The Royal Runaway

by Lindsay Emory

  The cottage was small enough that I could have located the bathroom easily, even if I hadn’t remembered the way. I took the opportunity to splash water on my wrists and neck, and patted my face with a towel. My nerves stayed elevated, though, and I realized that as much as I trusted Nick at this point, we could not trust Sybil at all. I wanted to leave, and as soon as possible.

  When I returned to the sitting room, Nick was gone and Sybil was sitting quietly, staring into the cup Nick had used. A swirl of foreboding whisked around my stomach. That was what the ginger cookies were for, I realized. To help relieve the nausea of hearing the worst about one’s future.

  Even though every instinct was telling me to open the door and make a run for it, I couldn’t help myself. “What does it say?” I asked softly. The tea leaves tell a story, she would say, back when I was innocent and trusting. A tiny part of me still believed. Still wanted to know the secrets.

  Sybil’s eyes met mine and she spoke in a shadowy, smoky voice. “There’s danger. And the truth will be revealed.”

  The nausea solidified into an icy brick that inner Thea picked up and threw at my metaphysical head. I woke up. “Truly insightful. And specific. Danger and truth. Thank you very much for that helpful prediction.”

  Nick came back into the room. “The police are here.”

  Sybil stood and slapped the cup onto the table and the dregs of tea sloshed out. “You’ll need to make yourself scarce.”

  I couldn’t help myself. “Strange how the tea leaves couldn’t tell us they were coming.”

  The old bat ignored me and turned to Nick. “On the stairs, at the landing. Second panel, there’s a switch on the cherub.”

  “A cherub?” I asked in disbelief. What was happening right now? But apparently I was the only one who thought this was thoroughly ridiculous. “No,” I said, yanking my arm out of Nick’s grasp. “We need to leave.” I didn’t trust Sybil farther than I could throw her, and learning that there were secret hiding spaces was not making me feel safer.

  There was a sharp rap at the door. Sybil’s eyes went wide. “Go!”

  And then Nick’s hand clamped around my arm and I was dragged up the stairs. I swear, if I had known this man was so bossy, I wouldn’t have gone down the chute with him at the museum in the first place.

  Sure enough, there were carved panels along the stairwell and on the landing, including one that I was pretty sure depicted the birth of Christ—odd for a woman who consulted with ancient spirits to tell fortunes. Nick’s long fingers traced the profile of a cherub on the second panel and there was a soft click. He slid open the door to reveal a cedar-lined closet, the type that people a hundred years ago might have used to store their linens or wools. It was barely more than two feet wide, but I soon learned that yes, two people could fit tightly in there.

  Then Nick slid the door closed and we were in the dark. Alone. And trapped.

  • • •

  “SHH . . .” IT WAS BARELY MORE than a breath in my ear. Nick pulled me closer to him, his fingers taking a sure hold of my hips, his hands wide and capable.

  The rustle and bumps seemed to come from above and below and beside us. The insanity of what I was doing hit me. I was a princess of this country. I could step out and order the people searching Sybil’s house to immediately stop their pursuit. I was due some respect; they would at least pause. Reconsider their actions.

  “Thea, no.” Nick’s arm curved protectively around my waist, in a strong yet gentle hold. His strength told me I was safe with him. His protection reminded me of what could happen if I threw open the door and revealed my presence.

  Not even Nick’s strength could stop a bullet aimed at his head.

  The bumps and thuds of the search below receded. The only sound I could hear was Nick’s breath, now heavy on my neck. A sigh from me. The soft swish of fabric as we shifted in the tight space and Nick’s leg moved in between mine.

  He squeezed my sides and I felt him nuzzle under my ear. He inhaled deeply. My skin was unperfumed, my hair was untamed, but I had never felt more desirable.

  “Oh, what the hell,” he muttered under his breath just before he kissed me.

  Soul-searing.

  Earth-stopping.

  Panty-melting.

  Lots of clichés didn’t quite capture the way Nick’s mouth dominated mine. He kissed the way he spoke Driedish—like he’d been born doing it.

