The first hit a man in the back, and though it appeared to startle him, he hardly twitched.
Monica realized they were likely wearing body armor.
Fine, then. Their heads were exposed. Peter had been intent on learning how to throw a baseball all summer. She’d gotten pretty good at pitching it accurately into his mitt. Granted, she was throwing with a lot more force now, but she also had a lot more at stake, and plenty of pent-up fury to propel the rocks with pummeling force.
She pulled back and let loose a chunk of rock.
It hit a man on the back of the head just as he reached for the scepter. For a second his hands hovered, outstretched in the air, giving her the opportunity to send a second missile knocking against his ear. He fell.
But even as Monica felt a surge of triumph at her success, she glanced toward Thaddeus in time to see him crumple under a mighty blow.
There were only two men still standing, plus those on the ground who still moaned and writhed as though they might yet suck up the strength to pull themselves to their feet again. Monica could only guess at the compelling prize Octavian had offered for the man who returned with the scepter.
The men fighting Thaddeus had pushed him backward, and they were now too far away for her to hit them with any accuracy from behind the protective cover of the parapets. She hated to risk showing herself, but there was nothing else for it. Already one man had hold of the scepter, prying it out of Thad’s hands, while the other pummeled her husband’s midsection with flying fists.
An arsenal of rocks cradled in her left arm, Monica scuttled out from behind the wall and hurled a stone at the man who’d grabbed the scepter. He looked stunned, but didn’t fall.
Her missiles were losing force as her arms grew tired, but all she had to do was remember what she was fighting for, and she found the strength to hurl the next rock harder. Pitching it at the man who punched her husband, she caught him in the back of the head, and he went down.
The other man must have realized they weren’t alone. He spun around, spotted her and lunged.
Monica dived for the cover of the low wall, but her assailant caught her by the shoulders before she ever reached it. He picked her up, holding her high above the stone floor, before hurling her down again.
Her elbow cracked as she hit the ground, and pain shot through her. Instinctively she crumpled into a ball, clutching her arm, howling as agony surged through her in nauseous waves.
The man kicked her with his boot, rolling her over onto her back before grabbing her. She tried to writhe out of his arms before he could throw her down again. He spun backward, and just as she braced herself for the fall, he seemed to crumple away behind her, and she sagged against a familiar chest.
“Quickly.” Thad scooped her up and headed toward the tunnel entrance.
“They’ll see us,” she protested through the pain.
“I think they’re mostly out cold, and we don’t have any other choice. We’ve got to get away.” He tucked her feet through the opening and half shoved her through. She shuffled out of his way and scrambled with her good arm to find a flashlight. A moment later he was in the tunnel with her.
Thad clicked on the flashlight and held it in his mouth while he slid the stone cover into place. Then he wrapped her in his arms, carrying her as he started down the stairs.
“Hurry,” he panted. “If any of them saw which way we went, they could come after us again any moment.”
“I can walk,” Monica assured him, flinching when his hand brushed her elbow. “My left arm’s useless, but I can walk.”
They made their way, half sliding down the steep stairs. Monica was dizzy by the time they reached the bottom. She told herself it was due to the rapid spiraling descent, but she knew the pain radiating up from her arm, combined with lack of sleep, were likely strong contributing factors. And they still had such a long trudge ahead of them.
“We need to hurry.” Thad shined the flashlight beam ahead of them.
Monica nodded and lurched forward. Stars danced across her vision as she stood, and she tried to catch her breath, tried to blink back the stars so she could see straight, but the world seemed to be spinning too quickly now, and all she wanted to do was crumple into a ball and rest.
Thad was in her face in an instant. “Monica? Are you okay? Can you keep moving?”
In answer to his questions, she tried to take a step forward, to show him she was fine, but the stars’ dance only became that much more frantic, swirling and rushing and threatening at any moment to pull the earth right out from under her feet.
Pinching her eyes shut, she leaned against the wall and propped herself up with her right arm. “Go on without me. You need to get the scepter to safety.” She sucked in a ragged breath. “I’ll catch up later. I need to rest.”
* * *
Thad looked at the scepter in his hands and back to Monica. Yes, they needed to get the scepter safely away from Octavian’s men, but there had been no sound from above to indicate the men had located the sliding rock that covered the tunnel entrance. The hidden door was in a dark, out-of-the-way corner of the Dorsi fortress. With any luck, even if Octavian’s men had spotted which way they went, they’d have great difficulty identifying the panel and figuring out the trick to opening it.
Besides, if the men got the door open and started down the stairs, he and Monica would be able to hear them coming. They already had somewhat of a head start. Their situation wasn’t quite as dire as it had been a few minutes before.
He could take a moment for Monica’s sake. She’d dug him out of the tunnel and saved his life with her rock throwing. Or at the very least, she’d saved the scepter.
