Vic stood in the doorway. She was still in her riding clothes but her helmet was gone, her hair wild around her face, her green eyes wide and glassy with what Alexandra recognised instantly as panic. Her chest was heaving. There was a scratch across her cheekbone that was beading with blood. Her hands were shaking.
"Vic?" Erin was on her feet. "What happened? Where's Florence?"
Vic opened her mouth. Closed it. Her face crumpled and she gripped the doorframe as though it was the only thing holding her upright. When she spoke, her voice was raw and cracked and it broke something open inside Alexandra that she would not be able to close again.
"Florence has been taken."
The words didn't make sense. Alexandra heard them but they didn't arrange themselves into meaning. They just hung there, suspended in the warm afternoon air between the teapot and the strawberries and the dragonfly above the lake.
Florence has been taken.
"What do you mean, taken?" Alexandra's voice was very calm. The way her voice always got when her body understood something before her mind did. "Taken where? By whom?"
Vic was shaking. The blood from the scratch on her cheek had run to her jaw. "A car. On the bridle path. It came from the estate road — it had the right plates, the right windscreen sticker, the security credentials. The driver said there'd been a change of plan, that Florence needed to return to the house immediately. Jennings got in the car with her. He said he'descort her back. I thought — I thought it was—" She pressed the back of her hand against her mouth. "I thought it was real. It looked real. Jennings said the documentation looked right."
Alexandra stood up. The teacup fell from her hand. She didn't hear it break. Everything had gone very quiet inside her: a vast, ringing silence, like the world after a bomb goes off, when the noise is so absolute that it becomes soundlessness.
"Florence." She said her daughter's name and it came out as a whisper. "Florence is gone?"
"We need to get to the security room," Erin said. Her voice was flat and hard, the voice of a woman who had spent fifteen years running towards crises while everyone else ran away. She was already moving, her body coiled, her jaw set, her green eyes blazing with an intensity that Alexandra had seen only a handful of times in their marriage. The bodyguard was back. The protector. "Vic, come with me. Tell me everything. Alex?—"
She turned to Alexandra and for one brief second the mask slipped and Alexandra saw what was underneath, raw, blinding terror. Then Erin's face closed and she was all business again.
“Find Julia. I'll find out what's happening."
But Alexandra was already following. She left the broken teacup and the strawberries and the peaceful afternoon behind her and walked through the terrace door into the house, and the warm stone corridor was cool against her bare arms and the sound of her own heartbeat was very loud in her ears. Her legs were moving but she couldn't feel them. Her hands were at her sides but she couldn't feel those either.
The only thing she could feel was the place on her palm where Florence's hand had been that morning, small and cool and trusting, when they'd walked together down the path to the stables.
Florence was gone.
The world kept turning but nothing in it made sense any more.
4
Erin took the stairs three at a time.
The security room was in the basement of the castle's east wing, a reinforced space that had been a wine cellar before the renovation, now fitted with banks of monitors, encrypted communication links, and a situation table that could seat twelve. She hit the door at speed and shouldered through it. The room was already full. Two Protection Officers at the monitor stations, their faces tight. Helena Ward at the head of the table, her red hair immaculate but her eyes betraying something Erin had never seen in her before. Uncertainty.
Vic was behind Erin, talking too fast, her words tumbling over each other. "—the car was right there on the path, it just pulled up, and the driver had everything, the plates matched, the sticker on the windscreen, even the radio frequency?—"
Alex was behind Vic. She was white-faced and silent, moving like a sleepwalker. Her hands were clasped in front of her and her blue eyes were glassy. She looked like a woman who'd been told something her body had accepted but her mind was still fighting. Erin had seen that look before. The look of someone standing in the first thirty seconds of the worst day of their life.
"Where is my daughter?" Erin's voice was low and controlled, and the room went silent. Every officer turned to look at her. Helena straightened. The two Protection Officers at the monitors stopped what they were doing. "Someone tell me where Florence is."
Helena stepped forward. "Ma'am, at approximately eleven-fifteen this morning, a vehicle matching our fleet specifications entered the estate via the south service road. The vehicle carried valid plates and a current windscreen credential. The driver was in standard livery. He intercepted Princess Florence's riding party on the bridle path at the edge of the south woodland?—"
"I know all of this. Vic told me. What I want to know is where the car went and where my daughter is right now."
Julia Grey-Hughes-Wilding, Alex’s most trusted advisor and Vic’s wife, appeared in the doorway. She must have been somewhere in the house when the alarm went up, because she was still in her reading glasses, her dark hair slightly dishevelled, a book in one hand that she set down on the nearest surface without looking at it. She took one look at Alexandra's face and crossed the room, placing herself beside the Queen with the practised calm of someone who had been managing crises for thirty years. Her warm brown eyes found Alex's and she murmured something too low for Erin to hear. Alex nodded once, a tiny motion, and Julia put her hand on Alex's arm and guided her to a chair.
Good. Julia had Alex. Erin could focus.
She turned back to Helena. "The bodyguard. Jennings. He got in the car?"
Vic answered before Helena could. She was pacing the length of the room, her riding boots loud on the concrete floor, her hands running through her wild hair. "He said he'd escort Florence back to the house. That's standard procedure if there's a change of plan. The close-protection officer stays with theprincess. I didn't question it. The car looked right, the driver looked right, Jennings didn't hesitate?—"
"Did you try to follow?"
