The Royal Runaway

by Lindsay Emory

  Nick held up a finger to his lips and I stopped abruptly. Obviously, he wasn’t interested in my relationship with his brother. He just wanted to push my buttons, and I needed to stop reacting when he did.

  The guest room had a simple bed, a small writing desk, a wardrobe, and two chairs flanking the fireplace. Nick had his other forearm resting on the mantel and then, with a flick of that wrist, he pulled a small black disc with a short wire from behind a painting of a bucolic hunting scene that hung above the mantel.

  A heavy lead slug dropped into my stomach at the sight of the bug. Before I could ask who’d planted it, Nick lifted a very serious eyebrow. “We need to leave.” His voice was low, barely audible.

  “Why?”

  He wiggled the black disc. “People with guns are looking for us, remember? We can’t take the risk that they’re not listening in and pinpointing our location right now.”

  The memory of the museum flashed in my head. Would that happen again? Here? Where I had grown up? Bullet holes shattering the pastoral quiet? Shredding Nick’s body?

  I swallowed the nausea that rose in my throat as I flung open the wardrobe doors, tore the curtains away from the wall, and toppled the careful row of linen-covered pillows on the bed in search of anything Christian might have left behind.

  With shaking hands, I opened a desk drawer and in the next moment, Nick gripped my upper arm.

  “How long?” I mouthed.

  “How fast can you run?”

  Not fast enough, I reckoned. There were no secret trash chutes that would shoot us out of harm’s way this time. And there was a wide expanse of lawn around the house where we would be instantly exposed—and slow—as we headed back to the river. So I thought of something better.

  Two minutes later, we were on the brick path to the stables. Three minutes after that, I had one of my father’s stoutest polo ponies saddled up. There were others that were faster, but this one, named Hercules, would take the both of us.

  I swung up on the saddle and offered my hand to Nick, who looked doubtful for a half second before grabbing my hand and landing behind me. He pulled me back into his lap, his arm tight around my middle, and thirty seconds later I was directing Hercules down the tree-lined lane behind the paddock. It wasn’t used much anymore. A hundred years ago it was a back entrance for service carts and servants. My siblings and I had raced down here on foot and on our ponies as children, hiding from instructors and nannies, and today, I spurred Hercules as fast as he could go.

  Five minutes later we were at the spot where the gate used to be before security had gotten tighter in the seventies. Now there was a large iron fence with ivy and weeds growing tall around it.

  “What now?” Nick asked just before we heard the whirring sounds of a helicopter flying over our heads. Through the thick green tree cover, we saw that the helicopter was flying toward Ceillis House, which gave us just enough time to get away, through the woods and back to the neighbor’s pier.

  I threw my leg over and jumped off Hercules. Nick followed me as I burrowed through the weeds and showed him where two loose poles could be wiggled apart, just wide enough for a certain polo instructor to meet a princess (and mother of four) for an illicit love affair.

  I’d seen Marco scrambling through one day while I was playing hide-and-seek with my sisters. Even then it had seemed very amateurish, but now I appreciated that simple was often best.

  Thirty minutes later, once we were back at the canal, a single black helicopter shot across the sky above our heads. There was no way it could have identified me, a tiny speck below, but I ducked my head all the same.

  fifteen

  THE NEXT MORNING, ON OUR yacht in the middle of the river, Nick dumped a stack of newspapers and weekly magazines on the table and pointed to the one on the top of the pile. “You’ve been missed.”

  My heart stilled. I never thought the palace would have told the media about my disappearance. Turned out they hadn’t—maybe my luck was holding. The headline read, “Theodora in Hiding.”

  I had missed a scheduled event at the St. Ignatius Children’s Hospital the day before and the palace had made excuses for me. “Apparently, I have a touch of the flu,” I said to Nick’s back as he made himself a coffee.

  “You look well enough to me,” he grumbled.

