Protect: Protect Book 4

by Ryann, Olivia

  The conversation moves on, but I’m busy thinking of all the possibilities. Maybe I can find all the heirs in time. Maybe they will be less heinous than my own sister is to me.

  Zoning out, I come back to the conversation when Dryas squeezes my knee again. I look up to find Damen talking.

  “—so basically, we are hoping to find people who hate Prince Henrick. And I heard that you might know someone that fits that description.”

  Jelena arches a brow, swirling the beer in her pint glass. She gives Damen a suspicious look. “I might.”

  Damen leans toward her, blatantly flirting. “We might have some things to discuss further, then. Should I order another round?”

  Her eyes sparkle. “Maybe so.”

  Dryas clears his throat, rising. “I think that is our cue to leave, Rue. Miko, come with us to help procure lodging.”

  I stand up, following Dryas out of the bar. The last thing I see as I’m leaving is Damen pulling up the chair I just vacated and leaning close to Jelena to whisper something in her ear.

  17

  Rue

  When I get up in the morning, I find coffee waiting for me in the kitchen of the little house we rented. Dryas is at the cramped kitchen table. He’s looking at a map of the area that we are in, a puzzled look on his face. He picks up his half-full coffee mug, taking a sip.

  He sees me enter the kitchen and nods to me. “I made coffee. And Miko brought cream from somewhere.”

  I wrinkle my nose. “Thanks, but coffee turns my stomach lately. I don’t know why. I liked it so much before…”

  He’s too absorbed in the map to really pay attention to what I’m saying. I drop a kiss on his head as I sit down, grimacing. I’m more than a little sore from the night before when we fucked three times in a row.

  Actually, we have fucked like that every night since Dryas rescued me from the auction. It’s no wonder that I am supremely exhausted, even when I’m just getting up.

  I lean over the table, examining the map. “It’s strange, being in a country where I don’t recognize anything on the map.”

  Dryas’s mouth crooks up at the corner. He reaches across and brushes a lock of my hair back, which makes my heart start galloping. He turns back to the map, not even noticing how flustered I am.

  “I think we are here,” he says, pointing to a little green peninsula that juts out into the sea. “And here is Podgorica, the capital.”

  He moves his hand, tapping on a large city.

  My stomach churns, gurgling. I exhale. “Do we have any bread? Toast and jam sounds amazing right about now.”

  He looks uncertain, shrugging and getting up. “I will see.”

  I frown, watching him move to the kitchen counter. “I didn’t mean for you to get it for me. I can make toast.”

  He looks at me with mild amusement. “I know. I just like being your provider. Keeps you coming back, right?”

  I roll my eyes as he chuckles. “Have you heard anything from Damen?”

  Dryas nods, looking down as he works. “He came back for a little while late last night. Apparently, he had quite a good time. He also said he learned all about the resistance that is working to undermine Henrick.”

  I raise my brows. “Really? He just gave Jelena liquor and she told him everything?”

  Dryas smirks. “Something like that, yes. Apparently, we are in a stronghold of sorts out here on the coast. Rebel territory, Damen kept calling it. After you eat breakfast, Damen is going to come by and take us to meet Ana Vukotić.”

  I pause. “My half-sister? I take it he’s already met her, then?”

  He nods, setting a little plate before me loaded with toast and some kind of fruit preserves. Famished, I eat in a hurry, thinking about Ana as I jam toast in my mouth.

  What will she be like?

  Rushing through eating and getting dressed in a conservative white linen frock, I am raring to go by the time Damen shows up. He looks a bit ragged and rumpled, still wearing his clothes from the night before.

  I’m still ready to follow him anywhere, but luckily Dryas and I don’t follow him far. We set out walking, soon coming upon what looks like a big tin barn.

  When Damen rolls back the door and ushers us inside, I’m a little agog. It’s definitely a supermarket of some kind, filled to the gills with metal shelves. The room itself is extremely dusty and dingy, with spiderwebs on every corner and dirt smudged into the once-white floors.

