When they were out of the room and safely in the hallway, away from all windows and balconies, the Sheikh looked into Pen’s eyes and nodded. “You have to trust me. We are not safe here. I will take the children alone, and I will end this. Trust me.”
Pen snorted, rolling her eyes at him. “Right. You will take the children and leave me here. The moment you drive past the gates, I’ll be slaughtered like a cow and buried in the desert somewhere. Then you’ll have the kids, and Charlotte will join you, and the four of you will ride off into the sunset, laughing at what a moron I turned out to be.”
The Sheikh rubbed his eyes and shook his head. “Ya Allah, Pen. This is not the time to talk like a crazy person! How can you believe this is some conspiracy between me and Charlotte?!”
“Because it is,” came a cool, calm, controlled female voice from behind them. “It is a conspiracy between Rafeez and me. He just doesn’t know it.”
29
“Charlotte?” said the Sheikh, blinking as he stepped in front of Pen and the kids as if to shield them. “How did you get into the Palace?”
“Let’s just say I know the password,” replied the tall, blue-eyed woman as she leaned to her left and smiled at Pen. “Hello, Penelope! How was my half-eaten muffin?”
Pen clenched her fist and seriously thought about swinging it before she decided to give it a minute. She glanced at the Sheikh, and she could tell that his astonishment was genuine. So was his instinct to protect her and her children, and although Pen’s head was swirling as she tried to figure out what the hell was happening, there was a strange sensation of warmth flowing through her as she felt the Sheikh’s shadow fall across her and the kids like a blanket.
“The harlot’s gate,” muttered the Sheikh. “I told you about it as a joke when we were at Oxford.” He turned sideways towards Pen. “A gate that was used in the old days when the Sheikhs would have women snuck into the palace after dark. It has a lock that is basically a puzzle, like a combination of moves.” He glanced back at Charlotte. “You figured out the combination.”
“I do have a PhD, you know,” said Charlotte. She bent forward and looked at the twins. “Hello, you two! What are your names?”
“Don’t answer her,” Pen ordered.
“Don’t worry. I already know their names,” said Charlotte. She took a breath and smirked. “All their names. New and old. Yes, Carlos and Camilla? You remember the names your real parents gave you?” She pointed at the twins one by one. “You were named for your grandfather, Carlos Ramonas, head of the infamous Ramonas Family. And you, young lady, were named for your mother: Camilla Pedrera, princess of the Pedrera Family. Two of the most powerful families in the Colombian Drug Cartel.”
Pen stared at Charlotte as her vision blurred for a moment before returning to focus. “You don’t know that,” she said weakly. “How could you know that when even the adoption agencies didn’t know who their parents were?”
Charlotte laughed. “You really are an innocent farmgirl, aren’t you? God, she’s a real prize, Rafeez! This is the woman you chose over me?”
The Sheikh just stared at Charlotte. “Chose over you? Charlotte, I have not seen you in over a decade! There was never any question of choosing you over anyone, let alone Pen!”
Charlotte shrugged. “Fair enough. I’ve done better anyway. In twenty years you won’t even be a king. And chances are, with oil prices going down, you won’t even be a billionaire.” She winked at Pen. “Gotta bet on the future, not the past, hon. Like Wayne Gretzky said, Skate to where the puck’s going to be, not where it is now.”
Pen snorted. “Is that a hockey reference? Wow, you really are a Midwestern gal, aren’t ya.”
“Part Canadian, actually. You know, that big country up north with thousands of miles of unpatrolled borders?”
“What in Allah’s name are you talking about, Charlotte?” said Rafeez. “You are spouting nonsense. You are unhinged. Insane. Mad.”
Charlotte sighed and shook her head. “Oh, yes. Just another hysterical woman spouting nonsense, says the Great Ape himself. Perhaps next you’ll say I have my period.”
“Everyone calls me an ape, and yet I am the one being accused of prejudice,” grumbled the Sheikh. “All right. Go on, Professor. The floor is yours.”