  I wanted more. It was the wrong time, the wrong place, and quite possibly the wrong man. But there in the dark, in desperation and danger, there were no rules. No restrictions, no responsibilities. There was only one true, strong thing: desire.

  He clutched me tighter and I leaned into him, taking fistfuls of his sweater in my needy hands. It wasn’t enough, but my fevered brain wasn’t quite sure what I was looking for until Nick’s palms found my breasts, roughly, even clumsily, pressed as tightly in the cupboard as we were. But still I went weak, as he stroked and teased and tested me.

  In the course of mere minutes, I craved a multitude of touches, kisses, caresses. My fingers went to his lips, my tongue tasted his neck, his hands brushed my thighs. One hand reached around my knee and pulled it up, wrapping my leg around his waist snugly. He was hard against me, pushing me against the wall, and we swallowed every whimper and growl with deepening kisses.

  I didn’t notice when the policemen’s footsteps thudded away, but the sound of Sybil’s voice rang out through the thick door.

  “You two! You can come out now! It’s safe. Those bastards are gone.”

  Neither of us moved. Or said a word. Our heavy breathing and thudding hearts were reminiscent of the aftereffects of a car crash.

  Finally, I let my leg slip down, trailing Nick’s as it did. One last brush of his thumb against my neck before he said, “Maybe you should go out first.”

  I exited, smoothing my clothes and hair and distracting Sybil with questions while Nick tarried a moment—I presumed to compose himself and readjust his pants.

  Sybil described the invasion of the jackbooted thugs who had questioned her with great fervor, using colorful vulgarities regarding their intellects, their mothers, and their likely afterlife destinations. But her story had worked. They were gone.

  “You’ll have to stay the night. I didn’t trust the older one. He might keep an eye on the place.”

  “Too many stolen cars in your driveway?” Nick asked.

  She shrugged. “I can’t help the delinquents who keep leaving them here.”

  Looking at Nick with his mussed-up hair and piratical air, I thought “delinquent” was an excellent description.

  eighteen

  NICK CHECKED HIS WATCH. “RIGHT. Since we’ve got the night, you can do your thing and help me with some information.”

  I still didn’t trust Sybil but it seemed that she had Nick’s confidence, which allayed my concerns slightly as he went over the Claytere situation.

  She pulled out a laptop from a nearby bookshelf and Nick moved to look over her shoulder as she searched. “All these names worked at Christian’s firm,” Nick confirmed. “Several deaths in four months.”

  Sybil tapped the screen. “This was the first.” Her eyes flicked up at me. “He died two days before your wedding.”

  “What are you looking at, anyway?” I asked. “A countrywide database?”

  She avoided my eyes, which was all I needed to know. “Now the truth behind all the psychic pretension is revealed. What do you do, check that thing before clients come over? You hack into their bank accounts and social media profiles to get your phony psychic predictions, right?”

  Sybil ignored me and said something I couldn’t catch to Nick.

  “What was that?”

  “The first death that occurred before your wedding,” Sybil said, giving me a look. “Christian would have known about it.”

  “I wish you would stop calling it a wedding. It never happened. It was a colossal waste of money and time. Why didn’t your charts show any of us that th
ere wouldn’t be a groom for the event?”

  “Three dead. Two missing.”

  “Two?” I asked.

  “Christian and Claytere,” Nick replied.

  Sybil relayed the causes of death: one hunting accident, one car crash, and one undiscovered shellfish allergy.

  Such a wide array of events probably seemed like a gruesome coincidence of bad luck over four months to anyone else. But step back and the pattern became clear: several of those whom Christian had worked with had met with a premature end in the last few months.

  Or, in the case of Tomas Claytere—and Christian himself—they’d simply disappeared into thin air.

  As I sat on the threadbare velvet sofa to take all of this in, I realized just how serious a situation this was.

  The power of suggestion is strong, and my reality for the past four months had been that Christian Fraser-Campbell had slunk out of the country in the middle of the night, unable to face a lifetime of being with me.

