found, because that was what she did. She protected people. It was the only thing she'd ever been good at, and she had failed at it today in the one way that mattered most.
She would not fail again.
7
The bedroom was dark except for the lamp on the bedside table, its warm glow reaching no further than the edge of the bed. The curtains were drawn against the night. The room was quiet in the way that only old houses were quiet, not silent but alive with small sounds, the creak of ancient beams, the tick of the radiator, the distant hum of the security systems that now felt less like protection and more like a reminder of everything they had failed to prevent.
Alexandra sat on the edge of the bed. She was still in the cornflower-blue silk blouse she'd worn for the broadcast, her shoes kicked off on the carpet, her hair down around her shoulders. She hadn't changed. Changing clothes required a kind of intentionality she didn't have right now. It required thinking about fabric and buttons and the mechanics of dressing, and all of those things belonged to a world that functioned normally, and Alexandra's world had stopped functioning at eleven-fifteen that morning when a car drove away with her daughter inside it.
Her phone was on the bedside table. Julia had called twenty minutes ago, her voice carrying the particular tone it got when she was delivering information she knew would be unwelcome.
Cecilia has been in contact. She wants to come to the castle to support you.
Alexandra's jaw had gone rigid. The idea of Cecilia here, in this house, where Florence's pyjamas were still folded on her bed and Percy was still in the stable and the remains of their terrace lunch were still on the tray, was obscene. Cecilia, who had told Florence that some Queens don't last. Cecilia, who had spent forty-four years teaching Alexandra that she was not enough and who now wanted to play the concerned grandmother for whatever audience she imagined was watching.
Don't let her near this house,Alexandra had said, and her voice had been steady and cold and certain.Don't let her near my children. Don't even tell me when she calls again. I don't want to hear her name.
Julia had paused. Then, quietly:Understood. I'll handle it.
The phone was dark now. No new calls. No updates. Nothing from Erin, who had been in the security room since the afternoon, running searches and barking orders and doing all the things that Erin did when the world was falling apart and she needed to put it back together with her hands.
Alexandra lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling. The plaster was old, cracked in places, a web of fine lines that someone had once told her were signs of a house settling. Houses settled. People settled. Foundations shifted under the weight of time and pressure and the things you built on top of them, and sometimes the cracks were just cosmetic and sometimes they went all the way through.
She closed her eyes and saw Florence. Not the Florence from this morning, bright and excited about Percy, but the Florence from last night, lying in bed with her blue eyes fixed on a point past Erin's shoulder, her voice small and careful.Grandmama says some Queens don't last.
A sob rose in Alexandra's throat. She pressed her fist against her mouth and held it there until the pressure subsided. She would not cry again. She had cried for hours and the tears had accomplished nothing and Florence was still gone and crying was a luxury she couldn't afford because somewhere in this country her daughter needed her to be strong.
She wasn't strong. She was hollow. A shell in a blue top, sitting on a bed in a dark room, waiting for someone to tell her that her child was safe. The most powerful woman in the country, and she was waiting. Helpless. Dependent on other people to do the one thing that mattered.
The door opened.
Erin. She stood in the doorway for a moment, silhouetted against the corridor light, and Alexandra could read her body before her face came into focus. The set of her shoulders. The way she was holding herself, spine rigid, jaw clenched, the posture of a woman who had been running on will alone and was reaching the end of what will could sustain.
Erin closed the door behind her. The room dimmed back to the amber glow of the single lamp.
"We tracked the car," Erin said. She was crossing the room as she spoke, her voice flat with exhaustion, her movements automatic. She pulled her jacket off and tossed it over the back of a chair. "ANPR picked it up on the A3 heading east, then the M25 northbound. It dropped off the network near Guildford. Switched plates, we think, or switched vehicles entirely. MI5 is running secondary tracking on the new plates. Helena's teamfound a possible match on a B-road in Surrey heading towards a property owned by one of Arthur's associates."
"Which associate?"
"Lord Latimer. Old family money, estate in the Surrey countryside. Connected to Arthur through the Privy Council and about four layers of gentleman's clubs and shooting parties." Erin unbuttoned her shirt and pulled it off. Beneath it she was wearing a black sports bra that showed the lean definition of her arms, the flat plane of her stomach, the scar on her left ribcage that was a pale crescent in the dim light. "The financial audits are underway. Helena's flagged three transactions in the last six months that route through trusts connected to Arthur's private office."
