Crowned: Gowns & Crowns, Book 4

by Jennifer Chance

  Another flash of anger cut through Fran so quick, so hot, that all her fear suddenly blanked.

  Her head came up with a snap. “You talk a lot of shit, you know that?” she asked, and it wasn’t Francesca’s voice talking any more. It wasn’t the Summa Cum Laude psychology scholarship earner, the earnest, hard-working student dedicating herself to serving with serenity, composure and compassion.

  No. She was Frannie Lambert now, with calloused hands and bitten off fingernails, bruises on her legs and shoes two sizes too small. She was Bert’s little girl with the big laugh and the battered knuckles and she shouted back at Silas loud enough to be heard all the way back to that tiny little bar in that tiny little town that had been everything to her. Everything and nothing in the end.

  “Big man with the gun,” she sneered, and even her voice sounded young—so young, so belligerent, so furious in the face of senseless tragedy that had changed her life forever. “You try to kill Ari too? When he dumped your daughter and told you to go kiss his ass, that he was going to marry who he wanted? I saw the way you stared at him in the ballroom, and you know what I saw in your face? I saw guilt. Guilt and relief and maybe a sneaking satisfaction that whatever you did to him, nobody’s gonna catch it after all. But he is going to catch you. You wanna know how I know? He’s going to catch you because he knows something went down at that airstrip. He knows something went wrong that he hasn’t quite remembered yet.”

  “Shut up,” Silas growled, but Frannie couldn’t shut up. Wouldn’t shut up. She’d been shut up for too damned long and she’d had it with staying quiet.

  “I know you Silas,” she said. “I know exactly who you are. What’d you do, spike his gas tank? You were there that night; I’d bet money on it. You were there and you crippled his plane. Crippled it and watched Ari take off knowing you were sending him to his death—and why? You were that pissed he didn’t want Edeena?”

  “I didn’t cripple his plane,” Silas roared, waving his gun at her with his own flash of fury that finally broke through Fran’s bluster and made her back up a step.

  What the hell was she thinking? This man had a gun!

  But Silas was caught up in his own memories now. “If Ari had flown like a military pilot instead of like a carnival sideshow, he would have been fine—dropped into the water, yes, injured probably. But fine! And close to home. Edeena is a trained nurse, they’d been friends since they were little. She was perfect for him! Perfect for him and perfect to nurse him back to health until he could see the value she brought, the grace and standing and class. And finally the Saleri family would be part of the throne as we always should have been, instead of on the outside, one station less royal, when ours was the older and truer bloodline and has always been!”

  Silas pointed his gun at Fran again, more menacingly this time. “Instead Aristotle didn’t have the grace to even die right! He came back with another piece of American filth and now he won’t look at anyone else.”

  “He came back and he’s going to marry me, you jackass,” Frannie jeered, so shocked at what Silas was saying that she couldn’t do anything more than egg him on. He’d—he’d tried to harm Ari? Deliberately? “He’s going to marry me and we’ll have a million babies and you’ll never get to the throne.”

  “You stupid bitch!”

  Fran saw it coming, the jerk of his hand, the lurch of his finger as it squeezed the trigger. Saw it coming and still couldn’t believe it, couldn’t move—couldn’t react. The bullet that crashed out of the gun—Son of a bitch, the thing was actually loaded!—and buried itself in the wall over her shoulder.

  Horror and fear swamped Fran again, pushing her beyond anger, beyond anything but panic-stricken survival…and another set of skills she’d learned the hard way. She knew guns and what they could do in the hands of sloppy drunks or rage-fueled lunatics. She couldn’t stand back and make herself a target. The bastard couldn’t get a clean shot off at her if she was inside of three feet of him, and for the love of God if she was going down, he was going down with her.

  She launched at Silas with all the strength of the dozen lives she’d fought through up to now, teeth and nails and fists and feet ready for a brawl.

  “What the hell!” Ari pulled up short in the manicured park, the interior courtyard of the Visitors’ Palace eerily still in the wake of the gunshot. Dimitri raced by him, grabbing his arm.