“Skate to where the puck’s going to be, not where it is,” Charlotte said triumphantly. “Oil is on its way out, but cocaine is coming back to America in a big way. The problem is, the route from Colombia has always been through Mexico, whose borders are being watched a lot more closely these days. But Canada . . . now that’s a different story. The media doesn’t give a damn about the Canadian borders, and so the politicians don’t worry about spending money patrolling it. And North Dakota is right there. Yeah, it costs a bit more to fly the goods up to Canada, but we make up for it because so little gets seized at the border. Simple economics.”
The Sheikh stared at Charlotte. “So this was all about . . . money?”
Charlotte stared right back. “Of course! It all starts and ends with money! Do you know how much a college professor makes? I have no intention of doing the lecture circuit when I’m sixty, you know. What, are you surprised?” She shook her head, glancing at Pen and smiling. “See, when someone is born into money they don’t get it. You and I, we get it.”
“Speak for yourself,” Pen snapped. But then she turned red when she remembered she’d taken twenty million from the Sheikh in exchange for her turkeys. Or was it twenty million in exchange for her values?
“Regardless,” said the Sheikh firmly, and from his tone Pen could tell he had a plan in the works so she stayed with the children and let him lead. “You said this was a conspiracy between you and me. What did you mean?”
Charlotte took a breath and closed her eyes. “All right. I suppose you two deserve to hear the full story. So listen. The shootout that killed the twins’ parents was just one of many in an ongoing escalation of the war between the Cartel and the Colombian Government—which of course was being supported by the American Drug Enforcement Agency. The Cartel could see that there was no way they could simply fight it out and hope to win—not with the Americans supplying the Colombian Army with weapons, intelligence, and training. So they decided to go dormant, to seed things for the next generation of the Cartel’s top families. They sacrificed certain members of the family so others could get out of the country. Get out by way of adoption while covering up where they’d come from. The Cartel used the last bit of their influence to cover up birth records, to place the children of the Families all over the world, in Europe, America, Asia. Like sleeper agents, in a way.” She paused and took a breath. “My husband was one of those children, sent to Canada for adoption. We met in Amsterdam a few years ago, and he told me that when he was eighteen, a member of the Cartel had contacted him and told him who he was. That was how it was planned for all of the children, spanning two or three generations. It’s been going on for decades.” She took another breath, narrowing her eyes with a strange satisfaction as she looked at the Sheikh. “And it started with your sister, Rafeez. She was one of the first sent away for adoption after the Cartel obscured her birth records. Except she returned to Colombia and got romantically involved with a member of the Ramonas family. Pure coincidence! Perhaps the pull of destiny! Anyway, they fell in love, eloped, and had children. Twins. A boy and a girl. Carlos and Camilla.”
Pen saw the Sheikh’s body reel as Charlotte spoke, and she could barely see straight when it hit her: A zero percent match on the DNA tests. But of course it would be zero percent if the Sheikh’s sister had been adopted! So these were his sister’s children?! Except she wasn’t his real sister, she was adopted! Did he know?! Did he even know she’d been adopted?!
One look at the emotion on the Sheikh’s face and Pen knew it was as much a surprise to him as it was to her. But this wasn’t the time to be gasping at dramatic family revelations, bec
ause clearly Charlotte wasn’t just telling them all of this to pass the time.
“Why are you telling us this?” Pen said, her voice almost a whisper. “What do you want?”
“You know what we want,” Charlotte said softly, glancing quickly at the twins and then back at Pen. “My husband and I want to be a family, to rebuild what was broken in generations past, to rebuild an empire based on providing pleasure in the form of a natural byproduct of the coca plant.”
“Then you can start your own damned family,” said the Sheikh, his voice confident and deep in a way that sent tremors through Pen. “Because this one is taken.”
