He caught one of her wrists and stared at her again, still grinning. “It is what?”
Rae had walked right into it.
Wulf was not superstitious. He was rigorously logical, which was why he was one of the unseen masters that controlled the world’s economy. When he was sitting behind the bank of his computers in the small room behind the grand stairway on the main floor of their house, while he was manipulating the flickering numbers that ruled people’s lives on the huge, curved screen that surrounded the desk, he was an emotionless, calculating deity of currencies and stock options.
He cared deeply about why he manipulated the world. He understood random walks and unforeseen variables.
Outside of his office, he was occasionally sweetly sentimental.
But he didn’t believe in luck, good or bad.
Wulf wound the soft cotton of the pillowcase around her hands, tying her wrists above her head. “Go ahead,” he said, his voice turning deliciously sinister. “It is the morning of our wedding day. Seeing you is—”
He trailed off, daring her to say it.
“Come on,” Rae said, twisting her hands to try to get free, but he never tied a loose knot. “It’s traditional.”
“I have never stood on tradition.” He swooped down and ran his teeth down her neck, his breath warm on her skin.
Rae stretched against him, unable to even help herself when he laid his hands on her. She whispered, “It’s bad luck.”
“I’ll take my chances,” Wulf said, his voice vibrating against the sensitive skin behind her ear.
He took more than his chances.
Wulf slid off and turned her, holding her from behind as he ran his hands over her. His hands sculpted her body, molding her against his lean muscle and the blond, silken fuzz that softened his chest.
Rae’s body warmed with every stroke of his hands over her hips and breasts until she moaned his name. He hadn’t untied her hands, and she was helpless while he roused her, trailing his fingers over her and palming her skin, teasing her and sliding his fingers over her nipples, and he finally shoved his knee between her legs to slide himself between her folds, every rough shove of him through her sliding over her clit until she clenched her fists, still bound over their heads, as he bit down on the back of her neck.
The throb started in her clit but rippled up her body, and Rae arched. His strong arms tightened around her ribs, and he ground against her. Every thrust rebounded on her, pulsing up her body until white light spun her in brilliant silence.
She gasped air, and the room steadied. Wulf held her hard against his body, every hard muscle clenched. His breath heated her shoulder where he held his teeth, just barely shy of leaving a mark, as he shuddered.
When Rae could breathe again, Wulf rolled back slightly, letting her lean against him.
“Well,” she said, still out of breath. “That was only thirty-five minutes. Guess you didn’t pace yourself.”
He trailed his fingers lightly down her arm, raising goosebumps.
Rae wiggled around to see a cold smile forming on his lips.
Oh, no. She knew that smile too well.
“We have another hour and a half then,” he said. “Perfect.”
Kidnapping
Flicka von Hannover
I slipped away from my security teams one more time that early morning, just to walk through Montreux, just to get away from the wedding chaos that was compounded by security men constantly tugging me away from my friends and consultants and coordinators because I had been stationary in a common area for too long.
My whole life, black-suited security men have followed me like bats fluttering in my wake. They suffocate me, swirling in the air and isolating me from people and children and birds and air. Instead of being a fairy-tale princess, I have been a fairy-tale witch, trailing vampires and darkness.
Two teams surround me every day: the Grimaldi team from my new husband Pierre’s palace staff in Monaco, where he is the noble heir to the principality, and a Hannover team hired by my brother, who believes that Pierre’s team is either inadequate or might not defend me.
That very thing happened at our wedding.
A man with a gun shot white-hot bullets out of the crowd at us. Pierre’s team threw him into a car and sped away, even as Pierre reached back for me and shouted at them to return.
He fired half of his team afterward in a cold rage that I had never seen before and then apologized to me, swearing it would never happen again.
But I know better. His team answers to his uncle, Prince Rainier the Fourth, the reigning Prince of Monaco. He won’t let his heir be murdered.
The press would be awful.
Trust me, the press gets horrible when princes are murdered. Scathing. Blaming. Aggressive. I’ve read a lot about things like that.
Security threats are always present. I know that. Deeply. From the time that I was a toddler, I knew that I owed my very existence to an act of horrific violence, and that someday, another would probably take everything away from me, either by ending my own life or someone I loved.
Every damn day.
And yet, still, when both security teams broke formation for just a few seconds in the crowded hotel lobby and they couldn’t push their way through, I darted sideways through a cluster of talking people and around a corner.
I’m good at that. I can get away from anyone.
I’ve practiced my whole life.
After I gave them the slip, I met with the catering coordinator for more than three damn minutes to ascertain that suitable shrimp had been delivered that morning, that we had secured an alternate source of the problematic black truffles for the pheasant main course, and that the roses were indeed one-quarter opened.
Hallelujah. This reception might come off this evening as planned after all.
