by Meg Cabot
You have slain the dragon.
What did it mean?
Before she had a chance to slip on a robe, Meena heard a sound outside her door. She looked out the peephole. There they were. Red roses. A huge bouquet of them.
Her heart swelled. He was crazy. And too extravagant.
Yes, he was a prince.
But this was too much.
Meena unlocked the door and opened it a crack.
“Thanks so much,” she said to the flower deliveryman. “Do you have change for a ten?”
That was when he lowered the roses away from his face.
And Meena, for the first time in her life, knew that she was the one about to die.
Chapter Thirty-five
7:00 P.M. EST, Friday, April 16
910 Park Avenue, Apt. 11B
New York, New York
The most amazing thing-to Meena, anyway-was that she never would have guessed he was a killer. Not at first glance, anyway. He was dressed so nicely, in dark form-fitting jeans, a cashmere sweater, and a long, black leather trench. The scarf around his neck looked as if it were made from cashmere, too-at least from where Meena was standing-and brought out the blue in his eyes…the kind of bright blue eyes that wouldn’t have been out of place on some hunky blond heartthrob making his way down a red carpet or paddling a surfboard off a sandy white Australian beach.
They hardly looked like the eyes of a killer.
Except that Meena had known that’s what he was from the moment she’d opened the door and he’d brought the big bouquet of red roses down from in front of his face.
Why had she fallen for that old trick? That bouquet-in-front-of-the-peephole trick? She deserved to get killed just for falling for a trick she’d used a million times herself in her own scripts.
And now here she was, facing down death in nothing but her bra and a black silk slip. She was furious with herself for not having grabbed a robe first, or something she could at least have employed as a weapon…a can of hair spray and a lighter to use as an impromptu flamethrower…even a shoe, for God’s sake, to throw at the guy.
But she hadn’t realized how close she was to death until now, when it was too late. All she’d reached for was her BlackBerry, which in almost any scenario was pretty much useless.
And in this case it was just plain pitiful, unless she wanted to call some cops to come over and be killed along with her.
Because no way was this guy going to let himself be arrested without a fight. She could tell that just by looking at his handsome, pitiless face.
And of course, like any proper assassin, he already had a foot wedged firmly inside the jamb, so she couldn’t slam the door shut in his face. It would just bounce harmlessly off the edge of his steel-toed boot.
The fingers of his right hand rested on a you-know-what. Yeah. It seemed unbelievable, but given everything else that had gone on this past week, Meena realized she shouldn’t have been surprised. It was an honest-to-God sword hilt.
She held her breath as that blue-eyed gaze drifted toward her.
“I am not here for you, Meena,” he said, in a German-accented voice so deep, it seemed to reverberate through her chest.
How could he know her name? She had no idea who he was. She’d never seen him before in her life.
And yet…she felt as if somehow she’d known him forever.
Maybe that’s how everyone felt when they met their killer.
Or maybe it was just Meena.
He unsheathed the sword. The blade made a ringing sound in the stillness of the hallway, clear as a bell, as it came out of its scabbard.
Meena swallowed hard.
It’s amazing what you think right before you die. All Meena could think, for instance, was, Wow. No foreplay for this guy.
Then, Wait, that’s not even funny.
Then, Although actually, that would make a good line for Victoria on the show. Then, But I’m not going to live long enough to write another episode for the show. This is so unfair.
She knew just by looking at her killer’s rock-hard, chiseled profile that there wasn’t the slightest flicker of hope.
But it’s incredible what we’ll do to try to survive.
Meena pried her lips apart. Forced her tongue to moisten them.
“I know you’re lying,” she said. “You’re holding a sword. You’re here to kill me.”
“I’m not lying,” he said. “Just tell me where he is, and I’ll let you live.”
Meena had no idea who-or what-he was talking about. She pointed at her purse where it hung on the hook she’d slung it onto after coming home. “Look,” she said. “There’s plenty of money in there. I just went to the cash machine. Take what you want and go. Otherwise, there’s some costume jewelry my great-aunt Wilhelmina left me, but it’s all fake, I swear to you…”
He looked annoyed. Meena felt her heart rate speed up. Way to go, Meen. Antagonize your killer. That’s smart.
“I already told you, Meena,” he said, his dark blond eyebrows raised a little sarcastically. “I have no interest in killing you. Only him. But if you are going to be difficult…”
Difficult. He had no idea how difficult Meena could be. Especially since she already knew she was as good as dead.
Meena knew then that she had absolutely nothing to lose.
Which was why she chose that moment to hurl her BlackBerry at him with all her might.
Hey. It was all she had. That and her life.
Then she turned around and made a run for it.
Chapter Thirty-six
7:02 P.M. EST, Friday, April 16
910 Park Avenue, Apt. 11B
New York, New York
Meena couldn’t exactly escape out the front door, since the sword-wielding maniac in a trench coat standing in front of it had shut and locked it behind him.
But she figured if she could throw open the French doors to the balcony in the back bedroom, then scream for help, someone would definitely hear her.
