Once Upon a Time: Billionaires in Disguise: Flicka

by Blair Babylon

  A black Volkswagen Touareg slid to a stop in the street beside the sidewalk.

  I was just looking up at it, unconcerned because cars stop in front of hotels all the time.

  Someone shoved my back.

  Kidnapped #2

  Dieter Schwarz

  My nightmare.

  Dieter didn’t have a spare moment to feel sorry for himself.

  His team from Rogue Security had arrived a few days before to establish the perimeter and sweep the rooms.

  With the arrival of Wulf’s Welfenlegion team, his management load had doubled.

  The Monegasque Secret Service had arrived a day after Dieter and Flicka had, and they had been in the way ever since. Pierre’s security chief, Quentin Sault, had the cold, hawk-like eyes of a KGB officer and the demeanor of a serial killer. He was good at his job, but his Secret Service agents were all screw-ups. Not one of them could hold down a damn position for more than five minutes.

  While some of Quentin Sault’s Secret Service guys insisted on providing security for Flicka, others prepared a suite for the prince’s arrival.

  Dieter hated that Pierre’s security guys had cut him off, and as soon as the Welfenlegion arrived, he tasked Luca Wyss and some others with providing a second layer of security around Flicka.

  He would have done it himself just to make sure that she was all right, but Dieter was the ringleader of this circus that was the von Hannover wedding.

  It was a good thing that he had sent more men to cover her, too. Luca had reported an hour before that Flicka had dodged through a few doors and lost the Monegasque Secret Service team, of course, because they couldn’t hold a damn position. After she had lost them, she went right back to her schedule of managing the wedding and had breezed through several meetings, including one about truffles and another about shrimp.

  Luca and the Welfenlegion team were still on her, though she hadn’t spotted them.

  Dieter told Luca to have his men fall back just a bit so that she wouldn’t feel the need to bolt again. She was frighteningly good at ditching her security team. She’d gotten much better at it since she was a teenager.

  He listened to reports coming over the radios and poured himself another cup of strong coffee. It was going to be a long day.

  His radio squawked, and he heard Luca Wyss yell, “Nine! Code nine!” the Welfenlegion’s code word for a kidnapping. “Sheisse!”

  Dieter glanced at the duty schedule on his computer screen, praying that his memory was wrong, but the schedule showed that Luca had been assigned to Flicka.

  He staggered, grabbing the edge of the desk, and said to Luca, “Report.”

  “They got her,” Luca said, his voice cracking as he yelled. “Black SUV. Volkswagen Touareg, current model. Driving southeast on Avenue Claude-Nobs.”

  “License plate?” Dieter asked, his voice a low growl.

  The radio blasted static. “EU plate. German designation. Couldn’t see the region code. I saw the last two numbers, three and nine. It pulled away before I could read the rest.”

  “I’ll check here. Come back to the hotel for the cars.”

  “Yes, sir,” Luca said. “I was too far. Another five yards, and I would have had her.”

  “If you had been closer, she would have seen you, and then she would have slipped away again. If she had ditched us entirely, we wouldn’t even have known that she had been taken. Return to the hotel.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  A white-hot rage poured through Dieter’s muscles, and he strapped on his sidearm to go and get her back.

  Frantic energy possessed him, and he craved to light all of Montreux on fire so he could carry her out of the inferno. Burning down the city that had taken her felt so right.

  But first, Dieter had to tell Wulf that someone had kidnapped his sister, and then they would find where she was and who had taken her so they could mount another damned rescue mission.

  This time, maybe Wulfram would stay outside the damn door until the room was cleared.

  Revelations

  Flicka von Hannover

  I assumed Pierre was screwing around on me

  with half of France and all of Monaco,

  but I was wrong.

  Flicka lay on the floor in the back of the black Volkswagen Touareg while it wheeled around corners.

  Her kidnappers—her father’s security men whom she had known since childhood, all of them—had laid down one of the rear seats. When the SUV lurched to a stop, her head bumped the back of the driver’s seat. When it accelerated, she slid toward the cargo part of the SUV. Turning corners bonked her shoulders and thighs on the hard sides of the vehicle.

