Royal: A Royal Billionaire Novel (Billionaires in Disguise: Maxence Book 6)

by Blair Babylon

  “My—” Sault stared at the small gun in his hand. “My betrayal.”

  “Your job was to serve Monaco, but you were supposed to serve with honor. The oath you took was to the country and the Constitution, not to Pierre, and not to further your own political agenda. You betrayed that oath and Monaco.”

  “No.” Quentin’s chest puffed, and his nostrils fluttered as he breathed. His dull gray eyes flared wider as he stared at the ship as if he’d just noticed where he was. “What did I do?”

  Maxence said, “You launched a coup, Quentin. You committed treason. Your military operation killed members of the Crown Council.” Including his cousin Nico, and Maxence’s chest clenched at the thought of him. “You kidnapped the current ruler of the country, and you did it to subvert the will of the electors. That’s the definition of a military coup d’état.”

  Quentin’s head wavered with the motion of the sea under the ship. “I did what was right. You would have bankrupted Monaco. You would have taken away Prince Jules’s wealth and canceled my pension. I have a wife and kids. What would I do without that pension?”

  Maxence stepped toward him. “What are you talking about?”

  “You’re a radical socialist, and you would have ruined everything. I was saving Monaco from you.”

  Max squinted at Quentin in disbelief. “I’ve been trained in macroeconomics since I was a kid. I’ve run multinational charities with enormous budgets for a decade. Monaco isn’t on the brink of bankruptcy. It’s thriving. Your pension has never been in danger. Who told you that?”

  “Everybody knows it!”

  Maxence squatted in front of him, still beyond Quentin’s feet and keeping away from Rossi’s limp form. “Who’s everybody?”

  Quentin’s voice verged on panic. “Prince Pierre and Prince Jules both told me how you were going to destroy Monaco! With Pierre gone, Jules is the only one left who will save it for people like me!”

  Max peered at Quentin, looking him straight in his colorless eyes. “Is that why you committed treason?”

  “I didn’t! I was—”

  “You broke your oath to the country and the Constitution. When you took your oath, you didn’t swear to protect and honor Jules or Pierre. Your oath was always to Monaco, not a person, and not to an ideology.”

  “I was doing my job!”

  “No, you weren’t. You committed treason. You were supposed to support the peaceful transition from one prince to another, not to kidnap or murder someone in line for the throne.”

  “His Highness Prince Pierre told me to send people after you because you were dangerous to Monaco’s future, because you would rape Monaco and leave people like me with nothing. He told me to have your security detail take you out when you were off on one of your damned charity missions, but you always slipped away as soon as you got off the plane.”

  Maxence nodded. He’d known. That’s why he’d gotten so good at giving his security the slip.

  “He told me to have you followed in Paris and, if there was an opportunity, to remove you there.” Sault’s eyes creased closed. “He told me to leave and lock the doors.”

  Maxence didn’t know what that meant. “Stop this, Quentin. Give me the gun, and help me call the shore. We can discuss ways you can help the situation and contribute toward a peaceful resolution at the Crown Council meeting tonight.” He held out his hand, palm up, hoping.

  Quentin Sault raised his arm, lifting the gun with its muzzle toward the brilliant blue sky above the ship.

  “No!” Maxence yelled, leaning, reaching. “No, Quentin, don’t!”

  Quentin wedged the barrel of the gun under his own jaw, and his fist squeezed the trigger.

  The gunshot crashed through the air.

  A burst of blood appeared on the gray wall behind his head. His body jerked and slumped to the side to lie on the deck.

  Max had reached with his hand through space as if he could have somehow grabbed Quentin’s arm and stopped him.

  His fingers grasped air, and he let his hand fall.

  Over to Max’s side, the last guy from Monaco’s secret service fell to his knees and buried his face in his hands.

  Quiet descended over the mob.

  They weren’t fanatic freaks who had awakened that morning anticipating a mutiny. For the most part, they were just guys trying to do their jobs out on the sea, moving the world’s commerce from one country to another so people could have what they needed to live.