  “Center building, storage building. No muzzle flash—they’re in one of the interior rooms, nothing in there,” Dimitri barked. The captain had his gun pulled, and they took off running as someone else breached the courtyard, running fast toward them from the direction of the ballroom.

  The door to the storage building was locked but no match for Dimitri piling into it, its flimsy fastening breaking on impact. Inside the space was a long tee’d off hallway, two men standing to either side of the door at its end. They didn’t move as Ari and Dimitri raced up, but their weapons were on the floor in front of them, their faces stoic.

  They were bound to protect their employer, but they weren’t idiots. There was their employer and then there were their monarchs.

  Ari recognized the guards at a glance. Pain knifed through his head with a resounding crash and he stumbled against the wall, but when he looked up again it was with such perfect clarity that he almost laughed out loud—right before he and Dimitri piled into the men, thrusting them aside. Another shot sounded and Dimitri crashed against the door. This one held and they both ran at it, cracking it completely off its hinges as it crashed into the room.

  A man screamed and Ari whirled around as the power of Dimitri’s rush carried him almost to the far wall.

  He watched Francesca stumble back from Count Silas Saleri in her heavy, rumpled ball gown, her hair streaked with broken bits of wood and a small cut bleeding on her neck, her hands wrapped around Silas’s where Ari realized the man was wielding a gun—

  Caution fled him and he strode the final step to reach the man, cracking him with a roundhouse punch. Silas slumped against Francesca, nearly toppling her, until Ari was able to pull her to his side, her hands still clasped around Silas’s gun though the man now lay sprawled out on the floor.

  They stared at Silas’s inert body as Francesca let Dimitri carefully take the gun out of her grasp. Then gently, ever so gently, Ari put his arms around her. She hadn’t begun to tremble yet from the shock, he realized.

  At his touch the softest sob broke free from her lips, and she swayed—but he was there to catch her.

  “Sweetheart,” he whispered, as he pulled her into his embrace. “In the future, you’re really going to have to do a far better job of letting me rescue you,” he said.

  Francesca pressed her head against his shoulder, then shifted away, her half-sob sounding more like a laugh as she muttered something about her mascara.

  Stefan’s voice cracked across the room. “Damage?”

  “Negative,” Dimitri said, crouching down at Silas’s side. “He’s breathing, more’s the pity.” He squinted up at Ari. “We’re going to have to work on your boxing skills.”

  “Agreed.”

  Ari held Francesca to him as Stefan stepped inside the room, clearing the way for them to re-enter the hallway. As they exited the storage room, there was an entire phalanx of royal guards now lining the hallway of the building, but the count’s two soldiers were nowhere to be seen.

  Stefan stepped back into the hallway and signaled two more men inside the room with Dimitri. “There’s a bag in the corner of the room. That’s how she was carried. Chloroform.”

  Ari’s breath hissed between his teeth. “Son of a bitch.”

  Stefan nodded. “The count’s guards are being detained in the conference room, the party’s continuing. Your father knows and wants you back when you can come.” He glanced between Ari’s face and Francesca’s. “I’ll let him know that’s not advisable.”

  “No.” Francesca’s head came up, her face pale as she brushed her hands beneath her eyes, though sh
e remained flawlessly beautiful. “No. Go—I’ll be fine. You’ll put me…somewhere, right?”

  Stefan lifted his brows. “There are several conference rooms near the ballroom.”

  “There,” she said. “Conference rooms. Several of them. I’ll be there with a stiff drink and someone can fix my hair,” she tugged at it ruefully, “and you can do what you need to do so that no one knows—especially not Edeena or her sisters.” She touched Ari’s arm. “You have to know she knew nothing about…this. I don’t really think Silas knew what he wanted to do with me. He just wanted to lash out. To be heard.”

  Ari blinked at her, unable to fully process her words, but at that moment the two royal soldiers emerged from the chamber, carrying the unconscious Silas in their arms.

  “He should go to the hospital,” Stefan said, and Ari nodded.

  “Yes. Send him first, then notify Edeena. Wipe down his hands and if we can, change his clothes. He fired two shots?”