  Every shelf is brimming with all sorts of things: a small woven basket of yo-yos next to boxes and boxes of macaroni noodles, a spilled sack of cheap candy next to no less than a thousand bundles of oversized salad tongs. On and on it goes, up and down the length and breadth of the barn.

  There seems to be no method of how everything is put on the shelves. As Damen leads us through the shelves, I can’t stop staring. He rounds a corner suddenly, coming to a sudden halt.

  There, behind a counter covered in newspapers, is a woman in her thirties with a mop of bright red hair. She looks up, smacking her gum, and adjusts her purple velour overalls.

  “Dis is the one?” she says, her English heavily accented. I feel her gaze fall on me, judging everything she can see. My cheeks blaze and I want so badly to hide behind Dryas.

  Damen steps forward, waving to me. “Yes. This is the one I told you about. Ana, meet Rue. Rue, Ana.”

  Ana looks at me, popping her gum. “Rue. Roooooooueeee. What kind of name is that?”

  My tongue is dry in my mouth. “English, I think.”

  She snorts, then picks up a piece of her fiery hair. “I think we are related, no?”

  “Maybe,” I say, shrugging. “The fact that Declan Stuart was even here in Montenegro is news to me.”

  She leans forward on the counter, smirking. “You want proof?”

  I hesitate, looking to Dryas. Ana snaps her fingers at me, looking disgusted.

  “You no need to have him permit. You are strong woman. I have sense for these things. Here, you come and see for yourself.”

  She ducks out from behind the counter without a word from me, expecting that I will follow her. I start after her, throwing a glance back to Dryas. He stays put with a skeptical look on his face.

  When I catch up to Ana, she’s at a half-wall of dusty printer paper boxes, opening a few a setting them aside dismissively. I sneeze as she shifts boxes, throwing up clouds of dust into the air.

  Finally, Ana seems to have found the right box. She pulls it out and opens it, digging through the papers inside. Ana rummages through the contents and discovers a huge photo album, its cover as dusty as everything else around here.

  She blows some of the dust off of the cover, revealing the Rebel King’s monogram in gold and purple. She turns the album around and offers it to me.

  It’s heavy in my hands as I open the cover, the leather creaking and crackling under my touch. The very first page I see is one of Declan Stuart with two red-headed children on his lap. He stares at the cameraman, his expression serene.

  “I am that one,” Ana says, pointing to the child on the left. “And that is Sergio.”

  I look up in surprise. “I have a half-brother?”

  Ana smacks her gum. “He is dead. Most of Stuart’s heirs have been hunted down and killed.”

  That fact is mind-blowing. “What? By whom?”

  She pulls a face. “Who do you think?”

  That gives me pause. “Ummm… Prince Henrick?”

  Nodding, she crosses her arms. “And that father of his. It is a big secret here that the King could not… what is the word? Could not make his own child?”

  It takes me a minute to digest that bit of information. “I see.”

  Looking back at the album again, I turn a few pages. For the most part, it seems like the Rebel King liked to pose next to anything that would make him seem wealthy. A pile of gold, a handful of large gemstones. Anything he could pose next to, staring at the camera almost threateningly.

  It appears that the king may have
been a little frivolous, not to mention shallow. And his signature pose looks a little silly, to boot. That sort of makes me wish I had gotten to know him, these shows of bravado and wealth aside.

  I flip through the album, then blink. I turn back a page, and there we are. Little Ama and I on the Rebel King’s lap, the king wearing the same expression as he does in the other photos. My mum stands behind the throne that the king sits in, looking awkward. This photo clearly wasn’t taken for her.

  My jaw drops.

  If ever there was proof, this is it. I spread my fingers across the figures in the picture, feeling a twist of pain. If the king of Montenegro and Prince Henrick hadn’t decided to kill Stuart… if my mum hadn’t become a druggie… This is what could have been, if not for those simple facts.

