In Shining Armor

by Blair Babylon

  But she always went back to Kensington Palace to listen to the personal protection detail’s scoldings, which she dutifully nodded along to, until the next time she slipped away.

  A year later, Pierre proposed.

  It was perfectly reasonable that she, a princess of Hannover, would marry the heir to the Prince of Monaco, even though he was ten years or so older than she was.

  Dieter Schwarz had married someone else months before, she had heard through the Hannover family grapevine. Wulfram had attended the elopement. That was nice for him.

  London seemed dreary and gray all the time that winter, more so than usual. The chilly rain arrived early, stayed late, and was unrelenting.

  Flicka tried every day to get over Dieter, to put him in her past and chalk their entire affair up to an immature infatuation, but the best she ever managed was to numb that raw part of her wounded heart and go on.

  Hannovers shouldn’t love anyone, anyway. She should be like her brother Wulfram, floating through life with a cold, insubstantial touch.

  For her, a marriage to Pierre Grimaldi, Prince of Monaco, was a logical choice. They had a special understanding about their personal lives, which was fine with her.

  Pierre was affectionate whenever they were together, and he loved her in his fashion. He took special interest in her security, and he finally sat down and talked to her, asking her not to go on her walkabouts any longer. He would be devastated if something happened to her, he assured her, his dark eyes solemn.

  So she stopped slipping away for even those moments of privacy.

  Flicka’s piano performances took on new energy and urgency, tapping a deeper wellspring, as she poured her broken heart into her music.

  Regrets and Recriminations

  Flicka von Hannover

  And now, after two long years,

  and deeper cracks in my soul than I thought possible,

  I am in Dieter’s arms again.

  Flicka tried to sleep on the train from Montreux to Paris, but with Dieter’s strong arms around her and his kiss still warm on her lips, her mind buzzed.

  Her shoulders and arms hurt where she had wrenched her joints, trying to twist away from Pierre and Quentin Sault in the early morning hours. Her whole body hurt, every bone, every muscle, every cell, down to her shredded soul.

  Yet in Dieter’s arms, she could rest. He could protect her. No matter what, even if she tried to distract him, he wouldn’t waver because he was her guardian angel.

  She pressed her hand to her thigh, pressing the seam in her pants against her leg, just like she always did when she needed comfort. The gold and diamond brooch pinned inside scratched her skin.

  Regrets and recriminations rolled through her brain. Anger shook her that she had been so stupid to believe anything Pierre had ever said. She painfully wished for a do-over for her whole life, every single minute, and she wanted to walk away into the crowd at the train station when they got to Paris and never look back.

  She wished that, three years ago, she had knocked the Kensington Palace security guard out of the way and chased Dieter, demanded that he talk to her instead of running away, and forced him to stay with her.

  But he had obviously made his decision.

  That kiss felt like he had decided something else, now.

  Whatever was going on in Dieter’s head would have to wait. She was, quite literally, a victim of domestic abuse by a powerful man who threatened more and worse, and she was on the run, trying to divorce him.

  Dieter would have to wait his damn turn.

  But she cuddled deeper into his arms as the train sped toward Paris because his strong arms comforted her, and any breath of peace that stilled the maelstrom in her mind was a relief.

  Mass Text

  Flicka von Hannover

  Fiddlesticks.

  Flicka walked behind Dieter as they stepped off the maglev train at Paris’s Gare du Lyon train station. He took the point position, of course. Her job was to keep up with him and not lose him as he navigated through the crowd.

  The clamor hit her first: the overwhelming roar of the voices talking and whirring trains and pounding feet and thumping bags and clacking signs. Odors of piss, sweaty people, and sour coffee stank in the air. People pressed close, shouldering their way through the train terminal in the direction of the street. The ceiling flew far above them. Support columns stretched and poked the skylights and gold panels with green steel branches.

  Flicka pressed closer to Dieter in the shoving crowd and swatted away a hand that tried to worm into his backpack.

