“Glad to hear it! Say hi to my dodgeball buddy when you get home.”
“I can say hi tonight,” I offer. “When I travel alone, Matteo and I talk almost daily before his bedtime.”
“Jonas d’Alenq, you’re the best father Matteo could have.”
We both know it isn’t true, Your Highness.
“What about the royal family?” I ask. “Everyone all right?”
She nods. “They sent me here with a message.”
Oh good! Finally.
A concern that had crossed my mind when I saw her in the Sky Hall resurfaces, triggered by her heads-up.The stakes are much too high to not air it.
I squint at Gigi. “Can you be sure you weren’t followed? It might’ve been safer to call me on the secure line.”
“No line is really secure anymore.” She smooths back a blond strand. “And we’re certain I wasn’t followed. Kurt has his hands full these days, thanks to a diversion MESS and MINDFUCH jointly concocted for him.”
The Mount Evor Secret Service in Pombrio and our agency in Paris, the Modern Institute for the Neat, Diligent, Fair and Useful Conservation of Heritage or MINDFUCH, rarely work together.
Scratch rarely. The MESS spooksneverwork with anyone other than the royal family or the prime minister’s office. The spook in chief, Adam Von Dietz, has paranoia encoded into his DNA. He’s worse than Carlo Bodden-Bock, his predecessor, that way. Reigning Prince Richard’s childhood friend, Carlo trusted everyone in the extended royal family and high nobility by default. Partly out of loyalty, but also because he knew that if our powerful archenemy Kurt Ozzi succeeded in his push to get Mount Evor stripped of statehood, the peerage had the most to lose.
While that hasn’t changed, Adam doesn’t have Carlo’s qualms. He’s been shrinking Prince Richard’s circle of confidence every month since he became the head of MESS. There’s the mole problem, of course. But there’s also the fact that Kurt had Crown Prince Theodor’s helicopter shot out of the sky three months ago. Theodor survived, but his pilot and his right-hand man, Darrel Vlovsky, were killed in the crash. That’s how far Kurt was willing to go to stop us from finding the third key.
But we have it now.
Problem is, we must locate six more keys to secure Mount Evor’s future. With only a year left to hunt them down, it’s a daunting task.
“MESS and MINDFUCH working together!” I shake my head with incredulity. “What did they come up with? What’s the diversion?”
“I’m afraid it’s classified.”
Damn Adam!“Even to the key seeker of the moment?”
She spreads her hands. “All I’m authorized to tell you is that it’s an elaborate plan spearheaded by Adam, Max, and your cousin Louis.”
Ah, now I see.
Prince Maximilian and his wife Lucie used to work at MINDFUCH when Max was searching for the first key. They’re back in Mount Evor now, but Max still has sway over the agency. For all I know, he oversees it behind the scenes. And my cousin Louis is now ambassador to France. A high-ranking diplomat and Arrago County’s new duke, he is well-liked by everyone in the principality, including at MINDFUCH and at MESS.
Louis must’ve brokered the interagency cooperation to give me a better chance to find the key. A wave of gratitude for my cousin washes over me and doubles the pressure I’ve been under for the past weeks. I absolutely must find, retrieve, and safely deliver to Pombrio the fourth key to the vault. The fate of my homeland hangs in the balance. Not to mention the d’Alenq family honor.
Especiallythe d’Alenq family honor.
CHAPTER7
JONAS
My comfy little life was upended soon after Princess Felicia received a three-part revelation about the fourth key.
She saw the Key to the Key first. It was a woman once again. A long-haired twenty-something of average height, she had pale eyes and blond hair. Felicia saw her rushing down a wintry street of a big anglophone city. The woman wore a puffer coat, a hat and a long, thick scarf around her neck. To shield herself from the biting wind, she’d pulled the scarf over the bottom half of her face.
When the woman ducked into the Tube at the Charing Cross station, the vision stopped. MESS was unable to identify her with what Felicia gave them. But her city was established beyond doubt—London.
In a follow-up vision the next day, Felicia saw yours truly in the d’Alenq mansion in Bloomsbury. Fortunately, I was in the kitchen, having breakfast with Mrs. Everly, and not in bed having sex with some English rose or Caribbean hibiscus that I’d picked up in a bar the previous night.
The oracle now held the key seeker, the city, and the general appearance of the Key to the Key. But the latter was still impossible to ID.
