At Midnight (Runaway Princess: Flicka, Book 4)

by Blair Babylon

  AT MIDNIGHT

  Runaway Billionaires: Flicka

  Book 4

  By: Blair Babylon

  AT MIDNIGHT

  Runaway Billionaires: Flicka

  Book 4

  By: Blair Babylon

  When is a rescue not a rescue? When it’s a kidnapping.

  Flicka and Dieter, whose real name is Raphael Mirabaud, tried to escape her ex-husband’s Secret Service and army, but they couldn’t. Dozens of military personnel, maybe hundreds, surrounded them, trying to kidnap Flicka as they left the courthouse. The only way out was with mercenaries hired by Raphael’s father.

  But Raphael’s father has other plans for them, plans that would force Raphael to return to a destiny he tried to leave behind, and his father will hold Flicka and his daughter hostage and threaten their lives to make him do it.

  The story gets darker, AT MIDNIGHT.

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  Published by Malachite Publishing LLC

  Copyright 2018 by Malachite Publishing LLC

  Table of Contents

  At Midnight

  Special Offers --At Midnight

  At Midnight -- Table of Contents

  A Creation Story, Told By A Man Who Is Not An Angel

  Arriving in Geneva

  A Duel, Of Sorts

  Whispered, In The Dark

  The Real Geneva Trust

  An Assessment of the Situation

  Whispers

  Invisible

  How To Whisper Secrets

  Working Days

  Piano

  Nannies

  Recruiting Bastien

  Park

  Recruiting Océane

  Message

  Options

  Racing Home

  Burner Phone

  No Longer Invisible

  The Big Thing

  Bankers Should Not Kidnap People

  Bump Pass

  Competing Economic Theories

  A Court in Monaco

  D-Day

  Whispers, Again

  Piotr Ilyin

  About the Money

  Raphael

  An Emissary

  Old Army Buddies

  Flicka’s Body

  Burn It Down

  Worse

  An Armani Kidnapping

  Gibraltar

  A Silver Flask

  The Wedding: Flicka

  The Wedding: Raphael

  His First Time

  Games

  Stepmother

  Details of the Next Shipment

  Calling Magnus

  Another Message

  A Ship Full Of Guns

  Magnus’s Note

  More Instructions

  More Messages

  Traitor, Again

  Rogue Revolution

  Tell Me

  When They Came For Us

  Shipment

  The Monegasque Secret Service

  The Last Time I Saw Flicka

  A Note From Blair Babylon

  Blair Babylon Books

  More Rock Stars and Billionaires from Blair Babylon

  Frequently Asked Questions

  Dear Reader

  Copyright and Notices

  A Creation Story, Told By A Man Who Is Not An Angel

  Raphael Mirabaud

  Raphael Valerian Mirabaud sits in a wingback chair in front of you, smoking a cigarette.

  His dark blue suit lies on his muscular body as if it is very expensive and tailored, which it is. He’s slouching in the chair just a little, a posture that emphasizes his flat stomach under his parted suit jacket, with one long leg jutted out like he’s stretching. The sun setting outside the window glows on his face, turning his light skin and blond hair a warmer shade of gold and tracing his sharp cheekbones and jaw with silver.

  “My mother named me after an angel,” Raphael says, rolling the cigarette between his thumb and fingers. “I don’t know why. We’re not religious. We’re French Swiss, so we’re Catholic. That’s the church we don’t attend. None of my sisters have religious names: Océane, Ambre, Chloé. My grandmother was devout, but it got lost somewhere. I was baptized as an infant, probably. I did first communion but not confirmation. By then, I was too involved with other things to worry about my grandmother’s religion.”

  He stares out of the window at the blue expanse of Lake Geneva in Switzerland. He grew up here, you remember. This was his mysterious childhood and his home. The dark wood shelves lining the walls suggest that this room used to be a library, but ceramic statuettes from many cultures fill the niches instead of books.

  He says, “Maybe my mother sensed what I would become through that magic pregnant women have. Maybe she tried to change me by giving me the name of an angel.”

  He sucks a deep breath of smoke from the cigarette and holds it before exhaling. “Maybe an old witch cursed her while she was pregnant with me and then told her what I would become in a prophecy, so she tried to change my fate by changing my name.”

  You wonder if the smoke will stain the elegant, antique crown moulding and tray ceiling, but the plasterwork has been there for at least a century. It’s survived worse, and you saw the housekeepers scurrying around the mansion when you walked in. A fan whirs in the ceiling, efficiently drawing the tobacco smoke up, and you can barely smell it from where you sit.

  He says, “Considering that my nearest sister, Océane, is eleven years older than I am, maybe my mother made a deal with the Devil for another child, and that’s why I’ve turned out the way I have. Maybe I am literally the Devil’s son, a demon in human form. It would explain a lot.”

  He sucks on his cigarette and then mashes it out in an ashtray. He contemplates the crumpled paper and dry leaves. “I keep giving them up, but sometimes, my hand will reach out in a pharmacy and pick up a pack and a lighter when I haven’t smoked in months. It’s like an alien hand or demonic possession.”

