Kissed by Death - Book three of the Trueborn Heirs Series

by Queen, Nyna

  Alex placed her hands on the desk, mirroring his position from the other side, and leaned forward, her own face just as hard as his. “You’re furious and all, I get it. Believe me, so am I. You have no idea how much I wish I could twist some heads of their necks. But right now we need to focus on getting Darken out of the firing line.”

  Stephane fixed her with his golden-green stare—like looking into the eyes of a hungry lion.

  “And how, pray tell, are we supposed to do that?” he asked with a snarl. “I would love to make an appeal on Darken’s behalf, but frankly, I don’t know where to turn. You were the one who just told me that our entire leadership ranks are corrupted.” He shook the paper snippets in his fist, indicating the list of names on it.

  Alex bared her teeth at him and smiled maliciously. “Then there’s only one solution, sugar. We must expose all of them and destroy the entire organization with a single blow, and we must do it before they can track Darken down.”

  Stephane stared at her for a long second—and burst out laughing. It was a harsh, derisive kind of laugh, which made Alex want to punch him in the jaw. She cupped the desire with much difficulty. She wasn’t angry at him, not really. She was angry at her situation and Stephane was her best ally. She couldn’t lose him. She just had to make him see her point of view.

  “We’re not talking about the entire elite here,” she pressed with a cutting motion of her hand. “According to the list Belaris gave us, about two dozen people from the A-list are involved in this. If we could show the rest of the elite what’s been going on, the public outrage will crush them.”

  Stephane’s face was still dripping with trueborn scorn. “I admire your enthusiasm, but I ask once more: How? All our evidence just went right out of the window—murdered in the guardaí’s headquarters no less. We may know things, but if we cannot prove them, they are about as useful to us as a comb for a headless corpse, excuse the crude comparison.”

  He shook his head, weariness seeping through his anger. “Our position was never good, but at least we had a starting point. Now that Darken has been declared rogue, we have lost another witness. I don’t want to sound overly pessimistic, but the odds do not seem to be getting better for us.”

  Alex pressed her lips together to keep herself from saying something she might regret later. Struggling for composure, she glanced out of the window. In the sunny garden below, she spotted Max and Josy splashing around in the pool, reclaiming a bit of normalcy after the shock of Debayne’s death last night. Or whatever was considered normal for trueborn children, anyway.

  When the wind came from the right direction, she could hear their laughter. It burned right into her chest, a stinging sensation as if someone had stubbed out a cigarette on her heart. They would have to be told that their uncle had been declared an outlaw and was now being hunted down like a rabid wolf. That they might never see him again.

  Alex gulped the too-sweet air. How could she look them in the eye and tell them that she had been with Darken, yet hadn’t been able to stop him from leaving on his own. Her hands balled into fists at her sides. Sweet Jester, she so wanted to kill him for doing this to her! She sucked in a deep breath. Later, she told herself. She would kill him later. After she’d rescued his macho ass.

  Rachel had once told her that you knew you loved someone when you were ready to take on the odds for them. Well, these odds would get the shock of their lives.

  Alex turned away from the window and leveled a hard gaze on Stephane. “I don’t give a flying fuck about odds,” she told him icily. “In fact, I intend to beat them.”

  Slowly walking up and down before his desk, she considered how to best persuade him of her idea. Except, there simply was no way to say this without sounding batshit crazy. Turning around to him, she finally asked, “Is there a way to contact Darken?” Things would be a lot easier, if they could reach him if need be.

  Stephane’s eyes narrowed a little, a sharp ‘V’ forming between his eyebrows. “We always knew that the possibility existed that this would happen one day, so we prepared for the worst.” He relinquished most of the paper snippets from his hands, holding the last one between his thumb and forefinger and staring at it as if the solution to their problem were hidden somewhere among the words.

  “We devised a way to reach him in the utmost emergency. It’s … complicated, so it cannot be easily compromised and there remains a risk that it could be intercepted. I wouldn’t use it unless I had absolutely no other choice.” He looked up at her. “Why?”