  “Two, sir,” one of the men responded.

  “Close down this building, let no one in or out. He’s my mother’s cousin, and we don’t want anyone to get the wrong impression here.”

  “Agreed,” Stefan said. “We’ll take him to the royal infirmary on the castle grounds, wait until he wakes up. Depending on his responses and state of mind, we’ll take him to the public hospital or keep him on site. He’ll have armed escort at all times.”

  “Go,” Ari said. The men moved forward, carrying Silas down the long hallway, but bypassed the main door.

  Francesca frowned after them. “Where are they…?”

  “There are underground passages between the two buildings,” Ari said. “Something else I’m happy to remember. I’ll have to show you sometime. It can take twenty minutes by car to wind between the main residence and the Visitors’ Palace, but by foot, it’s not so long.”

  They were walking now as well, and Ari lifted a hand to brush splintered wood out of Francesca’s hair. Then he remembered her neck.

  “You’re injured,” he said, frowning down at her.

  “Not really—a scratch.” She lifted her hair off her shoulder and he blanched at the blood on her neck. A soldier strode up with a clean cloth and he took it, pressing it gently against her skin. She didn’t seem to notice. Instead, she was staring mournfully down at her dress. “It’s ripped,” she said, and once again, her voice cracked on a half-sob.

  “It can be fixed,” Ari said. He lifted his gaze to Dimitri but his captain seemed as confused as he was.

  “Shock,” the man mouthed silently, and Ari nodded. He shouldn’t leave her.

  Francesca chose that moment to look up, irritation flaring in her eyes. “You’re kidding me, right?” she said, staring at them both. “I’m not in shock. I’m barely hurt.”

  “You were abducted, drugged, carried to an unknown location and accosted by a man wielding a gun,” Stefan observed dryly. “You could do with some shock.”

  “He was an old man with bad aim,” Francesca said. “You both are fussing like you’re my nannies. Look!” She pointed across the garden. “There are the girls. Get me to them and I’ll be good.” She fixed her gaze on Ari, then shifted to take in Dimitri and Stefan. “Truly. I’m being selfish. The faster you can get the party wrapped up, do whatever you need to do there, the faster you can come back to me and tell me how brave I am. Deal?”

  Ari stared at her, his heart in his throat. He didn’t know exactly what Silas had told Francesca in the storage room, why she was so insistent that he spare Edeena from the truth, but he had a solid guess. The rest of his memories had slammed home when he’d burst through that last door to find Francesca with Silas.

  He could remember Silas at the airstrip now, that night a year ago. He’d not thought anything of it, at first. Silas knew planes, it was one of the things they had in common. They were both out at the airstrip a lot.

  But he’d never thought Silas would damage his plane.

  Now was not the time for recollections, however. Not with a ballroom full of guests who’d seen entirely too much drama in the royal family for the past few weeks. He squeezed Fran’s hands and realized they still weren’t shaking. She seemed poised, calm, carefully controlled. The way he’d seen his mother appear, countless times, as she stood by his father’s side after receiving the worst of news.

  “You sure you’ll be okay?” he rumbled, and Francesca nodded definitively.

  “Just as soon as I can get to a mirror,” she said.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Fran held it together all the way to the bathroom—the real bathroom in the Visitors’ Palace, which was nowhere near the long hallway she’d gone down before. Nicki, Lauren and Emmaline clustered around her, unraveling her hair from its pins and shaking free the dust and bits of drywall.

  “I swear I think I’ve gotten the short end of this stick every single time,” Emmaline was grumbling now, untangling a particularly vicious snarl from where Fran’s hair had gotten tangled in the bag. “Lauren gets attacked by a jealous ex, Nicki rescues a prince, Fran gets shot at. All that happened to me was having my name dragged through international media. It’s not fair.”

  Lauren snorted. “Ex-boyfriends have an expiration date,” she said. “The internet lasts forever.”

  “I can’t believe this mascara hasn’t run,” Fran said, holding on to the one link to sanity to which she could still credibly cling. “Whatever brand this is, we should buy stock.”