  He examines the bent, cold cigarette. “Flicka doesn’t like the smell, and my parents don’t smoke. I’ve tried to give up these things a thousand times,” he says, watching the last of the smoke drift toward the ceiling far above.

  “I picked it up as a teenager, of course, when I was a criminal. The others smoked. It’s hard to stop. Once you’re doing a wrong thing, it’s very hard to stop.”

  Raphael doesn’t seem like a devil, sitting in the glow of the setting sun. Indeed, the long shadow of his chair spilling from the wall to the floor looks like it might be large wings at rest.

  The last of the smoke curls around him as he looks up at you again, his gray eyes serious.

  Maybe he could be a devil, sitting in the smoke and shadows like that, as the gold of the sun touches his face with fire.

  He says, “Once you’re doing wrong things, you don’t want to stop, especially if you like doing them.”

  Arriving in Geneva

  Flicka von Hannover

  I knew I was being kidnapped,

  and I knew Dieter Schwarz couldn’t save me this time.

  During the long flight on the private jet from Las Vegas to Geneva, Switzerland, Flicka helped Dieter with his tiny daughter, Alina, but mostly, she tried to figure out what the hell was going on and how to escape their kidnappers.

  In Las Vegas, four mercenaries—or bodyguards or private security or whoever had saved her and
Dieter from Pierre’s Secret Service by shoving them into the van—had also boarded the airplane, climbing up the stairs from the warm tarmac to the door that blew cold, air-conditioned air. The other thirty or so men had climbed into SUVs and sped away from the plane, back toward the public terminal and the busy freeway beyond the end of the landing strip.

  Valerian and Bastien Mirabaud had entered the plane behind her, Dieter, and Alina.

  Ah, Bastien, Flicka’s silver fox—pale blue eyes and golden-silver hair—who had shadowed Flicka from casino to casino and tipped her exorbitant amounts that had sometimes made the difference between paying their rent or not being quite able to afford it. Living near the edge of financial ruin had attuned Flicka to the importance of generosity. When she looked back at her life, she thought she’d been adequately generous, mostly, but she’d had a lot of money, back then. She wished she’d done more for the people around her.

  Bastien sat far up at the front of the private jet and didn’t talk to them. Flicka wasn’t sure what she would have said to him—maybe asking, Were you spying on me? Why were you stalking me? Was it so you could kidnap us?—so it was probably best that he sat far away from them. She might have decked him, hoping to crack open his gray-haired head on the plane’s white walls.

  Yeah, Flicka was mad. She was furious. Bastien had been her friend. At least, she had thought he was.

  Dieter sat on a couch on the other side of the plane from where Flicka sat. His toddler daughter Alina stood on the couch beside him. The child clutched the back cushions and stared out the windows at the ocean far below.

  The toddler turned to Dieter and shouted in her baby squeak, “Daddy, we’re up in the sky!” pointing with wonder at the blue beyond the round window. Her blond curls glinted in the sunlight.

  “Yes, Alina.” Dieter sat beside his baby daughter on the couch, one of his arms cinched around the child’s waist and his long legs stretching into the plane’s aisle. “Just like when we flew to Las Vegas.”

  Flicka tried not to stare, but Dieter’s voice was weird. Even though she was angling her head toward other areas of the plane to pretend she wasn’t staring and eavesdropping, she watched him, trying to gauge what was going through his head.

  The jet was creamy white inside, from the leather upholstery of the seats to the blond wood trim. Afternoon sun streamed through the wide portholes running down the walls as the plane banked, turning eastward toward Europe.

  Flicka clutched her fingers around the armrests of the seat as the floor slanted under her feet.

  Dieter leaned with the plane, bracing himself as he steadied Alina from toppling off the couch.

  Alina had grown in the last month, and her pink dress was a little too short on her skinny, pale legs. The bulky underpants that matched her dress flashed when she bent over to peer below the plane. She might need a diaper change, though she usually told them when she needed that. Luckily, Flicka had been able to grab a handful of diapers and baby supplies, stuffing them in a diaper bag, while an armed guard had walked Dieter inside their condo to retrieve the Mirabaud passports they had been traveling under.

  Dieter held Alina’s waist and stared at his shoes and the floor, his face impassive. His strong, square jaw was still, not bulging as if he were angry. His muscular arm held his daughter with little effort. He responded when she said something, but he didn’t particularly talk to her.

  That was weird. He usually talked to her all the time.

  Flicka watched him more closely.

  Usually, with Alina, Dieter came across as a warm and affectionate father, sometimes silly when she wanted to play, and he spoke English to her with as little of an accent as he could muster. He didn’t speak with a British accent like Flicka did because he hadn’t attended Le Rosey School under a fanatical Anglophile English instructor. His inflections had always been a mishmash of British and the German-French lilt that was Swiss German. Sometimes, she could really hear the German-based Alemannic in his English.

  But now, Dieter seemed subdued, and his accent was very French when he spoke.