  Noon sunlight blinded her when it shone inside, even through the dark tinting on the windows. Flicka squinted as they turned, and a bright square slid across her face again. Plastic fumes irritated her nose when she rolled too close to the carpeting.

  “Moritz,” she begged, “let me up. I’ll sit in the seat and won’t jump out or anything.”

  Dennis Moritz looked down at her from where he sat in his half of the back seat, his dark eyes flickering to her bound wrists and ankles. The creases around his eyes and mouth deepened as he frowned, more lines than the last time she had seen him several years before. “I am sorry, Prinzessin. Your father was clear that he didn’t want anyone to see you in the car. We’ll be there very soon, I promise. It’s not far.”

  He held her phone, which he had powered off. Dieter couldn’t track her signal with that intrusive software he used if it was off, damn it.

  “We’re not going all the way to Germany, are we?” she asked. “I can’t miss Wulfram’s wedding. Please, I can’t miss it.”

  Moritz leaned over and whispered, “Not Germany. A hotel here in Montreux.”

  “He’s here? My father shouldn’t be in Montreux. He should be back in Germany, far away from Wulf and this wedding.” She hadn’t sent her father an invitation, and she was quite certain that Wulf wouldn’t have, either, not after the horrors that he had pulled like kidnapping Rae just over a month ago.

  “He needs to talk to you,” Moritz said, “in person and without interruption. It won’t take long.”

  “He’s trying to disrupt Wulfie’s wedding, isn’t he? Wulfram will come after me. He’ll find me. I know he will.”

  And hopefully, Wulf would send Dieter to burn her father, his hotel, and this damned Touareg to the ground, and then the wedding would start on time.

  “I don’t know about that,” Moritz said. “I only know he wanted to speak to you.” The SUV turned another corner, bumping Flicka’s shoulder against the side. Cement ceilings and darkness replaced the Swiss sunlight. He said, “We’re here.”

  The Touareg pulled over, and the driver killed the engine.

  The rear hatch door flew up, and two more of Flicka’s father’s security men, Rhyn and Forrer, stood there. Rhyn cut the plastic cord around her ankles. “Please, Prinzessin, if you would walk to the elevator.”

  She scrambled out of the back of the SUV and struggled, trying to get away from them, yanking her arms to try to break their grip all the way to the elevator.

  It didn’t work. The men, even though they were in their forties or fifties, were all stronger than Flicka, so her wiggling and flopping were fruitless. They hauled her past the cement pillars to the elevator.

  She wasn’t trying to get away. There were too many of them fanned out around her, and she wouldn’t make it. Mostly, she wanted her struggling to alert anyone watching the internal security cameras that protruded from the ceiling of the parking garage.

  As the elevator ascended and gravity dragged on Flicka’s feet, Moritz whispered, “Please, don’t make me hold you too tightly. I’ve known you since you were little, Flicka. You know that I would not let anyone hurt you.”

  “Even my father?” she asked, watching the numbers change above the doors.

  “Yes,” Moritz whispered.

  She relaxed a little, but a small part of her brai
n worried that they wanted her to relax, to be less on her guard, because maybe her father did want to hurt her.

  Around a month before, Flicka’s father had convinced the family of Wulf’s fiancée, Rae Stone, to kidnap her. Rae’s family had used terrible techniques that might have killed her or the baby she carried.

  Maybe Flicka’s father had suggested those, too.

  Flicka wasn’t sure just how far her father would go to disrupt Wulf’s wedding. She’d often thought that her father might be a psychopath, unable to love anyone and only using other people like disposable chess pieces.

  It would explain a lot about her childhood.

  Maybe her father would kill his daughter, defective because she was female and thus useless in the House of Hannover’s Salic lines of descent. She couldn’t inherit the title and power that went with it. She was, dynastically, a dead end.