  Hey, she might be a princess and more accustomed to thieving billionaires who skimmed money from do-nothing charities, but she wasn’t going to let a pickpocket nick Dieter’s wallet.

  They hustled through the crowd and broke out of the door onto a busy sidewalk, where throngs of people streamed out the open doors into the summer sunshine.

  Dieter grabbed her hand and tugged her to walk with him, glancing at his phone as he threaded through the crowd. “He’s coming.”

  “Who?” Flicka asked, breathless as she stared at the crowd around them. One teenaged boy stared back at her, his brown eyes widened by thick eyeliner and mascara.

  “Our ride.”

  A car screeched to a stop on the street beside them.

  Dieter ducked and looked in before opening the back door and wheeling Flicka around to shove her inside.

  The driver was a black-haired man crowded into the small car’s front seat. He turned and glared at them, his black eyes unfathomable in their darkness. A day’s growth of coarse beard covered his cheeks, but his hair was cut military-short. He looked at Flicka through the rearview mirror and said, “Ah, I see now.”

  Dieter nodded back as he climbed into the back seat beside Flicka and slammed the door. “Anything new to report?”

  “I arrived four hours ago. Monegasque Secret Service is definitely surveilling the law office, even though it is Sunday afternoon. I have identified six operators and six additional possibles. There is a white van parked nearby. I assume, for kidnapping. Your meeting will have to be off-site, and I suggest you call in additional Rogues for operational security.”

  “Thank you, Aaron,” Dieter said. “Let’s do that.”

  “I have an apartment set up as a safe house in the Latin Quarter, as you requested. It’s modest,” his dark eyes glanced in the rearview mirror at Flicka, “but it will suffice for most needs.”

  Dieter leaned back. “Perfect.”

  Flicka piped up, “Wulfram keeps an apartment in Paris. We could stay there.” But there were problems with going to a location owned by a member of her family and staffed by family employees. “Or maybe that wouldn’t be the best idea.”

  Dieter gave her a half-grin, while the driver ignored her and drove.

  She shrank in her seat, trying to keep out of sight. She turned her head away from the window. The sun, lowering toward the buildings in the West, warmed her arm and neck as the car dodged through the heavy traffic.

  Dieter watched the traffic and the mirror on his side of the car.

  Twenty silent minutes later, the driver stopped the car in front of a building that occupied an entire Parisian city block. “Third floor, apartment 3C. Entry code is five-eight-nine-six. There’s food in the fridge.”

  “Thanks.” Dieter picked up his rucksack and helped Flicka out of the car and onto the sidewalk.

  The streets in the Latin Quarter were much less crowded, probably because it was after five-thirty on a Sunday evening. Though the sun was still shining above the rooftops, few people meandered on the streets. The cafes and stores on the ground floors of the graceful buildings were shuttered and locked.

  Flicka followed Dieter in a door and climbed the narrow, spiral stairs behind him. The old wood and plaster of the building smelled like the musty back rooms of some museums. Light streamed through a stained-glass skylight at the top.

  On the third-floor landing, Dieter asked, “What was th
e code?”

  “Five-eight-nine-six.”

  “Right.”

  She slugged his arm.

  He opened the door using the keypad, and they went inside. He flipped closed the several locks on the door while Flicka looked around.

  The tiny flat had a couch and television in the living room. Over on the side, a few cabinets and table with two chairs served as a kitchen. Two open windows let in the late afternoon sunlight. Sheer curtains blew in the summer breeze, a flutter of a breeze in the warm apartment. One door at the back led somewhere else.

  Dieter slung his backpack on the couch and surveyed the room.

  Flicka wandered through the tiny apartment, dragging her shoes on the scuffed floor. Behind the door was a small bedroom with one bed.

  Good. Dieter would be close by during the night.

  She dropped her purse on the little table in the corner. The glittering gold bag thumped on the wood.