Charlotte glanced down and shook her head, and when she looked up again her blue eyes were cold steel “I told you what we want. So now I’ll tell you what we don’t want: We don’t want anyone else to die. It’s been a long, twisted path to get here, and we’re not going to stop, but I’d rather not have anyone else die. This isn’t about death. It’s about life. See, my husband and I applied to adopt the twins ourselves, but we were denied because I failed a drug test. The test was confidential, so it didn’t affect my job, but I was declared unfit to be a mother. Can you fucking believe that?! So anyway, my husband was about to pull the plug and just marry someone else, but I convinced him that by the time he got someone else on board with the whole thing, the twins might well be adopted by some other couple. Also, my husband wasn’t an American citizen, so he needed the marriage to happen so he could stay in the United States. So we just kept track of the adoption process, and when the kids ended up with couple from Fargo—Willow and Randy—I took a job with the University of North Dakota. I figured once we were in the same city, we could maybe circumvent the adoption agencies and just go directly to the couple who got the twins!”
The Sheikh took a breath. “Ya Allah, Charlotte. Some things never change. People are just commodities that can be bought and sold, yes? Everything is up for negotiation, yes? You actually believed that convincing a couple to give up their adopted children was a reasonable plan of action?”
Charlotte shrugged. “That was only Plan A—which, I will admit, was far fetched.” She glanced at Pen. “At first we offered cash to Willow and Randy, but they straight up said no. To be fair, we didn’t have that much to offer, so perhaps that was it.”
Pen rolled her eyes. “Yeah, I’m sure the amount was the only sticking point. I’m sure Willow would have sent the twins right over to you for the right number.”
Charlotte blinked, but Pen didn’t see any remorse in her blue eyes. “No. Willow wouldn’t have. She was immovable, which was why we got her out of the way. But Randy . . . we had a chance there.”
Pen gritted her teeth as she tried to hold herself back from just unleashing on this frigid, cold-hearted bitch. But she held back out of concern for those same children, Willow’s children, her children now.
Charlotte went on, and Pen could see the glint in the woman’s eye, like she was actually excited, thrilled even. This woman thinks what she’s doing is completely justified, it occurred to Pen, and she shook her head and almost sighed as she listened.
“And I was close to an agreement with Randy. After Willow died—”
“You mean after you killed Willow,” corrected Pen.
“Well, I didn’t kill her,” Charlotte said, almost shocked at the accusation. “My husband had it done. He’s a quiet man, but very good at taking care of things.”
The Sheikh turned his head slightly, not quite looking at Pen but in her general direction. Pen instinctively understood that she needed to hold her tongue here. For a little bit longer, at least. She needed to trust him.
“Go on,” Rafeez said softly. “So you were close to an agreement with Randy. Then what?”
Charlotte shrugged. “Then my husband didn’t want to wait any longer. He said it was pointless, that Randy was estranged from her parents, and if she died, they would be the next of kin. He figured it would be easier to get her parents to give up the kids, and so he had Randy taken out.” She sighed and looked at Pen. “Of course, we missed the tidbit that little Miss Farmgirl was the godmother, next in line for the kids.”
Pen nodded. “And so then you got to work on me. Though you’re the piece of work in all this. How could you even think that any of us would give up our children?!”
“Hey, I wanted to be civil and reasonable about it!” Charlotte barked, her white face going red alarmingly fast. “If my husband had his way, he’d have had everyone killed in fake accidents and staged suicides. If Willow hadn’t been a stubborn little bitch, she’d still be alive. If Randy hadn’t taken so damned long, she’d still be alive too. And if you had just signed over those little Colombian muppets, I wouldn’t need to be here!”
“Why are you here, anyway?” the Sheikh casually asked, taking a step to his left, toward the door to the chambers where his attendants lay dead. “And you still haven’t answered my question of how I’m involved in all this, about what you meant when you said we were in a conspiracy together—one which I’m not aware of, being the Great Dumb Ape of the East.”
“You’re her backup plan. A set-up for her Plan B,” Pen said quietly as a chill rose up her spine. “In case Plan A failed, she knew she’d have to kill me too. And that would be too much of a coincidence. It wouldn’t even be worth it to fake an accident, because no one would believe that three accidents could occur back-to-back, just coincidentally killing every person who happened to take custody of these children. So you were going to be the fall guy, Rafeez. The patsy. The turkey. She invited you for that wedding to bring you into the picture, place you in North Dakota, connect you to the scene.” Pen paused and shook her head. “Was that even a real wedding, or was it just to have an excuse to bring Rafeez into town?”