Mary Lou. Mary Lou would hear her.
If she was home. Which was unlikely, it being a Friday night.
But no sooner had Meena whirled around to make her escape than something impossibly hard-and amazingly strong-locked around her bare ankle and flipped her to the floor. She went sprawling down amid all the fallen roses, her right foot pulled out from under her before she knew what was happening, her palms skidding on the parquet as she tried to break her fall.
She craned her neck to look down the length of her body in astonishment and saw the man with the sword standing above her.
Wow. He was really fast. Meena had only just hurled her BlackBerry at him-and hadn’t waited around long enough to see if it had hit him, though she’d thought she heard a dull thud, then the smack of plastic parts hitting wood floor-and already he’d yanked her foot out from under her?
What was he, bionic?
“Meena,” he said in the same calm, slightly bored voice, still gripping her foot. “You’ve got nowhere to run to. I think you know that.”
The sad thing was, he was absolutely right. Even with the breath knocked entirely out of her body from the force of her fall, Meena did know that.
She’d always wondered what it would be like when it was finally her turn to meet death face-to-face.
But now that it was actually happening, she knew something else: that she wasn’t going to go without a fight.
“I’m not going to die tonight,” she said from between gritted teeth. “Sorry.”
And she twisted around so that instead of lying on her stomach, she was on her back…
…and in a better position to grind her free foot into his groin. The only problem was, he seemed to anticipate the move, since he let go of her ankle, and-so quickly Meena barely had time to register what was happening-was on top of her…his full body weight stretched over her, heavy as a steel beam and just as strong.
“I told you, Meena, I’m not here to kill you,” he said. His face was just inches from her
s now.
So was the sword blade. He held it propped casually against Meena’s throat as he peered at her, like she was some kind of interesting species of butterfly he’d managed to capture and pin to his collection.
This was not really how Meena had anticipated her amazing kick-to-the-groin move going.
“Oh, really?” she grunted, trying to sound like she didn’t care. This wasn’t easy, considering the fact that her heart was hammering so hard, she wondered if he could see her pulse in her throat.
Also, he wasn’t light. She was finding it difficult to draw a breath with him on top of her like this.
Still, she tried to sound casual. Like she didn’t care that he was stretched across her body like a lead blanket. Like she wasn’t conscious of the fact that she was a slight young woman wearing nothing but a black bra and silk slip and he was a man roughly her own age weighing at least eighty pounds more than her and holding a knife-sorry, a sword-to her throat.
She was beginning to reconsider the whole not-afraid-to-die thing.
“No,” he said in the same disturbingly deep and much too calm voice, with that slight accent. “I already told you.” Was it Meena’s imagination, or did he sound a little insulted? “I’m not interested in you.”
Meena had to laugh at that. Even though she was about to die. Or worse. Maybe she was hysterical.
Still, she had to admit, it was kind of funny, a guy tackling you while you were half naked, holding a sword to your throat, then intimating that he wasn’t interested in you. Especially when he was on top of you.
“You could have fooled me,” she said. “You seem really interested in me at the moment.”
He raised a blond eyebrow. “That?” He shifted a little. “That’s just my scabbard.” Then, apparently fearing that he might appear ungentle-manly, he added, “Not that you’re unattractive. But you’re not really my type.”
Meena glared at him. Really, this was just too much. To kill-well, come here with the intention of killing her, then insult her, too?
“Well, you’re not my type either,” she said angrily.
“Oh, I know that.” He grinned down at her. His teeth were white but not quite even. One or two of them were just crooked enough to prove they were all real, not veneers. “I’m alive.”
Meena stared up at him. Since he was obviously a foreigner, she thought maybe he’d misunderstood her.
“What are you talking about?” she asked. “I meant that I don’t happen to like men who come barging uninvited into women’s apartments, waving swords.”
Now he was running his fingertips-from the hand that wasn’t clutching the sword-along the length of her arm. He was doing it seemingly absently, as if he couldn’t resist the feel of her skin.
But he evidently had understood her.
“I know,” he said. “I meant I know your type. Lucien Antonescu is your type. That’s why I’m here. All I want is for you to tell me where he is. Then I’ll go.”
Meena would have frozen if she hadn’t already been rendered immobile by his body weight. Lucien? This was about Lucien?
She supposed it made a crazy sort of sense. Men with swords had certainly never come bursting into her apartment before Lucien had come into her life.
And Roger had said the flowers were from Lucien.
“You know Lucien?” she demanded.
She should have known. It had all been going so well. Too well. The amazing night they’d passed together. The note, saying he was hers. The bag.
She should have known it was too good to be true.
It ought to have been as obvious to her as the sword in front of her face. Leisha had even suggested it:
Lucien was married.
Of course he was. No single man his age was as perfect as he was. They were all gay, completely baggage ridden, or taken.
Obviously, Lucien’s crazy wife had hired this man to scare the living daylights out of her.
Well, it had worked.
“Actually,” the man said-he was still absently stroking her skin, like he didn’t even realize he was doing it-“we’ve never met personally, the prince and I.” She realized he was still answering her question about whether or not he knew Lucien. “But I’m certainly acquainted with his work.”
