“Much needed. Duchess Sells paid for a private demonstration for twelve of her dearest friends.”
“Congrats?” Saber asks, never willing to truly encourage.
I don’t let it deter me. “Every woman in attendance was either a director, a major shareholder, or married to one. Together they control nearly a third of the disposable wealth in the entire palace, and at least that much prestige,” I say as I glance at my reflection in the atrium mirror. “If I’m going to make my new deadline, this is exactly the kind of clientèle I need.” What I don’t say is that they’re all older women than I would have originally felt comfortable selling to. My standards are unraveling.
“Thanks for letting me sleep in,” Saber says, dropping a kiss on my forehead. “Are you going to need to rest before the assembly tonight? I could make the run out to Giovanni’s myself.”
“Tempting,” I admit.
“You know you can trust me.”
“Of that I’m certain.” We both take a scant moment to remove our Lenses before I key in my father’s code on the decorative inlay and bend for the facial scan. “I just don’t want to get caught skipping my dance lesson.”
“You could sleep in the car,” Saber suggests, stepping slightly in front of me to hold the door open. “I make a pretty soft pillow, I’m told.”
“There’s a possibility.” I drop my reticule on the desktop, and at the moment I look to the side, my foot hits something soft and warm.
I look down in confusion and find my mother, sprawled on the floor. A trickle of blood has dried under her nose.
“Oh lord.” I remember her snooping about on Tuesday and alarm clangs like a bell, reverberating through my entire body. Saber rushes to her side and drops to one knee. His fingers go to her throat, and when he looks up at me with fear-glazed eyes, I know.
“She’s dead?”
Saber just nods.
“But I…I picked up product for the party an hour ago. She wasn’t here!” A sob wrenches out of my mouth, and I slap my hand over it. My throat convulses, but I let no more noise escape. If you had asked me two minutes ago if I’d be pleased to see my mother dead, my answer would have been yes. But the reality is more devastating than I could possibly have imagined. There were days, years’ worth of them, when I knew—or at least thought—my mother loved me. It’s those days that come back now, threatening to bowl me over with remorse.
Remorse for her death? I ask myself when rational thought finally worms through my tangle of emotions. I’m not convinced that’s what it is. For the waste. The potential. The could-have-beens.
Questions form and fizzle in my brain as I force myself to take deep breaths. Could the King be responsible for this? What does her death mean for me? What contingencies did my mother have in place for something like this?
Do I still have to marry Justin Wyndham?
“Danica, look.” Saber’s voice brings me back to the present. The top drawer of the desk is open.
“Oh no.” The words are barely audible as they wisp from my lips.
With clenched teeth, Saber kneels to lift my mother’s head, revealing a blood-caked cheek, shards of glass, and the unmistakable glimmer of Sonoman-Versailles’s favorite cosmetic additive. The remains of a vial of raw Glitter.
Automatically, I estimate the loss in production and profit, and though I haven’t loved this woman in a very long time, I’m ashamed at the reflex.
“Go get a washcloth. Damp, not wet. Hurry.”
“What?” Saber’s calm but firm words sound like a different language.
“We have to fix this—go get a washcloth. Please,” he adds, and strangely, that’s what gets me moving. I jog down the hall—cursing my clicking slippers—and wet a washcloth from my father’s bathroom. At the last second, I poke my head into his boudoir but am relieved to see him sleeping. For a moment I panic and wonder if he’s dead too, but I hear a light snuffling snore, so I hurry back to Saber.
“We’ll clean up the Glitter and reposition her body,” Saber says with a calm I can’t even begin to feel. How have I become the person who covers up two deaths in six months?
“I don’t understand, what happened?”
“I can only guess,” Saber says as he dabs at the blood on her cheek, trying to remove the sparkling drug. “She probably got suspicious and came back to snoop when she saw you had that party on your schedule. She knew you’d be out of the way. Looks like she got into the desk somehow. If she tried to taste the Glitter, or sniff it, and got like ten doses at once, she’d have collapsed and—” He gestures at her fallen form.
Saber’s doing everything, and I’m feeling so queasy, I just let him. Part of my brain reminds me that he’s been working with Reginald for…I don’t even know how long. This probably isn’t the first death he’s tidied up. For all I know, he’s caused a few. I wouldn’t presume to know just how dark Reginald’s underworld gets.
“If she didn’t overdose immediately, it’s possible she just tripped and landed on the vial. Then when the glass cut into her cheek…” He shakes his head. “Who knows how much got into her bloodstream? With it delivered that way, her heart and lungs would have quit within seconds.”
I close my eyes against the horror. This is my fault. “An overdose, then. Either way.”
“Massive. But if we can make it look like an accident…here,” he says, handing me the bloodied washcloth. “Put it into your pannier pockets. I’ll get rid of it in Paris later.”
I’m hiding evidence. Bloody evidence.
“Be careful,” he adds. “Don’t handle it without your gloves.”
“What are you going to do?” I ask as he wrestles Mother’s unwieldy form up against his chest.