  My eyes mist over while I stand here like an idiot, crying about what never was. Ana comes over and takes the album from me.

  “He is not worth being sad about,” she says dispassionately. “It is all in the past. Long ago, the past has become a corpse.”

  She looks at the picture again, tapping her finger over the image of my mum. “That girl lived here. She was from here. Let me see…”

  She fishes the picture out from between the sticky album pages, turning it over.

  “Irina Paldrova, age twenty. My mother, she used to spend hours looking at this book, no? She always pointed out those that were from here.”

  She taps her finger on the photo again, then hands the picture to me. When she closes the album with a snap, I realize that she means for me to take it. Looking down at the photo, holding it carefully by the edges, I try to make sense of what Ana has just told me.

  My mum was named Irene, that’s true enough. But Ana’s claim that she was from here… that can’t be true. Can it?

  Ana smacks her gum as she puts the album back into the dusty box. I wipe my eyes as she rearranges the boxes a little, then turns around.

  “So...” I feel the weight of her gaze again, judging me. There is no way I can ever measure up to whatever ruler she is using. She blows a bubble, then pops it. “You are the first sister I have ever met.”

  Blowing out a breath, I don’t quite know what I am supposed to say. “My sister Amabel is supposed to be the next princess of Montenegro. I would guess that she is your sister too.”

  It’s only then that I realize I have to tell Ama that she’s about to marry her own murderous brother. My mouth twists at the very idea.

  “Oh?” Ana says, interested. “There are whispers surrounding the palace about a coronation and a wedding. Does your sister not know that Henrick is her brother?”

  She looks a little repulsed. The look on her face cements for me the fact that I have to tell Ama before her wedding.

  “No.” My cheeks burn.

  Ana turns, heading back toward where the men are still standing. She pauses, grabbing my arm. “You should tell her. She would want to know. Besides, none of the royal brides seem to live long…”

  Her cool brown eyes seem to burn with intensity as she speaks. Then she just releases me again and walks ahead, as if it didn’t matter after all.

  I follow behind, more befuddled than ever.

  18

  Dryas

  On the way back to the little house that we have rented, I keep an eye on Rue. Her red hair has been tamed into a long rope braid. She wears a white linen dress with tiny black buttons down the front, a dress that makes my fingers itch with the need to undress her.

  She stares at her feet, lost in thought. A photograph in clutched in her hands, but she has not yet told me what it is a picture of. Whatever she learned from Ana, it has made her almost disconsolate.

  I share a look with Damen, who just glances at Rue and shrugs. As we get back to the shabby front yard of the rental, I make a signal to Damen to find somewhere else to be.

  He fades into the background silently. I follow Rue into the little house and close the door, catching her hand. I pull her back and press her close against my body, staring down into those endlessly blue eyes.

  I see the pain in them, which troubles my soul more than it should. Though I cannot heal every tiny slight for her, I want to. Moving mountains is not out of the question, not when it might make her feel better. As long as she is mine, only mine.

  God, when did I turn into such a possessive creature?

  “What is it? What did she tell you?” I demand to know, pushing a lock of her hair back out of her face.

  Rue’s eyes start to water. Her lips begin to tremble. But instead of answering my questions, she just reaches up on her tiptoes and presses her lips against mine. I am caught off guard, but her lips are so warm and inviting, her fingers tugging at the hair and my nape. Pulling me in.

  Who am I to refuse?

  I sweep her off the ground, only making it to the couch before staggering and stumbling down with her in my arms. Managing to protect her head with my hands as we fall, I cup her cheeks after and kiss her hard.

  Rue lights up at that, wrapping her legs around my body. Her hands are everywhere, pulling the buttons of my shirt free, tugging my shirt out of my waistband. As soon as she gets my shirt open, she smoothes her hands inside, pushing the shirt off my shoulders with a groan.

  I back up, pulling my shirt off and shucking my pants down my legs. Then I sit down on the couch, drawing Rue onto my lap. She surprises me by pulling her dress up and settling her damp pussy against my stiff cock.