“His work?” Meena was more confused than ever. She tried to picture this man attending a course in Eastern European history and failed. He obviously wasn’t a scholar. A homicidal maniac, maybe. But hardly an academic. “You mean his books?”
The man laughed shortly. “No. I was referring to his extracurricular activities.”
Meena had no idea what he was talking about.
But she didn’t miss the insinuation in his tone. He meant that he knew that she and Lucien…
Well. What they’d done together, last night.
God. Had he taken pictures? Wasn’t that what private detectives hired by wives did?
She wanted to die.
Clearly, the Lucien she knew and the Lucien this man knew were two different people. She’d known Lucien had secrets-which was all right. She was keeping secrets from him, too.
But she was furious that Lucien’s secret was that he was married. He just hadn’t seemed the type. She’d even asked him straight out if he had a wife, and he’d said no. If she ever saw him again-and she certainly would, because as soon as she got rid of this blond-haired mammoth on top of her, she was packing up the Marc Jacobs bag and heading straight over to Lucien’s apartment to return it, preferably with some of Jack Bauer’s excrement smeared all over it-she was going to tell him exactly what she thought about men who cheated on their wives with innocent dialogue writers.
“Look,” she said in what she hoped sounded like a strong, firm voice. Irritated by the man’s laughter, Meena twitched her shoulder away from his hand.
For the first time, he seemed to realize he’d been touching her skin. He looked almost surprised and instantly drew his hand away.
“I don’t know who you think you are,” she said. “But you can’t come bursting in here with…with…medieval armaments and boss me around. You can tell Lucien’s wife from me that it’s over. I don’t want anything more to do with him. Okay? So her little attempt to scare me away from him, or whatever this was, has had its desired effect. She can have Lucien back. I don’t even want him anymore.”
He was frowning now. He seemed displeased.
But he wasn’t looking at her. He was looking down at his hand.
“Did you hear me?” Meena demanded. She was conscious that the sword blade was still very close to her throat. Very close, and very sharp.
On the other hand, he seemed a little distracted, looking down at his hand, then back at her skin. Now, she thought, might be a perfect moment to knee him in the nads. Then, while he was curled up in excruciating pain, she’d grab that Pottery Barn lamp over there and smash it over his head…
“Did he even bite you?” the man demanded, swinging his blue-eyed gaze back at her.
Meena, who’d been formulating the third part of her plan-the part where she went for her Wüsthof knife set in the kitchen-froze. “What? Bite me? What are you talking about?”
The man did something then that totally astonished her (not that anything he’d done since she’d opened the door hadn’t thoroughly astonished her). He grasped her chin with the hand that wasn’t holding on to the sword and turned her head first one way, then the other, examining her neck the way her general practitioner checked for swollen lymph nodes.
“What are you doing?” Meena demanded. It would have been one thing if he’d been going to kill her.
But with every passing moment, Meena felt less and less that this was actually what was going to happen.
Especially when he threw the sword aside entirely-it fell to the hardwood floor with a musical clang-sat up, and, still straddling her, pulled down the front of her slip, along with a sizable portion of her bra.
“Hey!” Meena yelled, bucking beneath him.
“
Shut up,” he said. “Lie still.”
“I will not,” Meena raged, punching him in the chest.
“He bit you,” the man said, laying a hand upon her clavicle and shoving her back down to the floor. “He had to have bitten you. He couldn’t not have. Look at you. Your skin is like silk. I want to bite it. The question is, where did he do it? Not the carotid artery, obviously. You don’t have any bruising. Sometimes they go for the heart. Have you looked?”
Meena, her bra and slip straps dangling around her shoulders, just lay where she was, staring up at him.
She could never even have written a scene like this. And even if she had, Fran and Stan would never have let it air.
Because no one would believe it. It was just too bizarre.
“Who are you?” Meena asked.
“I am Alaric Wulf,” the man said patiently. He didn’t actually sound like a lunatic. Or look like one…sword aside. He was good looking, if you liked tall blond muscular types who dressed well and spoke with a slight Germanic accent.
Which ordinarily Meena supposed she would have. If he wasn’t sitting on top of her, calmly checking out her chest for some kind of mystical bite.
“And I work for an organization that’s very interested in finding Lucien Antonescu. So if you would kindly just tell me where he is, I’ll gladly leave you alone, Miss Harper.”
He looked like he meant it. He looked like he really didn’t like her very much at all.
Which was fine with Meena, since the feeling was 100 percent mutual.
“I’d like the name of this organization,” Meena said, “so I can report you to your superiors. Does your employer know this is how you treat women, terrifying them to death and then sitting on them? Get off me-” She twisted under him, punching him in the chest some more.
And then, as he was warding off her blows with open palms, there came the sound of a key being turned in the lock to the front door.
In a blur of motion, Alaric Wulf leapt to his feet, simultaneously yanking Meena to hers by the wrist with one hand and grasping his sword in the other.