  Occasionally, they took a little bribe and indulged in a little piracy because they needed more money to send home to their families, because the world would let them starve if they didn’t. Maxence had lived in the parts of the world where desperation outweighed ethics, and he didn’t begrudge them the little bit of extra money that would make a big difference to their parents and kids.

  Maxence staggered to his feet, staring at the ruin of Quentin Sault, a man he had never trusted but hadn’t been able to get away from, and the body of Michael Rossi, who’d saved Max’s life twice that day but had been instrumental in his kidnapping and his cousin’s murder.

  Max turned, staring at the sailors, the last gunshot from Quentin’s pistol still ringing in his ears and inside his head.

  The brilliant Mediterranean sun poured down over the crowd of men, their eyes vacant with shock. The deck of the ship rolled beneath his bare feet.

  Maxence sucked air into his fluttering lungs, and he said the only thing that would come into his mind, “Let us pray.”

  Most of them clasped their hands or genuflected. Other men lowered themselves to their knees, overcome with the horror of two violent deaths.

  Maxence raised his face to the light, his arms outspread, and he prayed with every fiber of his being, every shredded remnant of his soul. His voice rang out across the ship and the waves and echoed in the men’s hearts, “Our Father, who art in Heaven—”

  From far away across the water, the faint whir of helicopter blades chopping the air became louder.

  The people prayed with him, their voices blending, with Max’s strong baritone raised above them all.

  Some of the sailors fell forward on their faces, prostrating themselves as Maxence blew the stops out. This was his ship now, and these people answered to him.

  The breeze stiffened, then gusted around him.

  A helicopter engine thundered over the deck.

  Maxence raised his hand to shield his eyes from the whipping air blasting his face as the chopper touched down.

  Two men stepped out, crouching as they hurried away from the helicopter toward him.

  Casimir van Amsberg and Arthur Finch-Hatten, Max’s two closest friends in the world, hadn’t left him to die on this stinking ship.

  His chest clenched.

  Arthur reached Max and yanked him into a bear hug.

  Casimir looked at the crowd of sailors on their knees and lying face-down. “I think we’re extraneous.”

  Arthur sniffed as he pounded Max on the back, his fist impacting Max’s bare shoulders. Arthur said, “A gentleman is never extraneous.”

  Maxence wrenched himself out of Arthur’s grasp and looked back at the helicopter, where only a pilot sat inside. “Where’s Dree? Did you leave her back at the palace?”

  Arthur tilted his head. “Who?”

  “Dree Clark,” Maxence said. “When all Hell broke loose at the Sea Change Gala and they were muscling me out, I gave her my phone with the panic app calling you. You should have found her first.”

  “We came to find you,” Arthur told him, squinting his silvery eyes in the bright morning sunlight.

  “But she had my phone,” Max explained. “So, you’ve got her, right? You picked her up because she has my phone, and then you came to find me.”

  Arthur rolled his eyes and then grabbed Max’s wrist, where his steel watch shone in the sun. “The homing beacon is in the watch I gave you, not in your phone.”

  “But you’ve got her. She’s safe,” Max said, insisting.

&
nbsp; “I have no idea of whom you speak,” Arthur said. “I spoke to a woman briefly on your phone, but then we located your signal from the watch. We came to get you.”

  Horror. “You don’t have her. She was in that hell at the Sea Change, and you don’t have her. We have to find Dree. Give me your phone.”

  Arthur handed over his unlocked phone, already showing Max’s phone number. “How were we to know that some woman has your phone and you wanted us to go get her first? Is this the nurse from the Nepali charity junket you commandeered to be your secretary because that’s how you recruit all your staff?”

  Max said, “There’s no cell phone signal out here. There’s no way it’ll reach land.”

  Arthur cleared his throat. “It’s a peculiar kind of satellite phone. It would work on the Moon.”

  Trust Arthur to be walking around with a peculiar kind of satellite phone.