  The pieces of her phone were still in there.

  “Dieter,” she said, still thinking.

  “Yeah?” He had edged over to the window and was teasing the sheer curtains closed.

  “Wulf must be going nuts.”

  Dieter nodded. “I can’t imagine Alina suddenly going missing. I’d be out of my mind.”

  “He might think that Pierre killed me.”

  He nodded. “It’s crossed his mind.”

  “I need to tell him that I’m all right, that I’m not dead.”

  Dieter sighed. “Yeah, but I don’t know who Pierre has turned inside the Welfenlegion, so it’s not safe to contact him.”

  “A mass text, then. Not just to Wulfram, but to a hundred different people or more.”

  “They’ll have a hundred electronic trails, all pointing right back here.”

  “I’ll use your phone, then.”

  “If you use my phone, they’ll know we’re together and trace me. That’s worse. If you use a burner phone, he might not believe it’s from you.”

  “Can’t your guys do something about that? Surely Rogue Security has some computer guys.”

  “Of course, we do.” He stared at the sunlight shining through the sheer, white curtains. “Yeah, maybe I can get them to do something technical. Let me talk to them.”

  He called someone while Flicka used the tiny bathroom and washed her face. God, she hated hiding and running away like this, and she hated that back in Montreux, her brother must be quietly going insane.

  As she scrubbed off the chalky makeup, her face emerged, still red and swollen around her nose and eyes in the mirror.

  The devastated anger in her eyes didn’t look like herself at all. Flicka von Hannover was serene and collected as she swanned from meeting to meeting, blithely making the world a better place.

  The woman in the mirror looked like she wanted to crawl under the sink, sob, and fade out of existence. She might kill a few people before she did it.

  Who was Flicka if she wasn’t a rich bitch who ordered everyone around and demanded money for charities while enduring no hardship herself?

  The green-eyed blonde looked back at her with an angry, wounded stare.

  Flicka patted her face dry and went to see what Dieter had found out.

  As soon as she came in, he poked his phone, hanging up a call. “We can get a message to Wulfram that you’re okay. It’s going to come from a thousand different points around the world. I’m not sure he’ll believe it, though. He’ll think Pierre or whomever is trying to throw him off.”

  “We could use one of the old code words that he and I made up while I was at Le Rosey.”

  Dieter nodded. “I’d forgotten about those. He had his phone in the barracks one night, and I took it away from him for fun. It was just a long list of you two texting weird, single words back and forth.”

  “Yeah, it was stupid, but it’s a silly little code that only he and I know.” It was almost twin language, and Flicka wondered if Wulf had just taught her a substitution-cipher language that he and Constantin had made up. “That’ll work.”

  Dieter sat at the kitchen table and emptied her gold, glittering purse in front of him. “As soon as you’re done sending, I’ll have to pull the battery again. It would probably be smart to destroy it at that point. Do you need to write down any of the phone numbers before we pull the SIM card and break it?”

  Flicka never needed to write down phone numbers. “I’m good.”

  He finished assembling the phone and held it out to her. “I don’t have my screwdriver to screw the back onto it, so hold the back in place. My guy will catch it when you hit send.”

  Flicka selected most of the people on her contacts list and texted, I have to disappear. I’m going away for a while to think. I can’t deal with everything. I just want to walk the Earth and think. I’ll be in touch when I can. It might be a few months. Fiddlesticks.

  Fiddlesticks had been their code word that she was all right and safe. Wulfie had sent a text of just that one word to her after that guy in Munich had tried to gun him down a few years before.

  Dieter had saved Wulf that time, too. He’d pulled Wulfram to the pavement just as the shot rang out and the crowd dove away, saving his life.

  “Just send it to everyone right now?” she asked, confirming before she hit the button.

  “My guy will catch it, bounce it around the world for a few hours to hide our location and towers, and then it will go to all the phone numbers you selected.”

