A Valiant Prince: The Poisoned Pawn Duet Part II

by S. E. Rose

  “Anna, listen to me. Whoever is after us, they are likely going to be in the inner circle. They will be someone you trust,” I say to her.

  “I know,” she whispers. She takes a deep breath. “It’s just hard to reconcile it, you know?”

  “I know,” I say as I squeeze her hand.

  “Sebastian doesn’t have any shady ties, as far as I know,” she says, biting her lip.

  “Can you search him?” I inquire.

  She nods. “Jack says I can use the Wi-Fi at the cottage,” she says. She picks up her phone and sends a text. Her phone pings a moment later.

  “He’s coming to get me,” she says.

  “I’m going with you,” I say to her as we stand and head down to meet Jack.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Jack wasn’t kidding. He’s holed up in an actual cottage. Not like a cottage-style house back at home, but a real honest-to-god cottage. I look beyond to see the North Sea. Jack opens the door and even in the dim moonlight the view beyond him still steals my breath.

  “This is quite an office view,” I say to him with a whistle. He laughs.

  “It was a caretaker’s cottage originally. We rent it out now,” he says.

  “You didn’t have it rented out, did you?” Anna asks.

  “No, no. Don’t worry about that,” Jack says. Three men poke their heads out of what I can tell is a kitchen. “Harris, Brent, and Malik, this is Princess Susanna and Logan,” he introduces us.

  “Please, call me Anna,” Anna says, blushing at the use of her formal title.

  They all say hello.

  “Do you need anything, Jack?” Brent asks.

  “No. Anna here is going to use our Wi-Fi,” he says with a wink and offers up some space at a writing table in the corner of the room.

  “Thank you,” Anna says as she pulls out her computer from a bag and begins to make herself comfortable.

  “What exactly are you looking for at this hour?” Jack asks as he leans against the back of a sofa.

  “Logan can explain, I need to get searching,” she says as she puts on her giant headphones and focuses in on her computer. She turns for a moment to face Jack. “Passcodes?” she asks. He nods, and she pushes back for a minute to allow him to enter some passcodes, giving her access to the Wi-Fi.

  “Well?” Jack asks, turning to me once Anna is online.

  “What do you know about my mother?” I ask Jack. Jack gives me a hard stare.

  “Follow me,” he replies as he walks into the kitchen and opens the fridge. He pulls out two bottles of beer and opens them, handing me one before he heads toward a back door. “Come on, let’s talk,” he says as he holds the door open for me. The three men we just met are on computers set up around a kitchen table. I follow Jack out to a patio area surrounded by a small garden of flowers. The sea breeze whips through my hair as I sit down across from Jack at a bistro-style table.

  “What do you know about your mother?” Jack asks me as he turns his beer in his hands.

  I look at him with a raised eyebrow. “What do you want to know?” I ask him.

  “Logan, what do you really know about your mother?” he asks me.

  I lean in and set my beer on the table. “What exactly do you mean, Jack?” I ask, enunciating each syllable.

  “Sit back, Logan. I think there are things you need to know,” he says to me.

  I lean back in silence and confusion.

  “Do you know what your mother was doing when she met your father?” Jack asks me.

  “Yes, she was over here researching and writing articles about the anti-monarchist movement in Montelandia as a freelance journalist,” I say.

  “What if I told you that was just a cover?” Jack says slowly, his eyes don’t leave mine, and I know he must see the complete and utter look of shock on my face.

  “What are you saying?” I demand.

  Jack sighs. “Your mother worked in intelligence,” Jack says.

  “No. No,” I stammer.

  “Logan, your mother was investigating anti-monarchists and her journalism background was the perfect cover to do it,” Jack says.

  “But…I don’t understand,” I say.

  “Your mother was a journalist, at first. You know she studied journalism and politics and minored in foreign language studies, right?” Jack asks me as though my mother was some unknown person to me.