Charlotte narrowed her eyes and smiled. “Very good, Farmgirl. The wedding was real enough, but you’re right. We’ve been married for three years. The reception was just for Rafeez. To bring him into town. To establish the fact that he was there, in Fargo, just in case I needed to move to Plan B.”
“Which is what?” Pen said.
“No more accidents,” Charlotte said softly, and when Pen blinked and opened her eyes again the blonde Professor was holding a gun. “I’ll finish it here, and they’ll never find your bodies. When the news leaks that the kids were Sheikh Rafeez’s dead sister’s offspring—the same Sheikh who was coincidentally in Fargo, North Dakota not so long ago—it’ll seem like he killed Pen, maybe even Willow and Randy, took the kids, and disappeared into the desert mist. A nice unsolved mystery that’s outside the jurisdiction and reach of the Fargo police.”
“You’re insane,” Pen said, snorting as she tried not to look at the gun. “This is a palace full of attendants and guards. Good luck dragging my fat dead ass through the hallways without anyone noticing! Not to mention you’ll have two screaming kids in tow. And I’m sure once the first gunshot goes off, no one is gonna come to see who the hell is shooting at their Sheikh. Yup. Great plan, genius.”
Charlotte seemed unperturbed. She glanced at the kids and shrugged. “These kids aren’t screaming. They’re cool as ice, just like my husband. It’s in their blood, Pen. They have a sense of their destiny, their birthright, where they came from, and they’ll follow whatever path leads them back to it. You don’t know what you’re getting into here. You’re not cut out for this. And no, I don’t expect to shoot both of you and walk out of here. But I’ll do it if you don’t do what I say.”
“Which is what?” said Pen.
“Accept a reasonable agreement. Just sign the adoption papers. It’s so easy. It’s the right thing to do.” She looked at the Sheikh. “Rafeez, you swore you wouldn’t have kids, and here you are turning your back on that vow for a woman! And you know what, that’s great! Whatever floats your boat! So take your woman, and stick to your vow! Talk some sense into her! Don’t make me do this! My husband was so close to just sending Car
tel people in to finish this himself, but I told him to give me a chance to talk some sense into you.”
Pen frowned at that last statement as she thought about the dead attendants in the next room. It seemed odd that Charlotte would say that. She glanced at the Sheikh, and she knew he’d picked up on that too. And then Pen got it: Shit, Charlotte didn’t know that her husband had already sent people in to finish things his way!
So why the hell did he let her come to the Palace on this crazy mission?
“Three years,” Rafeez said slowly, his eyes narrowing but not in anger.
“What?” said Charlotte.
“That is how long you have been officially married to your Canadian-Colombian husband, yes?”
Charlotte shrugged. “Yeah. So?”
“So three years is the official probationary waiting period before a green-card obtained through marriage becomes permanent. He is now an American and a Canadian citizen. Free to go anywhere in the world, pass across borders without much more than a wave of his passport. Your husband no longer needs you, Charlotte. You’ve done your job. Provided all the connections to the kids. Set me up as the fall guy who kidnaps the children and disappears into the desert. And then he sends you into the lion’s den on a suicide mission. You’ve outlived your usefulness, Charlotte. I’m sorry.”
Charlotte frowned as she looked down at the gun in her hand. Then she whipped her head around as if she was expecting to see armed guards swarming in on her. But there was no movement. The hallways were empty.
“You’re not making any sense,” Charlotte said. “The gun is just to show you I’m serious, or in case things got out of hand. I’m only here to talk, and my husband agreed that I should give you guys one last chance to work out an agreement. I’m just here to talk, you guys!”
“Well, your husband is clearly a man of few words,” said the Sheikh, taking another step towards the open room, standing just out of sight of the balcony as he gestured with his head. “Take a look. Clearly he has proceeded with Plan B. Or is it Plan C now? C for Charlotte?”
Grateful for the Sheikh: A Royal Billionaire Romance Novel (Curves for Sheikhs Series Book 16) Page 15