  Her father really, really wanted to disrupt Wulf’s wedding. It might be the most important thing in his life, at the moment.

  Her father might have decided to kill her to stop Wulf’s wedding. If her dead body washed up on the shores of Lake Geneva in front of Le Montreux Palace hotel, Wulf wouldn’t be able to continue.

  Flicka’s legs trembled, but she jerked her chin up, unwilling to let these men see weakness in her.

  If her father did order them to kill her, her only chance might be to countermand the orders and make them believe she had the authority to do so as Prinzessin von Hannover und Cumberland, etc.

  All power is an illusion, but she needed that illusion.

  So she needed to be strong.

  She kept her chin up and her knees steady, and she didn’t let herself cry at all.

  When the elevator doors slid apart, Flicka walked between the three men like they were an honor guard instead of her captors.

  They led her to a small suite in the hotel. Two men peeled off to guard the door.

  Moritz led Flicka inside.

  Her father sat in a high-backed chair in the middle of the living room, sipping coffee. Sunshine streaming in the window glinted on his silver hair and dark blue suit.

  She sucked in air and bellowed, “What the hell do you want now?” because anger sounded better than fear.

  He looked up, his dark blue eyes scanning her, “Friederike Augusta, please come in and sit down. We need to talk.”

  “We do not need to talk. Have your goons give me back my phone so I can call Dieter to come and take me back to the hotel.”

  The frown lines on his forehead and around his mouth creased. “I have some lamentable news—”

  “Oh, I’ll just bet,” she sneered at him. “I don’t care what you think you do or don’t know. I have a wedding to run. I don’t have time to listen to your idiotic chatter about how you don’t like Rae, how she’s a commoner, how she’s not worthy of Wulf, or whatever stupid rubbish is going around in your snobby, elitist head. You said all that shit about Pierre, too, and Pierre will be one of the few ruling sovereigns left in the world. Unlike you, because our family lost its kingdom.”

  Phillipp von Hannover, Prince of Hannover, sighed. “No, Flicka. It’s not about Rae or Wulf. It’s about you, and about Pierre.”

  Just a ploy, she was sure. It was just another damned ploy to get her to disrupt Wulf’s wedding. “Are you still harping on him? Why can’t you just leave us alone?”

  Her father held out an envelope. “I’m sorry, Flicka. There’s a flash drive with all the pictures and documents in there, too.”

  She snatched the envelope out of his spotted hand and ripped it open.

  Pictures inside showed Pierre with other women, having drinks with them, or with his arm around their waists, or dancing. The women looked like adults, even late-twenties adults.

  Flicka raised her head and looked her father right in his dark blue eyes. “So?”

  “These were both before and after your marriage,” Phillipp said. “There are date stamps on the photos. The documents are official copies.”

  She shrugged. “I don’t care.”

  “But you should—”

  “No, let me tell you something, jackass: Butt out.” Some of Rae’s Western colloquialisms had wormed into Flicka’s speech, and in this case, pithy, earthy jabs worked beautifully. “I love Pierre and he loves me, but we have an understanding. We have a mature, sophisticated, modern marriage because we love each other. Our love is the most important thing, not where he puts his body parts. I don’t care if he sleeps with other women or men. I don’t care if he screws his way across Europe, Asia, and Africa and has additional lays in the Americas, Australia, and Ant-frickin’-arctica. As long as everyone’s of age, I just don’t care.”

  Her father hadn’t flinched. Indeed, his labored sigh seemed sad. “You need to look more closely at the pictures.”

  “These women are obviously adults, and Pierre has never had a thing for kids. That would have been a deal-breaker.” Her anger at her father, built up over decades of his neglect and indifference, erupted in her. She wanted to walk across the room and slap the old man. “You weren’t there when we were dating. You weren’t there for my whole life.”

  She advanced a step toward him, shaking the pictures like she wanted to grab her father’s throat and throttle him. The photos rattled like she wanted her father’s teeth to shake loose in his head when she jerked him around.