  “But insider sources say that I’m really recovering from a fresh bout of heartbreak,” I said, paraphrasing the article. “They say I’ll never be the same and that large crowds and open spaces make me ill now.” I chuckled at the reporting. It was far from accurate, but stories about me seldom were.

  But in the sports section, I found a more likely story, with an accompanying photo that showed my sister Caroline standing behind her husband, Stavros DiBernardo, at the Hungarian Grand Prix. Her arm was wrapped around his shoulder, and she was laughing at something he’d said.

  She looked good.

  Healthy.

  Even though my formerly responsible sister had run off and eloped while I’d been exiled on Perpetua, I was happy for her—really I was.

  She deserved to choose her life.

  One of us deserved that.

  “Why did you buy so many?” I turned the pages, leaving my sister behind and looking for something more interesting than how my flu-like symptoms were caused by my grief over my ex-fiancé. It was as if Lucy had written the headlines, what with the obsession about all my imaginary symptoms.

  “I like information.”

  “What kind of information?” I paused on a political report on the second page of The Driedener. The Liberal party leader had made another incendiary call for republicanism.

  Nick slid into the banquette across from me and selected four of the papers for himself. “Helpful information.”

  “I have lots of helpful information. Have you thought of that?”

  “I did. But when I gave you a list of questions, you were less than helpful.”

  I sniffed. “To be fair, you were blackmailing me and I thought you were a reporter. Perhaps I wasn’t inclined to share openly.”

  Nick looked over the top of a newspaper. “Perhaps.”

  I continued as if he hadn’t spoken. “At some point, you’re going to have to tell me what you’re looking for. I can’t help you if you don’t trust me.”

  Nick scanned the back page of The Times, then put it aside. “Of course I trust you,” he said in what was a very placating tone as he pulled Le Monde across the table, pausing on a story before absently creasing the upper corner of the page.

  “Then why won’t you answer my questions?”

  “Because you don’t need to know the answers.” It was as if he’d reached over and patted the top of my head. I hated being patronized.

  “This is a need-to-know situation?” I watched as he set Le Monde on top of The Times and selected The Wall Street Journal.

  “Yes.” He opened the Journal and scanned until he stopped at the fifth page, where there seemed to be a full-page advertisement. He took a moment to thoroughly review the page and once again folded the top corner with his thumb as he read.

  “Looking for something special?” I asked.

  He went alert and still. “Excuse me?”

  I tilted my chin at the large advertisement for lingerie that just had captured his full attention. Predictably. “For yourself or someone you care about?”

  “For you, in fact. Might as well make this trip a little more interesting.”

  I held out the copy of The Driedener across the table. “Would you like to look at this one?”

  “Why, are they discussing your lingerie sizes?”

  “Because I want you to be incredibly thorough in whatever research you’re doing.”

  “Sure,” he said as he accepted the newspaper just as cool as could be.

  “Are you trying to find out information on whether the police are looking for me?” I asked offhandedly.

  “Of course they’re looking for you, Princess. You’re the second in line t
o the throne.”

  “I could be the first,” I said, relishing his reaction. It was exactly what I had hoped for. He froze, and those green eyes got very serious as they rose from The Driedener and settled on me.

  “First.”

  “Yes.” I shrugged, second-guessing myself. “Well, maybe.”

  “First in line. Skipping over your father.”

  “It would seem so.”

  Even though I was enjoying finally being able to surprise Nick, he surprised me with his next question.

  “Did Christian know?”

  I hesitated before answering. What was the point of that question? “Yes,” I finally answered.

  “When did he learn this?”

  “At the ball before our wedding. Big Gran pulled us aside to tell us her decision. It was to be announced on our wedding day that the succession was going straight to me.”

  “Did your father know?”

  “Of course. Driedish law allows for the monarch to change the line of succession, as long as it’s someone within two degrees of consanguinity. He and Big Gran have discussed it for years because really, he’s horribly suited for it and he doesn’t want it. But she was quite opposed to the idea until this year.”