  Max tapped the green call dot.

  The phone rang and rang, but no one answered.

  Max tapped in Dree’s mobile number from memory.

  A voice told him the number wasn’t available.

  Maxence grabbed Arthur’s arm and stared directly into his eyes. “We need to find her. Now.”

  Arthur shook his head. “You don’t have to do that. Where does she live?”

  “In the palace,” Max said, climbing into the helicopter. “She has a staff apartment in the palace.”

  “Then we’ll try the palace first,” Casimir said. “Let’s go.”

  Chapter Eight

  Dree Speaks Spanish

  Dree

  After Matryona Sokolov and her goons drove Dree back to the same damned warehouse, two of the thicker ones wrestled her out of the car, dragged her inside, and tied her to a chair with her hands behind her back.

  Dree tried to fight them off. Oh, she tried. She threw elbows at their ribs. She kicked at their overly muscled thighs with her sharp high heels. She even managed a knee-shot at the left guy’s nuts, but he jumped back too quickly.

  Getting kidnapped sucked.

  While they were tying her to the chair with bungee cords and duct tape, Dree kept trying to roll away or go limp or keep her arms flexed to give herself more room in the bonds so she could get away later.

  All her life, advice on how to escape from a kidnapper had been furtively whispered by other girls and loudly bragged about by guys. The subtext always was that if you didn’t get away, it was your fault for not being smart enough to know how.

  Even though Dree had held her breath to blow herself up to try to force them to leave some slack in the bungee cords binding her midsection to the back of the chair, the elastic bungee cords were just as tight over her ribs as if she hadn’t done it. She’d flexed her feet up to try to do the same when they were fastening her ankles to the chair legs with duct tape, but it didn’t feel like there was any slack there, either.

  Nothing was working.

  Those know-it-alls who had never been kidnapped must have forgotten some strategy they’d been self-righteously mouthing off about.

  Dree wanted to slap each and every one of them.

  Matryona and Kir Sokolov conferred quietly with their goons about their operations schedule for the day while Dree sat in the chair, fuming and quietly jerking her hands and legs, trying everything she could think of to get loose.

  After a heated conversation about whose responsibility it was that the computer was locked by malware, Matryona set her phone in the middle of a desk for a videoconference.

  The person they called had a Central American accent, and Matryona and Kir switched to Spanish to talk to him.

  Dree listened to them because she wasn’t sitting that far away from them and couldn’t escape their stupid voices. Their Spanish was oddly accented compared to the Arizona border Spanish Dree was used to, and the grammar sounded clunky. They kind of sounded like the nun who’d taught Spanish at Dree’s high school, who’d insisted her students slur their words like a Castilian from Spain, even the kids from Mexico who spoke Spanish at home.

  No one did that. It sounded weird.

  Matryona said to the guy on the video call, “We have fifty kilo of product to move to Paris, but we’re having problems getting it out of the Port of Marseille. Our usual trucking service is not available, something to do with having a cover job because someone is moving house. The authorities are being obstinate because we don’t have a direct relationship with anyone there. What are our other options?”

  Kir told the guy, “The Port of Marseille is close enough that we could just go pick it up in a car, but we’d never get it past the inspectors.”

  Matryona and Kir bickered over their options for a while, poking holes in each other’s plans instead of helping each other cobble together a better one, not that Dree was going to diagnose their interpersonal relationship problems for them. The Spanish guy didn’t say much, just stepped in with a sarcastic remark whenever it seemed necessary.

  Seriously, screw those guys. Dree hated them with a steamy, killing burn like an autoclave.

  Their discussion about encouraging addicts to reuse dirty needles drove her outrage to a new, professional level of loathing.

  And the bungee cords and duct tape weren’t coming off her wrists and ankles or the chair.

  Their sibling spat escalated, as Matryona insisted that they retrieve the shipment of narcotics from the Port of Marseille immediately and deliver it to Paris before the sun went down.

