“A suicide—”
The candle I was staring at flares up. In my reality, it consumes the last of the air left in the chapel. I can’t breathe. My mind going dark, I sway.
THEO
Dense black smoke is rushing in from under the door and billowing into the bedroom. The hot, acrid fumes spread much too fast. Within seconds of the flare-up, the fire rips through the bedroom, growing faster and louder, surrounding me, crackling, its multiple tongues licking closer and closer. I cough as the poisonous smoke fills my lungs. It stings my eyes. I can barely see anything except that I’m cut off from both the door and the windows.
Is it just my wing or the entire palace that’s on fire? Are Gigi, Mother, Max, Grandma, and the others safe?
I push through the flames toward the window. My pajamas catch fire. I can smell my hair burning. But no matter. If I stay here another minute, I’m dead. I punch the glass.
“Your Highness,” Roberto hisses. “Your Highness!”
Roberto?Where’s Darrel?
No, wait, Darrel wasn’t yet my personal attendant during the fire. It was Gaston. He died in the flames trying to get into my room. The multiple smoke alarms in my wing had all been deactivated. The guards and the night shift staff had been drugged. They perished in the fire. All except one of the maids, the likely arsonist, who disappeared that night. Carlo’s people found her dead body in the woods outside Pombrio, months later.
Slowly, my sense of time and place returns. I’m upright, but only thanks to Roberto, Max and Gigi, propping me from all sides. It seems I had a brief hallucinatory episode, but at least I didn’t collapse on the floor.
With the awareness returns the horror of what Roberto had said before I passed out.
“Elise,” I breathe out as he loosens the collar of my uniform.
Mother joins our small group, handing me a glass of water, “Here, drink up.”
I take a sip, just to wet my lips enough to be able to speak. “Elise… Is she…? Did she…?”
“She’s fine, Your Highness,” Roberto says. “Elise Pontet is fine.”
“Thank God!” I drink more, feeling as though a mountain has been lifted off my chest. “You spoke of a suicide. Did she try to kill herself?”
“It wasn’t her.”
“Who was it?”
“The former head of MESS, Carlo Bodden-Bock.”
Oh, shit.“Did he succeed?”
“Yes.”
I take a moment to let it sink. “How did he kill himself?”
“By hara-kiri.”
Shocking as it sounds, Carlo’s chosen method doesn’t surprise me. A lifelong marital arts buff and admirer of the samurai, it’s only fitting that he chose the Japanese method of ritual suicide.
Roberto reaches into his pocket and hands me a folded sheet of paper. “This is a copy of the note he left for the Reigning Prince Richard.”
I unfold and read it.
Your Royal Highness,
I am innocent of treason. I have never spied for the enemy. But I failed to expose and stop whoever did and is still doing so. I hope the new head of MESS will be able to smoke him out.
Although no longer in charge, I find myself unable to move on. We were close friends in our youth. Now you won’t talk to me or look at me. I deserve your censure. I’m responsible for too many failures and too much dishonor.
There is only one way to wash it off.