  “Of course,” I say, sounding a bit defensive.

  “Well, a few years after she graduated, she was covering a story in the Middle East. She ended up uncovering an assassination plot. She was inadvertently pulled into an investigation. She had the access to individuals that some agents needed. However, she was so good at her job, her language skills, her knowledge of global politics that she was offered a position, and she accepted it.” Jack pauses, letting this sink in. My mind is blank at first and then bombarded by a million memories. All those times she was gone, now I wonder what top-secret mission she was on, what kind of danger she may have been in.

  “Becoming…close…with your father, was not part of the plan. When she became pregnant with you…well, she had decisions to make. If her cover was blown, she now risked not only herself but both you and your father. As a member of a royal family, your father was told about the situation upon your birth. Once you were old enough to travel internationally, they decided it was best to feign a breakup and move you back to the States, for your own safety. Leah was given some time to be with you, but when you were old enough, she went back to work. Obviously, it’s harder when an agent has a family,” Jack says.

  “Moving to the Bahamas…” I trail off and look up at him.

  “Was part of the case she was working,” Jack says. “She was tracing financial movements by large corporations with ties to the anti-monarchists. There are a number of countries, many in the Caribbean, where it’s easy to launder money in offshore accounts. The Bahamas put her in a good location to travel amongst islands but also stay slightly separated. We were able to give her a cover story of freelancing for some U.S. papers to cover the politics of various Caribbean nations.”

  “We?” I ask him.

  Jack lets out a breath. “I worked with her for a short period of time. My expertise is more in the organized international crime world. Not surprisingly, those organizations also like to launder money in offshore accounts,” Jack explains.

  “Shit,” I mutter.

  “Well…there’s more,” Jack says, taking a long sip of his beer.

  I look at him. He seems almost uncomfortable.

  “What aren’t you telling me, Jack?” I ask him.

  “What do you know about your mother’s death?” Jack asks me. I don’t like where this is going, not one little bit.

  “She died on impact in a car accident in Freeport. A man had a heart attack and his car plowed through the intersection and straight into hers. He was in a large van. She was in a small rental car. The rental car’s airbag didn’t deploy. Her lower half was pinned between the wheel and the seat, but her head went through the windshield. The blunt force trauma killed her, although I’m told her internal injuries would probably have killed her if the windshield had not,” I say, keeping my voice steady as I recite the medical examiner’s notes that I read and re-read after the accident.

  “That man did not die of a natural heart attack,” Jack says.

  “What?” I snarl, setting my beer down so heavily on the table that it splashes out of the bottle.

  “He was injected with a chemical that causes heart failure,” Jack says. “He was a pawn. Her murder was calculated. It was planned. She was going to a meeting with an informant. That informant was later found dead, also from a heart attack. We were able to examine his body and found the needle mark. He still had traces of the chemical in his body. We had the driver’s body inspected after that prior to burial and concluded the same chemical was used on him as well. We were in the middle of the investigation, so no one was told, not even your grandparents know this infor
mation. It is classified. But I feel you must know this now. It’s too important,” Jack says.

  “And why haven’t we been told this before,” I inquire, my mind half numb.

  “Because…the investigation is still ongoing,” Jack announces.

  My eyebrows shoot up. “What do you mean, exactly?” I ask him.

  “I mean…” Jack trails off and lowers his voice. “The anti-monarchist movement is not dead.”

  My eyes might as well fall out of my head because I think I raised my forehead up enough that gravity could suck them from my skull.

  “You mean…” I can’t even find the words.

  Jack leans into me. “My unit has been keeping tabs on some individuals that we believe are still active as anti-monarchists. It’s not been on the front burner, as we didn’t think there was much traction for them. However, when Anna stumbled upon the bounty for you, all hell broke loose. Clearly, we underestimated the game plan,” he growls. He runs a hand through his hair. “I should have known better. It’s like a sleeper cell. You think it’s dead for years, and then boom.”