  Alex took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

  “I have a plan, and you won’t like it.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  “A PLAN?” Stephane stared at Alex across the desk once she had finished. “You call this a plan? That’s not a plan, it’s a suicide mission!”

  Alex leaned on the heavy mahogany wood and crossed her arms. “Look, sugar, I know it sounds a bit crazy but—”

  Stephane held up a hand to cut her short. “Taking you into the Royal Palace, now that was crazy. This? This is completely insane!”

  Alex’s lips twitched into a crooked smile. “Yeah well, sugar, that’s me, Alexis Harper, terminally insane, at your service.” She performed a mocking little bow.

  Stephane started pacing again. “Crazy,” he muttered under his breath and flung his hands into the air. “Completely and utterly crazy.”

  He stopped to glare at her. “The chances of your little scheme to work are…” He paused, groping for words, and failing. There wasn’t a bad enough word he could come up with.

  “Abysmal?” Alex suggested sweetly. Oh, she knew. Her plan was desperate at best, but desperation was all she had left.

  Stephane frowned at her and picked up a pencil from his desk, turning it over and over in his fingers. His voice sounded less furious and more thoughtful when he asked, “You would really risk your life for my brother?”

  Alex returned his gaze without flinching. “I would.”

  She would make a pact with the devil himself if that was what it took to save him. Unfortunately, it wasn’t that easy.

  When Stephane didn’t say anything, bitterness flooded her voice, “But I suppose being a Forfeit and all doesn’t make him worthy of the same kind of sacrifice that—”

  A loud snap announced the pencil breaking.

  “Don’t you dare!” Stephane was holding the two pieces in his fists, shaking, his adamant green eyes shooting golden arrows of fury at her. If he’d sprouted a mane and tail and tried to rip out her throat, she wouldn’t have been surprised. “Don’t you dare imply that I don’t care for Darken. You have no idea what it was like when he was claimed, what we’ve gone through together.”

  Alex realized that his fury was masking pain.

  “I would sacrifice my life for him this instance.” Stephane threw the broken pencil pieces across the room where they slid against the baseboard with a clattering noise. The act seemed to calm him a little. “But it isn’t just my life which is in the balance here,” he continued more softly. “It’s the life of my entire family. The future of my children… Do you have any idea what will happen to them if we screw this up?”

  Alex bit the inside of her cheek. To be completely honest, she hadn’t thought that far. All she had thought about was Darken and how his last kiss had tasted so much like goodbye. It was tearing a hole in her middle that was so wide she couldn’t see anything else.

  Stephane kept watching her. “If only the tiniest thing goes wrong, my family will be ruined, and you and I”—he pointed from her to him—“will be dead, not to mention Darken.”

  That he pointed it out meant he was considering it. Alex felt a feverish rush of hope ripple through her. If she wanted to convince him, she had to do it now.

  “And if we don’t do anything, Darken will be dead for sure,” she countered. “And neither I, nor you, or your family will be safe either.” She clutched the edge of his desk bending closer to him. “If the Master and his cronies ca
n sentence an innocent man to death without a trial, what do you think they’ll do to your family once Darken is out of the way?” The thought of Darken dying almost tore her in half, but she forced herself to keep a steady gaze on Stephane.

  The dark look Stephane gave her in reply said more than a thousand words. She was right, and he knew it.

  “It’s still a bad idea,” he muttered and shook his head. “Too many variables. Far too dependent on chance.”

  Alex pushed herself off the desk and raised her chin in a silent challenge. “Look, sugar, if you’ve got a better bad idea, this would be a good moment to share it.”

  Stephane’s gaze became, if possible, even darker.

  Yeah, I didn’t think so.

  He fell into his chair with a creak and squinted at her. “Do you really think you can make your part of this plan work?”

  “And you?”

  Stephane looked as though he’d bitten an olive stone. “Touché.”