  “Until Christian came along.”

  That threw me. “No. Well, I don’t think . . .” I paused. “Why would it have anything to do with Christian?”

  Nick stood and started pacing the small galley.

  “How did Christian react when your grandmother shared this news with you?”

  “He was shocked, of course. He seemed a bit overcome and said he would do his best to serve the country.”

  I remembered the moment well, because I had been a bit shocked and emotional. Preparing to take wedding vows in front of the country had been one thing. Knowing that I then would be taking coronation vows shortly afterward was life-changing, to put it mildly.

  Nick stopped pacing and focused on me. “You said maybe.”

  “Well, nothing was final.” I twisted my fingers together. No one had talked to me about it in the last few months. “It’s all up to Gran, and it probably all had to be scrapped thanks to your brother.”

  “So you wanted the succession change?”

  “Want has nothing to do with it.”

  “Doesn’t it? You’re gaining a crown.”

  I rolled my eyes. “It changed nothing but the timeline. It’s not like I discovered I was a secret princess with—surprise!—an ancient hereditary claim to the throne. It’s what I’ve been raised to do, sooner or later. It just so happened to be sooner, that’s all.”

  Nick seemed unsatisfied with that answer, so I gestured toward the newspapers again, where the Liberal leader, Pierre Anders, was in a photo shaking his fist and grousing about democracy and the privileges of the 1 percent. “And I’m certainly not pleased to have to deal with this idiot.”

  Nick leaned over and saw what I was referring to. “You shouldn’t speak like that of your government.”

  “I’m just saying it to you. And I don’t have a problem with republicanism, as it goes, but—”

  “You’re a princess.” Nick inserted. “Of course you’d have a problem abolishing yourself.”

  “No,” I corrected him with a sharpness reminiscent of Big Gran. “I was going to say I don’t believe the debate over republicanism should divide the country. We’re all Driedeners. We should be able to discuss our government civilly.”

  “ ‘The Driedish elites are sucking from the teat of our motherland,’ ” Nick read, citing the Liberal minister’s quote from the article. “If that’s not civil, I shudder to imagine what you think of me.”

  I assumed the sharp look I gave him was answer enough, and he let the matter drop and left the galley in a sober mood. Silently, I counted to fifty and then collected the newspapers that Nick had looked at. Following a hunch, I opened each one and checked the pages where he had distractedly dog-eared the corners.

  Page 11, The Times of London. “Cayman Papers Move MPs Toward Reform.”

  Page 9, Le Monde. “The Cayman Islands: World’s Wealth Capital.”

  Page 5, The Wall Street Journal. “Opinion: Wall Street–Cayman Connections Must Be Transparent.”

  Nick had found these articles with laser focus. Clearly the man was interested in something regarding the Cayman Islands.

  But why?

  My eyes dropped to the rest of the newspapers. I pulled The Driedener toward me, ignoring the lurid headlines about my still-conflicted feelings about my fiancé. “SHE WANTS HIM BACK!” the cover screamed.

  I did want Christian back. But only so I could scream at him in person.

  Maybe all these news articles were just a coincidence, like when a woman’s morning toast just happens to burn in the figure of Christ. A believer would see the hand of God. A skeptic would recommend a new toaster.

  The kind of military precision that Nick displayed reminded me of my brother, Henry. If he were here . . . I shook off that thought. Henry would have killed Nick by now, and thrown me off the boat along with Nick’s body. The ultimate military man, Prince Henry of Drieden had no patience for illicit adventures like the one I was on right now.

  Or the one I wasn’t on right now, as I realized that the boat was no longer moving and the engine had been turned off.

  I poked my head outside and saw that once again, we were waiting for a lock to open. Since it was still daylight, I threw on a pair of sunglasses before I went to find Nick, who was staring intently at the satellite navigation system.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “There’s a mechanical problem with the lock. We’ll be here for a few hours.” He peered at the large wraparound sunglasses that I had found in a cabinet downstairs. “That’s a good disguise.”