  “Wait, wait, wait. You are telling me a sleeper cell of anti-monarchists are now after Anna’s and my family and that group also killed my mother who was investigating them?” I say.

  Jack puts a finger over his mouth, indicating that I need to lower my voice.

  “Aren’t they working for you?” I point out, motioning to the three men in the kitchen.

  “Yes, but it’s also frowned upon to give out classified information,” he whispers.

  “Jesus Christ, does Anna know?” I ask him.

  He shakes his head. “No, I need to tell her. But I wanted you to know first. You deserved to know first,” he says to me.

  My brain has a million and two questions now. I feel like the mother I thought I knew, I didn’t know at all.

  “Jack, we’ll have to talk about my mother later. I need more answers, but what Anna found…well, it may start to bridge our intelligence gap,” I say to him as I begin to fill him in on what was in the box in my mother’s closet.

  “How many boxes are there?” he asks.

  “There’s probably about a half dozen left and another half dozen that I had piled up for trash,” I say.

  He curses. “I’m sending someone over to get them and scan them,” he says.

  “But…my grandparents?” I say.

  “Call them. Tell them you have a friend who’s going to stop by for the boxes,” he says. “Make up something; you’re a smart kid.” Jack picks up his phone and walks to the edge of the patio, clearly making a call to whoever will be getting my mom’s things.

  I dial my grandparents and tell them that we had to head out of town for a meeting and that a friend is picking up my mom’s boxes for me, so I can get them shipped to my house to go through later. I hate lying to them, but I know it’s better to keep them safe right now. I freeze when that thought pops into my head. I now know why my mother kept her life a secret, why she did what she did. She was protecting me. And then my stomach flips because I realize that I don’t completely know what she was protecting me from and that unknown scares the shit out of me because now it’s not just me, but my family and Anna and her family.

  Chapter Eighteen

  I walk back into the living room where Anna is busy typing away. It dawns on me suddenly just how scared I am right now. I’m scared to tell Anna what Jack just told me. I’m scared for Anna. I can’t lose her.

  As though sensing me, she slowly turns. I can tell by her face that whatever she’s been finding online is not any better than what I just learned.

  “What’s wrong?” I ask her before she can inquire about what Jack and I spoke about a minute earlier.

  “Sebastian…he’s not so clean,” she says, frowning.

  “Meaning?” I ask.

  “Meaning, I found some strange offshore bank accounts. People with nothing to hide would not have these accounts,” she says. A little crease forms between her eyebrows.

  “But how do we know that he’s using those accounts to hide something?” I ask her.

  She moves over so that I can see the screen. My jaw drops. There are photos of Sebastian with a number of the anti-monarchists that were in my mother’s articles, and then there’s a screenshot of an email account, his email account. I almost want to roll my eyes, of course, Anna just went straight to the source and hacked his email. I read the emails and my stomach clenches.

  “Is that…” I trail off as I look at the “To” and “From” columns in his account.

  “He’s been corresponding with our favorite underworld assassin,” she says.

  “So, it’s him. He’s behind it all,” I say.

  She shakes her head. “I don’t think he is,” she replies.

  “What do you mean? He’s got emails with M!” I practically yell. Anna’s eyes dart toward the kitchen.

  “Shhhh,” she hushes me. “There are also encrypted emails. I’m trying to break the code right now. It’ll take a little while, probably a day of me running my encryption software to break the code. But he’s talking to someone else, and I’m thinking that he’s a middle man. His encrypted emails to M are basically like he’s giving directions but for someone else. It’s odd, almost like he’s not actually sending them. The verbiage doesn’t match his normal dialogue. But then there are these other ones, that I can’t quite figure out,” she says, pursing her lips. “What’s wrong?” she asks, suddenly realizing that I too have news.

  I sit down on the back of the sofa. She stands and walks over to me as though sensing whatever it is, it’s something very serious.