  Even when Nick had said Christian could be dead, I hadn’t really believed him. Christian was dead to me. But he hadn’t stopped living. He was too handsome, too ambitious, too canny to actually die.

  But now it looked like the employees of Boson Chapelle had been systematically removed.

  One of them had been removed right under the nose of the Driedish Crown.

  What type of entity could do that?

  How powerful was it?

  If something—or someone—could do this to Christian . . . what else could they do? To what lengths would they go?

  I found it hard to believe international law was this dangerous, but the blood and the Cayman papers in Tomas Claytere’s house said otherwise. If what Nick had said was correct, those mysterious papers were the link between the missing employees of Boson Chapelle.

  As I went upstairs to the guest room Sybil had said we could use, the carved wooden cherub on the stair landing seemed to give me a knowing smile. As if he knew Nick had kissed me. And I had kissed Nick back. Again.

  It had been amazing.

  It had been a colossal mistake.

  I’d rather deal with the lists of figures we’d taken from Claytere’s house.

  I knocked lightly on the bedroom door. When Nick answered, I opened it to find him lying propped up on the narrow bed, Claytere’s files spread around him.

  We’d had the same idea, then.

  I picked up a stack and settled on the floor, my back against the long curtains that framed the small window.

  We didn’t speak for hours, both of us analyzing and inspecting the financial records that Nick seemed to think were connected to Christian’s disappearance.

  Finally, I couldn’t see straight. I was woozy and dizzy from my lack of sleep and roller coaster of emotions. “You said there are more of the papers online?”

  “Not the ones that matter. Other firms have those and managed to retain a full staff.” Nick leaned his head against the wall and closed his eyes, and I tried to not stare at the shape of his neck when he did.

  “Do you think they took them?” I knew that my question wasn’t clear, so I tried again. “The people who tore apart Claytere’s office. Do you think they found what they were looking for?”

  “Maybe.” With the back of his arm, he brushed his hair back from his face and then looked at me. “You should get some sleep.”

  “I’ll sleep when you do. I mean . . .” Embarrassingly, I felt a blush on my exhausted face. “You know what I mean.” Several nights on the houseboat together and I’d heard him creeping along the deck at night. “You don’t sleep much.”

  “Neither do you.”

  I shook my head and threaded my fingers through the ancient scraggly fringe on the bottom of the draperies. “They gave me pills for it after the wedding, but I never took them . . .”

  “Do you really miss him that much?” The question was sudden and surprising—not just in its topic, but in Nick’s offhand delivery.

  “No.” I was firm. “That sounds awful now, but . . .” I searched for the right words. “You know how you can be driving along and then you get a flat tire and your day is all thrown off, and you can’t stop obsessing about all the things you had to do that won’t get done now? It’s just a flat tire, but—”

  “Your day is ruined,” Nick said flatly.

  “Not even that. The day could be fine, but your expectations are ruined. And it just takes time to adjust to a new reality.” I ducked my head. “I know it sounds ridiculous.”

  “You compared my brother’s disappearance to a flat tire.”

  “I thought he ran off. That was the flat tire.”

  “What is he now?” Another one of Nick’s carefully phrased questions, filled with subtext, but I was too exhausted to parse my words to please him.

  “He’s a closed highway. One way or another, I have to find a new route to take.”

  “You Driedeners are a prosaic lot.”

  “And the Scots are so poetic.”

  A smile touched his lips. “We’re romantics at heart.”

  Romance. Not a word I’d associate with Nick, or my former fiancé, either, for that matter. “Have you noticed that you tend to kiss me under dangerous conditions?”

  The quirk of a dark eyebrow was my answer.

  “Toss me a pillow,” I demanded, finally ready to curl up on Sybil’s floor and pass out.

  He rolled off the bed and extended a hand to help me up. “Her Highness should get the bed.” I clasped my frigid hand into his warm, wide palm and he pulled me up against his lean, hard body.

  “There’s enough room for two.”

  He leaned down and said in a rough burr, “A wee bit too dangerous for me, lass.”