  He might have been sarcastic, but my sunglasses were a decent cover. No one was expecting to see Princess Theodora on the deck of a houseboat in a Driedish canal.

  “A few hours?” I repeated. “Good. That will give you enough time to explain what’s going on in the Cayman Islands.”

  sixteen

  THE SMALL BLACK DISC THAT Nick had pulled out from behind the painting in Christian’s room at Ceillis House lay in pieces on the table inside our houseboat.

  “Who do you think put the bug there?”

  “Given that it’s practically antiquated technology, maybe a private party. Or the Driedish government,” Nick added.

  “Excuse me?” His assertion made absolutely no sense. “The Driedish government would not spy on guests in the Crown Prince’s home. And neither would it use antiquated technology.”

  Nick lifted a shoulder. “You’re just not known for being the best spies.”

  “Driedeners are good at everything,” I insisted.

  “You’re not.”

  “Says the man whose football team was destroyed the other night,” I muttered under my breath, for which I received a dark glare.

  “Our striker had the flu.”

  “Of course he did.”

  “He caught it in Drieden.”

  “Because it’s the best, most powerful flu in the world.” I flicked a piece of black plastic on the table. “Drieden does not use antiquated technology.” It seemed unpatriotic to give in on this point.

  “Pardon, Princess, but how much do you know about surveillance engineering?”

  I shut my mouth after that and resolved that if one day I ever returned to the palace and resumed my duties, I would get weekly briefings from the intelligence community just so I could successfully argue with Nick Fraser-Campbell.

  “Can you get the recordings off it?”

  “No.” Nick shunted the pieces into his hand and slid them into a plastic bag. “They’re transmitted via antenna.”

  “So we can’t tell who put it there, why, when, or what they may have heard? Fantastic use of our time.”

  Nick didn’t answer, but I saw an expression flicker over his face.

  “Tell me,” I dema
nded. “Remember our deal?”

  “I prefer red silk.”

  I crossed my arms, mostly so I didn’t reach out and throttle him. “Not that deal. The one where you tell me everything. Now what does this bug have to do with the Cayman Islands?”

  After a moment, Nick looked resigned. “I can tell you we found two other devices like this—one at Christian’s apartment in the city, the other in his law office.”

  “So this wasn’t something left over from my parents’ divorce? When they were fighting over my mother’s villa on the French Riviera?”

  “Um, no.”

  I sighed. What could I say? There had been lots of nasty shenanigans in my family during that time, and Mother had a fondness for extravagant real estate.

  I wanted to get him back on track. He wasn’t distracting me from this. “But neither Christian’s apartment nor his office is in the Caymans,” I said. “What’s the connection?”

  Nick tilted his head and took a moment before saying, “About six months ago, a large cache of documents from a Cayman law firm was leaked online.”

  Even though I had been in the middle of royal wedding craziness, I remembered the news stories, which had mainly focused on the revelations that Russian and Central Asian oligarchs apparently were much wealthier, with much greater influence in Western economies and democracies, than anyone had previously speculated.

  “Most of the documents were released in the news. But certain intelligence agencies determined that not all the documents were made public.”

  As fascinating as the inner workings of the international spy organization were . . . “What does that have to do with Christian?” I asked.

  Nick tapped a newspaper on the table. “Christian’s firm, Boson Chapelle, had some of the papers that were not made public.”

  “What?” I shook my head. “How do you know? Why?”

  “They’re not sure.”

  “Who is ‘they’?” Er. “Them?” I shook my head. “Who are we talking about here?”

  “My side.”

  “Your side. The British? How would they know?” That didn’t make sense. “If the papers weren’t public, then how would British intelligence know what papers Boson Chapelle had, or whether Christian . . .” My voice faded as I realized the only way they would know was if . . . “The British were spying on my fiancé before he disappeared?”