  Kir argued that the shipment was not perishable, and they should just wait three days until the trucking service was available to do the job as usual. “Why should we worry about little problems in the supply line? The customers will be more eager for our product in a few days, and they’ll pay a premium price when the shakes set in.”

  Matryona sighed. “I suppose it doesn’t matter. After this afternoon—I guess it is after midnight now—we’ll never have a problem with this kind of logistics again. Our shipments will glide through customs like they’re on ice, and we’ll have no competition in Monaco.”

  Dree perked her ears up, though she kept struggling with the bungee cords cinched around her flesh.

  “I’ve made a little deal,” Matryona continued, still speaking in Spanish. “We have many customers in Monaco, and some of them are highly placed. When Monaco finishes having their election this afternoon, we will not have to worry about competition or distribution in the principality ever again.”

  The Spanish-speaking man snickered. “You do not know Jules Grimaldi very well. He would never agree to that sort of a deal. He will want a new deal every week for every little piece of merchandise we move.”

  Matryona didn’t seem surprised. “I agree with you. Jules Grimaldi would never make that kind of a deal, so I did not deal with Jules Grimaldi.”

  “What are you talking about?” Kir Sokolov demanded. “Jules Grimaldi told our friend Louis that he has the votes for the election. Dealing with anyone else will just mean that we have to bribe more people in Monaco’s government.”

  Dree sneaked a glance toward them. Her arms were sweating from exertion and terror, and the moisture was beginning to soften the duct tape’s adhesive around her wrists.

  Matryona’s eyes were half-closed, and a prim smile compressed her lips. “You will see what I’m talking about in a few hours. You men do not see that we have many products. Yes, we have OxyContin and morphine, methamphetamine and Adderall, Xanax, and Ambien. We sell it as merchandise, but we only make a profit on it once.”

  The guy talking on the other end of Matryona’s phone hissed that she was wasting his time repeating the business structure they all knew.

  Matryona continued, “But if social media has taught us anything, it’s that people are your ultimate product. Facebook doesn’t sell advertising, you know. It sells access to its users. Drugs aren’t our only commodity. In fact, they aren’t even our most valuable commodity. Our customers need our drugs and will do anything we tell them to. Like Facebook, our users are a
resource our organization owns. While casual customers like Nathan and Ethan Allavena can be influenced to do what we want, our regular customers like Louis Grimaldi, Clémentine Gastaud, and Henri Giordano are assets more valuable than gold.”

  “This makes no sense,” Kir said.

  Matryona stared at her brother, and Dree had never seen such a cold smile. “While you men scurry around and think your golf and your gambling is important, we women get the job done. Both of you will see how things change after tomorrow when we have an exclusive charter to distribute our products through all of Monaco. Our merchandise will arrive at the Port of Marseille and not even be looked at before it is placed on trucks for all of France and Spain. Welcome to the future, boys. After tomorrow, I will be the future.”

  Kir and the Spanish guy scoffed at Matryona, but Dree had the distinct impression they were nervous.

  Dree thought they were both being stupid. If they had any sense at all, they would be trying to ally themselves with Matryona rather than antagonize her. She was obviously going to win whatever game they were playing.

  That whole conversation was bizarre.

  Matryona was walking by where Dree was tied up, so she hissed to get Matryona’s attention.

  Matryona asked, “What?”

  “I know that you guys just got me all tied up like this, and I hate to be a bother,” Dree said. “But could you untie me for just the teensiest little minute so I can go use that bathroom?”

  Dree bobbled her head toward the open door of a bathroom just off the office area. The toilet and sink were visible, as was the wide window near the ceiling where the moon was a bright circle on the night sky.

  Matryona scoffed at her. “You will just try to run out the doors again. We will deal with you soon. It doesn’t matter if you have a full bladder for that or not.”

  Dree ducked her head and whispered, “I think I just started my period, and I’m wearing a white dress.”

  Matryona pressed her lips together and then nodded. “I will get a knife for the duct tape. There are products behind the mirror.”