Scooping his arm around her waist, he eased her away from the wall as gently as he could, taking care not to jostle her injured arm. “Monica?” He nuzzled her cheek, and watched her eyes, waiting for a reaction.
Her eyelids fluttered. She winced as she shifted against him, and Thad felt his heart burning inside his chest. For the past six years, he’d stayed far away from her so she wouldn’t get hurt. And now she was hurt, in spite of all his sacrifices.
“Monica?” He kissed her cheek lightly.
She moaned.
Guilt tore at him. Earlier, in the car, she’d asked him to share what he was feeling, but he’d pushed her away. Was there any way he could make up for that by sharing with her now?
He could try.
“I never meant for you to get hurt,” he began in a whisper.
Instead of snapping at him as she had before, she looked up at him with warmth simmering in her brown eyes.
“All those years when we were friends,” he continued, “I never let myself believe I felt anything for you. It wasn’t until I was faced with leaving you behind that I realized I couldn’t do it. It was selfish of me to marry you so quickly without telling you everything about who I really was, but I didn’t know—”
“You didn’t know about Octavian.”
“I had no idea. I never would have married you, never would have fathered a son if I’d known the risks—”
“Then I’m glad you didn’t know.”
“Yesterday you said you wished you’d never taken a second look at me.”
She looked him up and down, a long, lingering look that melted the last icy corners of his heart. “For the last six years I’ve wondered where you were, whether you were okay. I’ve wondered how I could juggle my career and life as a single mother. But I’ve
never once regretted loving you.”
Thad drew closer, soaking up the warmth between them. His lips brushed hers.
She lingered for a moment on the edge of his kiss. “I regretted that I couldn’t come with you.”
A little sob rippled up through her, and Thad pulled her closer, sweeping her into the kiss he’d been holding back for the past six years. She moaned softly, and he realized he hadn’t told her half of the truth she deserved to hear.
“When my father explained what Octavian was after, and I realized what I needed to do to stop him, I had two choices. I could run away with you, or run away alone. You loved Seattle. You were looking forward to teaching. You were young and beautiful, and had a promising future. I couldn’t ask you to give that up for me. How could I take that from you?” He stroked her hair, which had come loose during her struggle with Octavian’s men.
He planted tiny kisses across her temple as he continued. “I was afraid, if I gave you the choice, you would choose me, and then, when it was too late and you’d thrown your future away, you’d wish you hadn’t. So I made the choice for you. I went alone, to a place where Octavian would never find me.”
Monica kissed him back gently. “I would have gone with you.”
“You would have hated it.” His lips nipped her nose.
“But we would have been together.” She nuzzled him lightly.
Thad felt a pinch of regret. “We can’t go back and undo the past.”
“What about the future?”
“That depends a lot on what happens with Octavian.”
“Does it?”
He wanted to tell her that of course it did, but her question made him pause. He planted anther gentle kiss on her cheek. “I’ve been telling myself that if I get close to you, Octavian will use my feelings against me. I’ve been afraid to allow myself to feel what I already feel, because he could use that to hurt us.”
When he paused, Monica asked quietly, “What do you feel?”
“I feel afraid.”
“Of what?”
“Of losing you again. Of losing Peter before I’ve even had a chance to get to know him, and then losing your love because I’m the one who endangered our son. I’m the one who couldn’t keep Octavian away from him.”
Monica was quiet for a very long time. Finally, as though she’d thought it over for some time and reached a conclusion, she lifted her face just high enough so that she could see into his eyes. “Don’t sacrifice the present for a future that may never come. When you do that, Octavian wins twice.”
Then, almost as if she didn’t want to face him after speaking her mind, she struggled to her feet. “We should get going.”
The brief rest must have been enough to clear her head, because Thad quickly realized he was going to have to hurry to keep up with his wife. As they plodded along in silence, Thad contemplated what Monica had said.
He’d given up six years in hopes of keeping Octavian at bay, but while he’d been hiding out, his enemy had been plotting and conspiring, endangering the very loved ones Thad had gone into hiding to protect. Thad had given up six years—missing out on his son’s birth and early childhood—all to avoid a scenario that had ended up happening anyway.
Running away hadn’t helped.
His body ached from his battle with Octavian’s men. His legs were sore from running, and he was exhausted. With each painful footfall, Thad’s determination grew.
He wasn’t going to run away again. In fact, he wasn’t going to let Octavian get away at all this time. It wasn’t enough just to hope that somehow he might get his son back. He had to get his son back. And then he’d make certain all of Octavian’s schemes were ended for good.
When they reached the pile of crumbling rocks where he’d been nearly buried earlier, Thad and Monica stopped and drank the rest of the bottled water.
“How’s your arm?” he asked.
“I think it’s broken,” she admitted. “But I’ll need an X-ray to be sure. What time is it?”