  With a groan, I hold myself still as she starts rubbing her pussy up and down my length, her eyes closing. She is so wet, so primed for me. I cannot help but reach down between us and raise my cock.

  Rue does not waste any time in sinking down on me, impaling herself on my cock. Gritting my teeth, I promise myself I will stay still until she’s ready to come. I grip her hips and keep her steady as she finds her rhythm.

  She works her hips up and down, her pussy swallowing my cock and bathing it in her wet heat. Her little mmms of pleasure are almost too much for me. I lean her back a little and adjust the angle that she comes down on my cock.

  Her blue eyes spring open in surprise, and she lets out a loud moan. “Oh, my God!”

  I apply a little pressure to her hips each time she lands, which makes her react by working her hips faster. She tosses her hair back over her shoulders, looking as glorious as any woman has. Still bracing her with one hand, I pull at the buttons on her dress, sending them flying one by one.

  Her breasts are exposed to me now. I lean forward to nuzzle my face against them, finding a nipple with my mouth.

  The urge to thrust up into her willing body is overwhelming, but still, I resist. This time I am merely the instrument, fucking her passively.

  The idea that I am a dildo makes me smirk against her pale skin. I can feel her tightening around me, clenching in time with her movements. Trying to be strong, I close my eyes and breathe through my nose.

  “Look at me,” she whispers. I feel her nails digging into my shoulders.

  I open my eyes, biting my bottom lip. My grip on her hip turns brutal. She pulls my free hand to her breast, pressing it against her skin hard enough to leave impressions of my fingers.

  When I grip her flesh just the way she wants, she moans. “I’m almost there…”

  I release her breast and wrap my fingers around the slim column of her neck. Squeezing savagely, I cut off her oxygen for the barest minute. It is enough to push her over the edge, make her pussy spasm around my cock over and over.

  “Fuck.”

  I take control, putting my hands on her hips and slamming her down, driving my cock into her creamy heat again and again. It does not take long for me to find my own release, growling and shaking as I come.

  Afterward, we lie on the couch together, her on top of me.

  At length, Rue looks over at me. I did not realize that she is crying, but there are tears running down her face. Feeling useless, I pull her into my embrace, hugging her tightly.

  “What is the matter?
” I murmur into her hair. “Hmm? You can tell me.”

  She sniffs and looks up at me. Her eyes have never been so blue. It is a little heartbreaking, holding her close but seeming to comfort her so little.

  She draws in a deep breath. “Do you want a family, Dryas?”

  Her voice is a little breathy. Her words make me freeze, the air in my lungs suddenly solid ice.

  For the first time in years, I can barely manage the words. “Are you… I mean… do you think you are—”

  Surprise alights upon her face. “No! No. I just meant… do you want a family eventually?”

  The air leaves my lungs in a whoosh. I think about it, about having a bunch of children. I never spent much time considering the future; mostly, I saw Derrik’s last breath and my own as occurring at more or less the same time.

  I look at Rue, a little smile creeping onto my face. “Yes. I mean, I have never considered it, but…” I take a breath, my gaze sinking down toward her belly. “Are you sure—”

  “Yes!” she blurts out, cutting me off. “Yes, I’m just wondering. You know…”

  I had not realized my muscles were locked up, but I feel them relax now. “Do you want a family?”

  Her lower lip sticks out and begins to tremble once more. “Yes. I’ve always imagined that I would have children. But this experience… it’s making me doubt that.”

  My brow hunches. “How is it doing that?”

  A tear rolls down her cheeks, and she brushes it away. She sucks in another breath. “If Declan Stuart wasn’t the father, and Henrick wasn’t his son, none of the other siblings would have been hunted down. All of these people died because… well, someone wanted to be extra sure that they weren’t a threat? It’s just…”

  She trails off, clearly disturbed by the idea.

  “Fucked up,” I suggest gently. “On that, we agree.”