  Of course, his accent should be French, now that Flicka thought about it, if Dieter really was Valerian Mirabaud’s son. She’d been shocked as hell when he’d said that as they were boarding the plane. She knew Valerian Mirabaud. She knew several of Valerian’s daughters and nieces. His nieces were Bastien’s daughters, she realized. Bastien’s daughter Anaïs had been presented at Flicka’s Shooting Star Cotillion just a few years before, and they’d become great friends. How could she not have known that her Dieter Schwarz, her Lieblingwächter, was Anaïs’s cousin and Valerian Mirabaud’s son? And why hadn’t she ever heard a proper French-Swiss accent when Dieter spoke? His accent was strongly Swiss German.

  The Mirabauds were a French-Swiss family. They must speak French at home, and she’d always spoken French with Valerian Mirabaud when they’d met at events. Swiss French hadn’t changed like Swiss German had. Swiss French was nearly indistinguishable from standard French except for a few numbers and such.

  Alemannic German, or Schwiizertüütsch, had evolved to become several different languages and was a very different variety than standard, high German. It was even more specialized than Swiss Standard German, Hochdeutsch, which was mostly written rather than spoken.

  Dieter spoke Alemannic with Flicka’s older brother, Wulfram, who considered himself Swiss, although Flicka rolled her eyes every time the very German Wulfie insisted on how Swiss he was.

  Of course, Raphael Mirabaud had grown up speaking French, and he should have a French accent.

  And he did.

  When he had become Dieter Schwarz, which was a Swiss German name, Dieter had begun speaking Alemannic German, which he’d probably learned as a child.

  Flicka had always thought he was speaking Alemannic with a Swiss-German-French-mingled accent, but he wasn’t. He was speaking the German dialect with a French accent because his first language was French.

  Dieter had been speaking English with what seemed to him to be a German or Schwiizertüütsch accent, but his French accent had leaked through.

  Flicka grabbed the arms of the airplane seat.

  Dieter hadn’t even spoken German all that well. When she’d been twelve and he’d tagged her with their silly nickname, he’d called her Durchlauchtig, not Durchlauchtigste, the proper form of the word. Essentially, all these years, he’d been calling her the adjective form of the word, not the noun. He’d been calling her princess-y, not Princess.

  He’d made that obvious mistake because French was his first language, not German. A native German speaker would have known the correct form of the word.

  She should have figured this out a long time ago.

  It was weird to watch him speak cultured, upper-class French with his father, but his accent was native and perfect.

  Valerian sat in a chair beside the couch, swiveled to face the rear of the plane to watch his son and granddaughter, and was speaking quietly with Dieter. Flicka should have been able to understand them if she had been able to hear Valerian’s low voice over the jet engines roaring outside the private plane’s fuselage.

  Dieter rarely looked at his father, just stared at his feet or the floor and answering with what seemed to be long, calm sentences, not terse, angry answers.

  When Dieter looked up at her, his gray eyes were as flat as a becalmed sea under heavy clouds, and he looked back toward his father, answering questions.

  Alina scampered off the couch, so Flicka played with her, sitting the baby on her lap and reading a baby book to her from her phone while Dieter spoke with Valerian. Neither of them seemed happy, but neither seemed angry. They appeared to be exchanging information, not accusing or debating.

  If Valerian was Dieter’s father, and if they hadn’t seen each other for over a decade, Flicka would have thought they would be a little happier to see each other.

  When Alina needed her afternoon nap, Flicka reclined her seat to lie flat. Alina curled up beside her, thoro
ughly pleased with this new development in naptime.

  With the sleepy child snoozing beside her, Flicka dozed off, too.

  When she awoke, night pressed against the windows, and the plane’s interior lights painted the white leather and blond men with a golden glow.

  Alina was still snuggled up next to her in the airplane seat. The toddler was playing with a button on Flicka’s shirt and singing a song about toes.

  Dieter was still sitting on the couch on the other side of the center aisle, reading a book.

  Valerian had moved up near the front of the plane. His silver head bobbed over the top of one of the front-row seats as he spoke with Bastien.

  Dieter looked up at Flicka, and his gray eyes were just as flat and expressionless as when she had gone to sleep what must have been hours before, considering that her stomach was rumbling like she had missed lunch. She asked, “What time is it?”

  Dieter said, “About six in Las Vegas. We’re not due to land for another hour or so. It’ll be late in Geneva because we’re going against the clock.”

  Flicka rubbed her eyes and pushed the chair up to sitting. Alina slid off her knees and toddled over to her father, asking, “Thirsty? Milk?”

  Flicka asked Dieter, “Is there anything in the galley?”

  “Sandwiches and cold meats. My father filed the flight plan and we took off immediately, so there’s no hot food.” A strong French accent slurred his words, much stronger than usual.

  Flicka stood on her unsteady feet. Tingles ran up the leg Alina had been sleeping on. “You want anything?”

  “No, thank you.” Dieter went back to staring at his book, which appeared to be political nonfiction. He must have found it on the plane because she didn’t recognize it from their townhouse.