  With a sigh, he swiveled the silver double frame on his desk around a little so that he could take a better look at the memoras held in them. Alex knew what they showed, having studied them for the entire time of his rant. One of them was a moving picture of Edalyne, Max, and Josy blowing kisses toward the onlooker. The other was a frozen image of the three Dubois brothers, Stephane in the middle between Tyler on his left and Darken on his right, their arms slung over each other’s shoulders, grinning at the recordare memorandi—Stephane a golden sunburst between the darker shapes of his brothers, one a pale crescent and the other one a bright, exploding star.

  Touching the double frame, Stephane sighed again and raked a hand through his golden mane of hair. “I must be insane, too, to even consider it.”

  Alex tossed her hair back over her shoulder. “Insanity is the weapon of the hopeless and the desperate.”

  He shot her a long gaze and slowly shook his head. “We’re going to regret this. Mark my words. We’re going to regret this.”

  “You have to see it like this,” Alex told him with put on cheer. “At the very least that phrase will look very neat on your gravestone.”

  Stephane made a rather rude noise. “I hope they put on your gravestone that this whole bloody plan was your idea.” He rubbed his eye sockets with the heels of his hands. “How I am going to sell Eady on this ludicrous scheme, I have not the slightest idea.”

  “Well, I’ll leave that in your capable hands, Lord Silver Tongue. I have my own battlefield to prepare for.”

  Stephane arched an eyebrow at her. “And what would that be?”

  Alex released her breath and said in a grim voice, “I believe it is time to prepare for another social outing.”

  “I WAS so happy about your call, Alexandre!” Bonny squeezed Alex’s arm and took a sip from her cocktail. “I’ll admit, I’d almost lost hope that you would show up today.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t have missed this for the world,” Alex drawled.

  She and Bonny were strolling through the outdoor area of the Kaelta Gallery Center Hall with their arms linked between their bodies, each of them holding a cup of cooled Jambale, a fruity cocktail that was so sweet that it made your teeth itch—quite literally. Right about now, Alex would have gladly sacrificed a year of her life for a piece of lemon.

  The exhibition hall sat in the middle of a huge botanical garden, the most renowned of the entire Republic. A helical building of bronze metal, glass, and marble, it was reminiscent of a giant snail’s shell and glittered in the sun with hues of salted caramel, amber, and cream.

  According to the brochure that had been thrust into Alex’s hand at the main entrance, like everything here, the building itself was already part of the exhibition. Every inch of ground, every path, every pond, and every plant out here had been designed with careful deliberation to create an ‘artistic synthesis’. While Alex failed to see a synthesis—whatever the hell that might be—she had to admit that the gardens were absolutely breathtaking with their huge wooden sculptures, artfully arranged, exotic flower beds, and natural looking water fountains. And, of course, everything was spiced with a little bit of magic.

  The day was little short of perfect, with a bright sun beaming down from a clear sapphire sky, the summer heat tempered by a pleasant breeze that sifted through the canopy of leaves and caressed the skin.

  The gorgeous weather and the prospect of fine art had attracted many visitors and the exhibition grounds were swarming with members of the trueborn upper crust meandering down the paths and enjoying the shade of the trees on one of the many benches scattered along the walkways.

  The big yellow organizer’s badge pinned to Bonny’s marine-blue blazer made them a constant magnet for overzealous art fanatics, and they had to stop at every corner to answer questions, give directions, or just listen to people praising the awesomeness of the exhibition. For Bonny, it had to be an absolute field day.

  Alex smiled and did all the expected cheek-kissing and superficial chit-chat that was expected of Lady Alexandre de Nuy, while on the inside she wanted to let the spider off its leash and rip out a couple of throats.

  Here, in this artificial paradise, people were idling away their time in the sun, enjoying their puny little polished up existences while Darken was out there somewhere, running and fighting for his life. And why? Because of someone’s freaking political power games!