After that, I rounded up the cosmetics team by throwing out a mass text. We met in an alcove of the lobby to confirm the schedule for the bridesmaids’ and Rae’s hair, primary make-up application, and touch-ups. They had everything down pat and extra pots of all the necessary cosmetics. They had become a well-oiled machine.
Brilliant.
Planning the wedding for my older brother, Wulfram, and his wife Rae had occupied all my time for the last few months, and it was almost done. It had been delayed for a month due to his wife’s delicate condition, and the rescheduling had been an around-the-clock job.
But it was almost done.
And at three o’clock, four hours from now, it would begin, and it would be perfect.
By the sheer force of my willpower, I will make this wedding a spectacular success, even I have to bribe, threaten, or blackmail everyone in Montreux to do it. Wulfram deserves a perfect day.
He will remember every detail for the rest of his life.
Four more hours.
And then I will bend everyone to my will that’s what needs to be done, and it will be perfect.
But, for those few moments of freedom, I walked along a sidewalk in Montreux that passed in front of the grand hotel that Wulfram’s security team had commandeered for the wedding, ambling toward the concert halls that filled for the jazz and classical festivals here in the summer and fall.
Across the road, a park velveted in late-summer green stretched toward Lake Geneva, and the scent of mown grass crested the two buzzing lanes of traffic in the street. Shops lined the ground-level of the hotel—a jazz cafe, a coffee place, a boutique—all with their snapdragon-yellow shades retracted for the morning. In the afternoon, these shops and the hotel looked like a yellow tent, sheltered from the summer sun.
Farther down the avenue, a church spire poked into the sky, and some of the concert venues threw glass glares into the street.
More traffic blew by, ruffling my trousers and hair.
Maybe I would stay for the classical music festival. It was supposed to be soon, right? A friend of mine from Tanglewood—an elite performing arts camp that I had attended when I was sixteen—was suppose
d to play a piano concerto here. I would love to see her again.
Maybe next year, when all the weddings had settled down, maybe I could go back to performing, too. No matter what Pierre thinks, I won’t give up music. His family had managed to force Grace Kelly to give up her career, but that was a long time ago.
But this year, maybe I can just watch the recitals.
The sun lifted away from the eastern horizon, and the fiery clouds thinned. The sky turned the deep blue of my older brother’s eyes, a good portent. Surely, if anyone deserved a perfect wedding day, he did.
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.
I stumbled forward, trying to catch myself, but my high heel caught in a sidewalk crack.
The door in front of me gaped open as I stumbled, and he pushed me inside the car.
More hands grabbed me, holding me on the floor, no matter how I scratched at their hands and skin.
No. Not today.
I writhed, twisting, and managed a glance up.
The man holding my hands behind my back was in his late fifties or older, his face running to lines. Gray floated through his hair.
I had known him all my life.
I switched to German and asked, “Moritz? What are you doing?”
He glanced down at me. “Prinzessin, I am sorry.”
The Machine Awakens
Luca Wyss
As soon as the man ran from between the buildings and shoved Her Serene Highness Flicka into an SUV, Luca pushed off with his toes and sprinted. He tapped his earpiece as he ran, shouting, “Nine! Code nine!”
Other black-suited men rounded the corner ahead of him, running hard. Friedhelm slapped the back of the kidnappers’ vehicle as it pulled away from the curb.
Luca turned and leaped between two other parked cars, trying for the windshield, but the SUV jerked hard into a lane of traffic before he could reach it. “Sheisse!”
More cursing from the other men as they pulled up, panting from the hard sprint.
Dieter Schwarz’s voice growled in his ear, “Report.”
“They got her,” Luca said, trying not to let his voice crack. “Black SUV. Volkswagen Touareg, current model. Driving southeast on Avenue Claude-Nobs.”
“License plate?” Dieter asked, his voice a low growl.
The numbers on the long plate on the car’s bumper had blurred in his eyes. “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.” Luca turned and jogged back. The rest of the team fell into formation around him.
Luca swore that he could still smell the exhaust of the kidnappers’ SUV, but it was the stink of failure that filled the air.
The Memory of A License Plate
Wulf von Hannover
Wulf stood beside the bed, pulling his robe over his shoulders, fresh from a quick shower. The thick Turkish towel fabric slipped over the elaborate tattoo on his back, a pale dragon surrounded by a riot of chrysanthemums and jasmine blossoms. The stiff scar tissue in the center of the design strained as he shrugged his shoulders.
His wife lay on the bed, wrapped in the covers, her fiery auburn hair spilling over the pillows.
The poor thing, he had worn her out.
Again.
And so she would sleep for the hour before the wedding primping began in earnest, just as he had planned. His younger sister Flicka had sent the schedule to all their phones. It was color-coded and punctuated with a distressing number of exclamation points.
But for now, his wife could sleep.
The curtains were drawn against the noontime sunlight, but he could see her twisted in the sheets, breathing deeply.