  She yelled, “You never saw how wonderfully he treats me, how he will do anything for me. We didn’t have the wedding in Monaco, his own country, because he wanted to make me happy and because he understood my commitment to my foundations and charities. He did battle with the Pope himself so he could marry me. Pierre loves me, and I don’t care what you think of him.”

  Her father’s frown looked sadly sympathetic. “You need to look at the documentation. I’m sorry, Flicka.”

  “You’re trying to poison my relationship with Pierre. You’re just a bitter old man who never loved anyone and doesn’t want anyone else to have love, either. I know that Pierre loves me.” She did know it. She emphasized that she knew because it was the lynchpin to her whole life. “He protects me, and he loves me, and he wouldn’t ever hurt me.”

  Her father’s voice was quiet, almost gentle. “No, Flicka. I did love your mother, but she didn’t love me. She married me for money and the title, and I don’t want you to make the same mistake. Please, look at those pictures.”

  His sadness sounded like Wulfram’s when he had come into her bedroom when she had been six years old to tell her that their mother had died the night before. Wulf had been as heartbroken as she was, and she could hear that same gravity pulling down her father’s voice now.

  Flicka looked more closely at the pictures, and then she looked at the copies of official paperwork in the envelope.

  Her knees weakened, and she sat on the couch across from her father.

  Her head buzzed, refusing to accept what she saw, but her body shook because she utterly believed it.

  For Old Time's Sake

  Dieter Schwarz

  Convincing Wulf was difficult.

  The entry team to rescue Flicka crammed into two SUVs, large men sitting three abreast in the seats, eight per vehicle.

  They all wore suits to conceal handguns in hidden holsters. While a team of men wearing black fatigues and carrying large rifles might not draw attention in the American West, it might have been remarked upon in Switzerland, so they lowered their profiles.

  Dieter sat next to Wulfram, who had barely blinked during the few minutes of the ride. Their arms pressed when the SUV rounded a corner, and neither of them shook with nerves in the slightest. Indeed, they both breathed slowly, methodically, dampening any adrenaline response.

  Good. He needed Wulfram to be perfectly logical and stay the hell outside the door while he secured the interior. The prince should not ride into battle on the front line.

  As soon as Dieter had described the Volkswagen Touareg SUV that Flicka had been pulled into, Wulf had known that it belong
ed to his father’s security detail.

  Dieter didn’t have to ask how Wulf remembered these things. He watched the computer in Wulf’s head process, the bytes flickering through Wulf’s eerie blue eyes, and then he output a number and a name.

  Dieter didn’t ask what happened in there.

  Wulf didn’t volunteer.

  And thus, they both got through the day.

  But Dieter suspected.

  Dieter had called the concierges of Le Montreux Palace hotel—they had been parading through Flicka’s office all week, so he knew them by sight and by name—and asked them to call their contacts on other hotels’ staffs to find the car.

  The concierges had returned with information in less than ten minutes, confirming that Wulf’s father, Prince Phillipp von Hannover, had taken rooms and registered the black Touareg with the front desk.

  They reviewed the surveillance footage from the garage to determine that the vehicle had indeed returned recently and a young woman had been fighting three men as they took her up the back stairs to Phillipp von Hannover’s suite.

  The concierges had already been dialing the Montreux police, but Dieter convinced them to let him handle it quietly.

  Quietly got their attention, and quietly bought Dieter an hour before the concierges called the police and probably ARD-10.

  The SUV rumbled under him as they drove to Phillipp von Hannover’s hotel to rescue Flicka.

  Dieter had pinched his nose, disgusted that Phillipp’s team had been so sloppy with the hotel’s security cameras embedded in the ceilings, watching their every move. It was like they were trying to get caught.

  Which was an excellent possibility.

  The Prince might be paying them, but few men wanted to commit crimes for their employer, especially kidnapping a kind young woman just to make her brother suffer on his wedding day. If Phillipp fired them, Dieter might take them on, if they had purposely left him a trail to find Flicka rather than carelessness.