  Flicka tapped the send button, let the icon whirl, and handed Dieter the phone.

  He whipped the back off her phone, yanked the batteries, scratched out the SIM card with his fingernail, and broke the tiny chip with his fingertips. “Okay. It’s dead.”

  Flicka wished she had a damn phone. The world felt like it ended at the walls of that very small apartment.

  Dieter texted someone on his phone and, a second later, nodded. “He got it. It’ll go out in a few hours.”

  “Okay, good.”

  He stretched. “Let’s see what Aaron has left us.”

  Vodka By Any Other Name

  Flicka von Hannover

  Let’s say this bottle of mineral water

  is vodka.

  Flicka followed Dieter over to the small kitchenette, and he poked around in the half-size refrigerator. “Aaron is the strong, silent type, but he does like his food. Are you hungry?”

  “Not really.” She leaned against the counter.

  “You didn’t have lunch. You should eat.” He took a whole, roasted chicken with small potatoes from the fridge, along with a container of hummus and a bag of sliced vegetables. He emptied two baguettes from a long paper bag.

  They were in Paris. Of course, there was bread.

  And three bottles of wine.

  Not so much of a safe house as a party house, Flicka mused.

  She found plates in a cabinet. “The hummus is a little surprising.”

  “Aaron is Israeli. Whenever he stocks a safe house, he makes sure there’s hummus, just in case he’s invited.” Dieter dunked a cucumber chip in the hummus and crunched it. “And in every city, everywhere around the world, he always knows where to get the best hummus. Damn, this is good. Now sit and eat some of Paris’s best hummus.”

  When she had been cramming for exams in London, Dieter had always made sure she ate enough. She tended to stress-starve, and he was probably right. That breakfast he had demanded she eat in the morning had settled her stomach.

  She ate some of the chicken, pulling shreds off with her fingers, and dunked vegetables in the hummus.

  Dieter held out a chunk of good, Parisian bread to her, and even though the carb warning bells clanged in her head, she ate it.

  The crisp crust and white, pillowy interior seduced her, and she chowed down several slices before any sort of sense caught up with her. In minutes, she was practically high from the sudden rush of carbohydrates, and she giggled.

  Dieter opened the wine. A dry white, as they were eating chicken.


  Aaron had even paired the wine.

  While he had surveilled her lawyers’ offices.

  Dieter had mad hiring skills. Maybe Flicka needed to get him to hire people for her admin team.

  She noticed that Dieter was drinking a bottle of water, but she sucked down the wine.

  He was on duty, so he couldn’t drink.

  She was a fugitive. She deserved wine.

  Flicka poured herself another glass. As the pale gold vino filled her glass past the halfway mark, she caught Dieter eyeing the glass.

  She asked him, “What?”

  “Under any other circumstances, I would have nothing to say. However, despite the fact that we have called this apartment a ‘safe house,’ there’s nothing safe about it. Pierre’s Secret Service is a state-run operation. They have legitimate and constant access to resources that we can only hack into. It is possible that they could show up on our doorstep. Hopefully, if they arrived, we would have notice from one of my guys down the street—”

  “So you have guys down the street,” she said. “They’ll warn us.”

  “I have two guys down the street. Others should be arriving tonight for our trip to the lawyers’ office tomorrow. But if anything happens, I can’t fight them and carry you if you’re drunk.”

  Flicka got a bottle of sparkling water from the fridge and popped the cap off. “Not that three glasses of wine would do anything to me. I drink all night at these charity things. My liver can handle any liquor I throw at it.”

  Dieter watched her sip the sparkling water and smiled a little. “You used to get pretty drunk when we were in college.”

  “I was faking it, most of the time,” she admitted.

  He frowned. “Surely not.”

  “I wanted you to put your arm around me so I wouldn’t fall, and I wanted you to carry me to the bedroom. So, I faked it.”

  He leaned forward so that his elbows rested on the table. “I would have done that anyway.”