  “Jack…just told me some interesting information,” I say.

  She takes my hands in hers and squeezes them a little. “Is everything alright?” she asks as her brows knit together once again.

  I run my thumbs over the soft skin of her hands. “My mother was intentionally killed,” I blurt out because I really don’t know what else to say.

  “What?!” she exclaims.

  “It turns out my mother wasn’t a journalist, but a spy,” I say because I don’t know how else to say it.

  “Holy. Shit,” she says enunciating each word.

  “Yeah, holy shit,” I repeat.

  “But…I don’t understand. Why was she killed?” she asks the million-dollar question.

  “She was using her journalism background as a cover while she investigated anti-monarchists. Apparently, she had traced some of their funds to offshore accounts in the Caribbean. That’s why she moved us there. They had her killed when she figured out too much,” I explain as best as I can.

  Anna’s frown only deepens. “I don’t understand. That was years ago. Why wouldn’t they have told you the truth?” she asks me.

  I take a deep breath before I answer her because the answer will change everything.

  “Because the investigation is still open,” I say as I exhale.

  Her eyes widen. “But the anti-monarchists…” She trails off as the realization dawns on her. She bites her lip as she does when she’s deep in thought. “They are behind all of this,” she states.

  I nod. “Yes, I think so,” I say.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Jack walks in and takes one look at us before hurrying over to the computer. “What did you find?” he asks.

  “Sebastian Bach,” she says. Jack’s already reading the emails on the screen.

  “Damn…he’s clever. We investigated him but we didn’t find these emails,” Jack says.

  “I don’t know if they are his. They were heavily encrypted. These emails have never been accessed from any device he owns,” Anna explains. “I only came across it because I stumbled upon a burner account that M was using a while back. I wasn’t sure he still used it, but I checked and…well, he’s still using it, or he was up until the palace bombing.”

  “If M is behind that, then he’s probably gone dark,” Jack says.

  “True,” Anna agrees.

&nbs
p; “What does Sebastian have to gain from any of this?” I ask. “I mean, I get the economic incentive, but the risk seems too high for someone with his public profile.”

  Jack laughs. “You’d be surprised what people in powerful positions are willing to do to stay powerful,” Jack declares. I contemplate his statement. I know he’s right, but something doesn’t sit well with me. I feel like Sebastian is just one part of the puzzle.

  “It’s very late. I should get you both back to the house,” Jack says. Anna nods.

  “Yes, I should get some sleep. But tomorrow night, I need to research more,” she says.

  “I’ll arrange it, once you get back from your day trip. It doesn’t appear our breadcrumbs have been found yet, so your plan for tomorrow is still cleared,” Jack says.

  “Thanks,” she says as we follow him out to a car, and he drives us back to the house. We barely pull on night clothes before we pass out from exhaustion.

  The next thing I know, I hear Auggie’s voice.

  “Come on, lazy asses. We need to get going,” he says from the hallway. I groan and put my face into the pillow.

  “Fuck off, Augs,” Anna grumbles beside me, making me smile against the pillow. I turn to face her. Even in the morning, with her hair disheveled and no makeup, she’s gorgeous.

  “What’s so funny?” she asks on a yawn.

  “You two,” I state.

  She rolls her eyes. “Trust me, having two older brothers is not funny,” she says as she pulls herself out of bed. I wonder why they haven’t given me the third degree about being with Anna. I cringe for that future conversation.

  “You’re lucky, you know? I always wanted siblings,” I muse as I follow her into the bathroom.

  “Well, the grass is always greener,” she says as she disrobes and turns on the shower. I follow her inside, my hands itching to touch her.

  “Let me,” I whisper as she reaches for the shampoo. She releases it, and I grab it, pouring some on my hand. She walks under the spray of the shower, letting the water pour down over her perfect body. My morning wood just went from steel to diamonds. I try to not focus on that as I begin massaging the shampoo into her hair. She closes her eyes and moans.