As always, even at night, Wulf slipped away so that he wouldn’t wake her up. He didn’t sleep more than a few hours on the best of nights, so they were both used to him sneaking out to work for a few hours.
Wulf swiped his clothes from the floor where he had flung them.
A soft knock tapped at the bedroom door.
He tapped back and pulled on his clothes before he let himself out.
He saw the steel in Dieter’s eyes before he had closed the door behind himself, but he listened for the soft click of the latch before asking, “What has happened?”
“Flicka,” Dieter said. His voice choked. “She was pulled into a Volkswagen Touareg and is unaccounted for.”
“Where was the Grimaldis’ team?” Wulf asked.
“She tried to slip away a half an hour before. Luca picked her up within minutes, but we didn’t see the Monégasque team after that.”
“Have you alerted them?”
Dieter shrugged.
Any other time, Wulf would have indulged Dieter’s competitiveness and disdain for Quentin Sault, Pierre Grimaldi’s head of security. “Tell them. We may need every person we can use if we have to go in after her.”
Dieter nodded and lifted his phone to his ear.
Wulf strode to the living room of the suite where Luca and Friedhelm were speaking softly into cell phones. Matthias, Julien, and Romain clustered on the couches, pointing to a map and comparing notes from their phones.
The head of his household staff, Rosamunde, placed a tray with two coffee carafes and a plate of cookies on the table for them.
Wulf asked, “Any more information?”
Luca said, “The vehicle was the current model. I saw part of the license plate. It was an EU tag, appeared to have a German D for the country code, and ended in the number thirty-nine. Romain got a picture with his cell phone, but we couldn’t quite make it out.”
Icy relief washed over Wulf, but it flashed into anger. He asked Luca, “It was a black Touareg?”
“Yes,” he said. “We’re getting footage from the hotel closed-circuit cameras. We might be able to get a complete license number.”
“Don’t bother,” Wulf said. “The license was H LP 739.”
None of the security men gaped at Wulf for knowing the plate. The accepted story was that he used all kinds of memory tricks.
The H designated that the plate had been issued in the state of Hannover.
When Wulf and Rae had gone to Schloss Marienburg a few months before, when she had seen the castle where he had grown up and met his father, that particular Touareg had been one of the vehicles that had picked them up from the airport and had driven behind them in the caravan to the castle. Wulf’s family used Volkswagens at Schloss Marienburg and their other houses because the major factory was in Hannover, an obvious public relations move.
Luca consulted his phone, flicking at the image to expand the picture. “It fits. The first number could definitely be a seven or a one, and the region code is a single letter.”
Wulf said, “It’s my father again. Find him, and we’ll find Flicka.”
Luca explained to the person on the phone that now they had a complete license plate, and they needed to find the car.
Wulf turned back to Friedhelm. “Ask the concierge to come up. They will know all the other concierges in town. One of them will know where he’s staying. At least we know that she’s in no danger.”
His father had better not have harmed a golden hair on his sister’s head, or Wulf swore to God, he would break the old man apart with his bare hands.
From behind Wulf, Rae asked, “What’s going on?”
He turned, slowly, and smoothed all the concern for his sister out of his f
ace and body. “Everything is fine. You should lie down.”
Rae looked over the room, her brown eyes wide. “Bull-hockey. What’s going on?”
Behind himself, his men shifted on the couches, fidgeting. Luca must be hanging his head between his shoulders. He lied so badly.
Wulf told her, “It appears that my father has managed one last attempt to interfere with our wedding. He’s kidnapped Flicka. We’re quite sure that it was him, so she’s in no danger, other than she might have an aneurysm if she is not allowed to orchestrate her masterpiece.”
Rae snorted. “So when are we going to go get her?”
“You and I aren’t going anywhere,” Wulf said. “You’re going to lie down.”
“Okay,” Rae said, grimacing. “I get why I shouldn’t ride with the cavalry, but you need to.”
He wasn’t leaving her alone at the hotel. “Dieter can lead this operation.”
“She’s going to expect you to be there, and you may need to talk to your dad.”
Wulf would definitely be talking to his father. “I don’t need to go.”
“If anything goes wrong, you’ll never forgive yourself for not being there.”
Wulf said, “There is a small chance that this is a diversion. He may be after you.”
She rolled her eyes. “Leave Julian and a gun with me. He’s your best marksman with a handgun, plus me. And Mrs. Keller will be here. She’s probably a secret assassin, knowing the type of people you hire.”
Wulf smiled. He loved that he didn’t have to worry about his wife being helpless because she wasn’t. Indeed, she was far more dangerous than most of his men. They looked like burly security forces who might be armed. Anyone attacking Rae was in for a devastating surprise.
She said, “You get your butt out there and bring Flicka home in time for our wedding. You hear me?”
Dieter whispered to him, “Just say Yes-ma’am and get it over with.”
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