  “He shot at you. Shot,” Nicki said, shaking out the train of Fran’s dress. “I can’t believe you got shot at by an old man in a tux. Or that they let him in with a gun.”

  “Member of the family,” Emmaline sighed. “It’s a very tradition-tied monarchy, and the right to bear arms is one of the oldest honors. Granted, they may be making some changes to that now.”

  “Either way, we need to get you cleaned up, Fran,” Lauren said, tilting her head. “I need more pins, but I think I can salvage this.”

  “And this tear really isn’t anything that can’t be covered with embroidery,” Emmaline said. “There’s already so much on the gown as it is. For now, the folds of the gown hide it well enough, especially if you’ll be seated. Which you should be. Seated that is. You probably shouldn’t be standing now.”

  Fran started lose track of the conversation, and allowed herself to be pushed and pulled, powdered and patted, until at last Nicki, Lauren and Emmaline were satisfied. Then she let them lead her back down the hall until they found a lit conference room, a tray of water and tsipouro sitting conspicuously on the table, along with an assortment of cheeses, grapes and crackers.

  “Is anyone else hungry?” Nicki announced. “Because I’m starved.”

  They sat Fran at the head of the table, and didn’t argue when she pushed away the blanket they draped over her shoulders. “I’m not an invalid, seriously,” she said, though she happily accepted the drink Lauren poured for her, along with the bottled water Nicki pressed into her hand.

  You’re all right. You’re okay. Now, Fran knew, she needed to pull it together. She couldn’t unravel now. The act wasn’t over yet. She wasn’t safe.

  The girls engaged her in lively chatter for a few minutes more, talking about their own evenings—the talk with the cooks who let drop the queen was already planning an engagement party for Emmaline and Kristos “sometime in the near future,” their individual dances with Dimitri, Kristos—and Nicki’s almost-dance with Stefan.

  “He’s the worst,” Nicki said, though her grin was filled with affection. “He didn’t want anyone talking to me in that dress, but he couldn’t talk to me either. He couldn’t take any time to dance with me, but the one time I danced with one of Dimitri’s men, he stared daggers at me across the room. I couldn’t win!”

  “Oh, I think you’ve won all right,” Lauren teased. “And was I right or was I right about that dress? You don’t even need to tell me. I was so right.”

  Nicki laughed. “You were right. You were also right abou
t the stilettos. Fran, I wish you had those when those assholes came at you with that bag. You would have completely taken them out.”

  “Someone’s coming,” Emmaline warned, though at first there was no sound in the hallway. A moment later, however, they heard the distinctive step of a dozen striding feet.

  Fran composed herself as the small group descended on the room. The queen entered first, along with her husband, their gazes immediately fixing on Fran.

  “Don’t you dare stand up,” Catherine announced when she shifted. “In fact, we should all sit down. All of us, everyone.” She gestured imperiously to the seats around the conference table and everyone seated themselves. Fran also settled back, fidgeting as more people entered. There were more than a dozen feet in this entourage to be sure. Stefan and Dimitri came first, then Kristos and Ari, then Cyril the advisor and another handful of guards.

  Ari strode past his parents to her side, and dropped down to one knee until his face was level with hers.

  “How are you feeling,” he asked earnestly. “Have you seen a doctor?”

  He was so intent that Fran nearly burst out laughing. “No I haven’t seen a doctor. I got scratched by flying drywall, not skewered. I’m fine.”

  Ari grimaced, clearly not satisfied with that answer, then moved to the chair next to her. He glanced to his parents. “We should have a doctor in here.”

  “We will, once he’s done examining Silas,” Queen Catherine said, and her tone was severe as she regarded Fran. “He’s my relation. I can’t help but feel responsible for this…this attack on you.”

  From the pained look on the faces of King Jasen and Kristos, Fran could tell that this wasn’t the first time the queen had made this statement. “I don’t think this is anything you could have predicted,” she said gently, trying to ignore the grateful glance Jasen sent her way. Instead she held the queen’s gaze. “Silas wasn’t truly going to hurt me, I don’t think. He needed someone to blame for everything that had gone wrong in his world, and I was the most likely candidate.”