  • • •

  THE NEXT MORNING THE KITCHEN smelled like fresh bread and greasy eggs, and my stomach rumbled. Sybil stood at the stove, somehow perfectly chic in a caftan with strings of meditation beads wrapped around her wrists and a pentacle at her throat.

  “Good morning, Your Highness.” She wasn’t cheerful, which I couldn’t have borne that morning, but she was quietly reassuring in some way, which I found strangely comforting. The old Thea, the one who believed, popped her head up again. I supposed I needed to hear some version of good, even if it was just a “good morning.”

  “Where’s Nick?” I asked, to keep the optimistic Thea at bay for a moment. After he’d given me the bed last night he’d left the guest room, and I was too much of a coward to go searching for him.

  “He’s in the study. There’s coffee.”

  As always, coffee was needed more than spiritual reassurance, and I did not hesitate getting myself a mug.

  As I sipped, I watched Sybil fry sausages under the dancing light of a web of crystals that hung across a high window. Blue, pink, lavender, and rainbow streaks crisscrossed down, over, and through the warm, cozy space.

  “The crystals used to be in the sitting room,” I remarked, remembering the times I would stare, fascinated by the designs that could be created on the walls by light, minerals, and energy.

  Sybil glanced up before turning her attention back to the smoking sausages. “The house feng shui changed.”

  I didn’t even know what that was. I only knew that the crystals and their refracting lights reminded me of the cathedral windows at St. Julien’s. The windows under which I was supposed to be married.

  “What did Christian’s chart say?”

  I don’t know which of us was more surprised by my question. I couldn’t believe it had come out of my mouth. Sybil seemed frozen. She took several long moments before answering, deliberately sliding the sausages onto a waiting plate, then wiping her hands on a nearby tea towel.

  “Come,” she finally said.

  For the first time in my life, I followed her into her study and was so absorbed by my surroundings that I didn’t realize for a minute or so that Nick wasn’t in there like she had said he was. Sybil did not seem surprised by this, but went straight to a set of wide wooden drawe
rs and opened the top one. She selected a large notebook and set it on the curiously bare antique desk. It was curious because every other surface in her house seemed to be covered with fabric or paper or assorted clutter.

  Her fingers flipped it open, and I saw the same designs my mother would pore over whenever she was here. The concentric circles, the arrows bisecting the personal universe of whomever the chart was drawn for.

  Sybil traced the words as she said them aloud, like an incantation: “Christian David Jameson Fraser-Campbell, Leo.” She read his birth date and place of birth, and I felt this emptiness grow inside me. Before this, I had never felt like he was truly gone from my life. Something about hearing this wise (or crazy) woman recite his given name distanced me from the man who had once upon a time held me in his arms.

  She tapped the symbols, one at a time. “Of course he is a Leo, which wouldn’t be all bad. But here. Scorpio in Mars.” She drew breath quickly through her teeth. “And in the twelfth house. He was born both to be the center of attention and to keep very dark secrets.”

  Sounded about right.

  Then she flipped the page. “Nicholas Robert Jameson Fraser-Campbell. I didn’t have time to draw his full chart.”

  “Sybil, no,” I breathed when I saw what was taped to the empty page.

  “Well, I’ll do it at some point. But in the meantime, I drew these.”

  “No one asked you . . .” My words faded when she traced the tarot cards affixed into the book with crooked slivers of tape.

  Death.

  The Magician.

  The Lovers.

  She tapped the enrobed skeleton on the Death card. “He was reborn.” Her index finger lightly drew a circle over the Magician, with his outstretched hands encompassing globes of fire. “You must trust him.” Then her fingernail clicked decisively on male and female nudes drawn in a passionate embrace. “Past, present, and future.”

  “When did you pull these?” I asked, trying to stay calm.

  “Yesterday.” She said it as if it were so normal. I rubbed my eyes with the back of my hand. There was every chance that Sybil was making this up, that she chose these cards on purpose, to manipulate me, to influence me to do . . . something. I couldn’t think what Sybil had to gain from this, but I knew now that she rarely did anything without a reason.