Thad pulled out his phone to check the time. It was just after six in the morning. Thad froze. “Wait a second.”
“What?”
He tore the battery from the phone, and the screen went dead.
“What did you do that for?”
“I was wondering how Octavian’s men found me on the island. I pulled out my phone to check the time. The helicopter arrived within half an hour.”
“You think Octavian is using your phone to somehow track your movements?”
“I don’t know. But you asked how his plane found us in Alaska—I had my phone on me then, too. He may have tapped into the satellite system to follow me. Petrela said Octavian always seems to know where people are. Don’t phones have some kind of GPS inside them?”
“But how would he access that information?”
Thad thought about the satellite that he’d seen in the sky. He stuffed the dead phone back into his pocket. “He has his ways. Never underestimate Octavian.”
He picked up the scepter from where he’d placed it on the pile of rocks, and Monica reached toward it almost reverently before withdrawing her hand, as though unsure whether she was allowed to touch it.
“It’s okay.” He handed it to her. “Take a look.”
“This is the thing everyone’s been willing to kill and die for?” She examined it with wide eyes. “It’s beautiful, but still...”
“It’s not the scepter, but the symbolism behind it and the authority of the document inside.”
“Is it waterproof?” she asked, then blushed. “I don’t suppose it matters, but when you were outnumbered on the island, I thought perhaps you should throw it into the sea. But the water would get inside and ruin the paper, wouldn’t it?”
“It was made well over a thousand years ago, long before waterproof technology,” Thad answered, then emitted a sigh that was almost a chuckle. “But come to think of it, I believe we put the document in a plastic zipper bag the last time we had it out.”
Monica let out a laugh. “The most precious document in Lydia, stored inside a zipper bag.” She handed the scepter back to him.
“The most precious relic in Lydia.” Thad rolled the scepter over in his hands. “I had dreamed one day of passing it along to my son.”
“Peter would love to be king.”
Startled, Thad recalled they’d been interrupted when she was relating what their son knew about him. They’d never gotten around to finishing that conversation. “What have you told him about me?”
“Nothing about the king part—I didn’t think that would be wise, in light of your instructions to tell no one of our association with you. I wouldn’t want the details leaking out during playgroup.” She shook her head. “But about you? Yes, Peter knows all about you. He’s got your picture by his bed, you know. He prays for you every night before he goes to sleep.”
Thad suddenly found it difficult to speak. “What does he pray?”
“That God would watch over you. That he’d get to meet you someday.” Her voice went soft, and unshed tears twinkled in her eyes. “I wish you would have told me who you were before we married. You were hiding from me even then. Not on the edge of the earth, but you were hiding part of yourself from me.”
Her depth of understanding frightened him, but the lack of condemnation in her voice frightened him even more, twinkling like a glimmer of hope in the darkness. He’d moved his face closer to hers, and now placed a gentle kiss on her forehead. �
��You were happy without me.”
“For Peter’s sake I told myself to be happy, but I missed you.” A tear dropped from her cheek to the dry stones.
Thad watched it fall. His throat felt thick. He pulled Monica against him gently, taking care with her arm. “I missed you, too. So much. I missed out on Peter’s childhood. He doesn’t know me.”
Monica met his eyes in the dim glimmer of the flashlight’s beam. “Peter loves you.”
“He doesn’t know me,” Thad repeated.
“True. But he loves you just the same.”
“I suppose he’ll only be disappointed once he meets me.”
“No. He’ll only be disappointed if you run away again.”
Thad stayed silent for a long time. It hurt to hear what Monica had to say, but she’d earned the right to say it, and he knew he deserved to hear it. Like picking at a healing scab, curiosity drove him to prod further. “I thought if I hid myself from you, then you wouldn’t truly know me, and it wouldn’t really hurt when you left.”
He sucked in a ragged breath, still marveling that after six years he could finally hold her in his arms. “Not only did I suffer the pain of our separation, but I’ve spent the last six years regretting that I had never fully shared my secrets with you. All those years we were friends, even during our whirlwind romance, I was never fully there.”
“You were already in hiding.” Monica rose shakily to her feet, favoring her injured arm. “You’re in hiding still.”
Thad stood beside her. “I don’t want to hide anymore.”
Her eyes fell on the scepter, and he looked at it, too, tightening his grip around the staff. They still had a journey ahead of them. They still had to get Peter back from Octavian, and keep Lydia from the madman’s grasp. And he had no idea how they were going to accomplish it.
“I’m tired. It’s already morning. We should get moving,” Monica whispered.
Thad nodded and plodded after her, the scepter in his hand weighing him down almost as much as the heaviness in his heart. He wanted to hold Monica and never let her go. But before he could do that, he had to get Peter back.
The Missing Monarch Page 16