  Alex’s fingers tightened around her metal cocktail cup. She hadn’t heard of him in three days—three horribly long days, during which she could do nothing but sit around and bite her proverbial nails—and the uncertainty was killing her. For all she knew, he could already be dead.

  The thought staggered her like a whiplash to her heart. Fear squeezed her throat in a monstrous fist, choking her until her vision flooded with bright, colorful spots. The metal cup moaned in her grip.

  No! Alex drew in a deep breath, swaying from the sudden inflow of oxygen. She couldn’t allow herself to think like this. Darken was too smart and too deadly to let himself get caught. The man could move like a fucking ghost if he wanted to. He would give his pursuers a real run for their money. And—scant comfort though that might be—Edalyne was right with one thing she’d said during last night’s supper: If Darken really were killed, they would plaster it across all the media channels just to cause a big scandal for Stephane. No way they would pass up that opportunity to disgrace his family and ruin his image.

  Silence was good, Alex reassured herself for the umpteenth time. Silence meant that he was still out there, hiding and biding his time. And if Alex wanted to have any hope for him to return to her, she had to keep her shit together and do the same. Their entire success hitched on her playing out her part in this game.

  Uncurling her fingers, Alex smiled at a group of passersby and pretended to be sweet and carefree.

  Bonny unglued herself from a gaggle of elderly ladies and led Alex past a giant flock of fantasy birds made of glass and silk feathers, whose gossamer wings seemed to move with the flow of the light, while their shadows created mythical shapes on the bed of white sand on the ground.

  They entered a small hedgerow path. The hedges on both sides had been artificially coaxed to bend so that they formed a breezy tunnel, intertwining above their heads but letting through enough sunlight so that they seemed to walk in a tunnel of liquid gold.

  At the other end, a small clearing sheltered a cluster of perfectly round ponds. Each pond was surrounded by a complicated ring of metal with inlaid amplifier crystals. Magical energy crackled over their surfaces and charged the air so heavily that Alex’s skin tingled in response.

  Around the clearing, weeping willows dripped their branches toward the ground. Thousands of fine, nearly invisible threads tipped with tear-shaped, little glass beads hung suspended from the branches, dazzling in the sunlight.

  Weeping, it struck Alex. The trees were literally weeping. Yet when the breeze moved through the branches, gently swaying the myriad of drops, the soft sound of laugher rippled through the clearing,
echoing under the canopy.

  A sign on a wooden post dubbed them, ‘The Tears of Joy’.

  Well, well, well, ten points for creativity.

  The stone path Alex and Bonny had been following ended right in front of the first pond. There was no other path leading away from there. Alex stopped and frowned, catching a glimpse of her reflection in the water.

  The light blue silk of her dress dropped from her bare shoulders, forming thin, loose sleeves that reached the middle of her upper arms. Two stripes of the delicate fabric knotted underneath her breasts, drawing the attention to the triangle of her décolleté and bringing out the bright blue shade of her eyes. Gathering around her hips, the soft silk fell down into a draped skit that ended just past her knees. In the shimmering mirror of the water it seemed as if she’d gotten ahold of a piece of the summer sky and wrapped it around herself. Small moonstones sparkled on her ears and on the barrette that fastened her loose half braid. Edalyne, Heloise, and Josy had dressed her with care for this occasion—prim, but with a slight hint of suggestiveness. The country flower giving elite standards a try.

  “You have to walk across.”

  Alex blinked up at Bonny. “What?”

  “They are Walking Ponds,” the other girl explained, then wrinkled her brow. “You really never heard of them? Seriously, Lexy, sometimes I wonder if you’ve been living under a rock all of your life. Here, I’ll show you.”

  And she stepped right into the closest pond. Alex automatically jumped forward and reached out to keep her from pitching head-first into the water, but Bonny didn’t pitch. In fact, she didn’t even break her stride. The water flared where her shoes touched its surface, a little like a disturbed ward, but that was it. If Alex hadn’t seen her feet touching the water, she would have sworn that Bonny was walking on solid ground.