“Better you don’t even ask,” he mutters. “All the cosmetics need to go in your pannier pockets. Clean out all those drawers, then make sure they’re locked,” he adds, dragging her around to the front of the desk.
I remove my supplies from the desk and place them in my panniers alongside the washcloth and makeup pots before locking the drawer. I’ve just shoved the key down the front of my dress when a sickening thud startles my attention back to Saber.
He’s standing over my mother’s body, having apparently let her fall, and I’m glad I didn’t see her head crack against the corner of the desk. My stomach curdles at the eight- or nine-centimeter gash he’s made in her forehead, which is oozing blood onto the carpet.
“What did…why…?” But the urge to retch overwhelms me, and I have to hold my hand over my mouth while my stomach heaves.
“Actually, if you’re going to puke, you should do it over here,” Saber says, pulling me toward him. I’m forced to remove one hand from my mouth to lift my skirts and step over my mother’s body.
I don’t understand any of this.
Saber takes me by both shoulders and shakes me gently. “We found her on the floor,” he says. His voice is quiet and gentle, and yet somehow steely, and all I can do is nod. “It looked like she tripped on the carpet and fell, hitting her head on the desk,” he says very deliberately. “When you couldn’t rouse her, you ran to get help. Do you understand?”
“She tripped,” I repeat.
“Yes. You have a dozen high-ranking ladies of the court to verify that you were nowhere near this apartment.”
I nod, the seriousness of needing an alibi making the situation crystallize in my mind.
“Can you rumple up the carpet near her foot so it looks plausible? I’m going…I’m going to use gravity to make her head bleed a bit more, to corroborate our story. Maybe don’t look.”
But I can’t just look away, after a pronouncement such as that. I flip up the corner of the beautiful Indian rug in front of my father’s desk while keeping Saber in my peripheral vision. Carefully working around my mother’s bulky skirts, he lifts her lower body, and I have to turn away again at the unnatural angles her limbs fall into.
I cough and barely manage to keep down the contents of my stomach before asking,
“Is it done?”
“Yes, and if you can manage, I’d like help arranging her dress so it looks right. Maybe even take one shoe off?”
I turn and see my mother again, now with a thick puddle of blood beneath the gaping split in her head. Still holding my fingers over my mouth, I say, “It’s actually in the King’s best interest to assume this is an accident. He knows I could easily point a finger at him for a motive for murder.”
“Really?” Saber looks a little skeptical, but I nod quickly, not entirely trusting myself to speak. “Then let’s hope we can get him to take a personal interest in this. Does she look ready?”
I look down at my mother—at the dragon in my life. The villain, sometimes. I adjust her skirts to make it look like she stumbled on the crumpled corner of the rug.
The tableau looks surprisingly innocent, and I hate myself for the relief I feel.
“Right now, your M.A.R.I.E. is our best friend and worst enemy,” Saber says, and I remember telling him something similar about Lenses not very long ago.
Lenses. “Her Lens!” I cry. “She always wears it.”
Saber curses, and I drop to my knees beside her. “Can you take it out without it recording you?”
“I have to at least check,” I whisper. I lift the corner of her left eyelid and find…nothing.
Emotions war within me. My mother always wore her Lens—ever ready to snatch up a few seconds of blackmail. Why wouldn’t she…? And then I understand. “She knew she was going to find something bad,” I say softly. “She didn’t want it to incriminate me.”
“Well, that makes our cover story significantly less complicated,” Saber says, all business, but he doesn’t grasp the significance. Maybe he can’t, having not grown up with her. Even in her convoluted way, she was protecting me. She didn’t want anyone to be able to discover whatever she was sure she would find in my father’s desk. A very childlike part of me wants to tear up at the fact that she had some sort of motherly consideration for me.
“Your security people will see that your mother came in alive,” Saber continues in his calm tone. “M.A.R.I.E. will have seen her crossing the atrium less than an hour ago, which will match the time of death. Your father will be seen sleeping in his room—no chance of foul play there. All surveillance will point to an accident. Which it was, technically.”
“Will that be good enough?” I ask. I don’t feel anything anymore. I’m empty and numb.
“Hopefully. Any investigator worth his salt will realize something isn’t right, and a competent autopsy—much less decent blood work—will raise even worse questions. But if we can get this all written up as a clear accident, none of those things will even come into play. With luck, the authorities will scratch their heads for a while and you’ll be long gone before they solve too much of the puzzle. But if, at any point, someone tries to take you into custody,” Saber says softly, “get to your dance man in Paris, take your money, and run.”
I don’t remind him that there’s nowhere for me to run—that this has been the problem all along. Instead I nod, reaching out to grasp his hand in a gesture that’s far more desperation than affection.
“Okay, when you’re ready, we’re going to burst out of the office and you’re going to com your security people, or whatever it is you do to report problems around here. We keep our stories simple and identical.” He puts both hands on my shoulders. “Good?”
“Good. I’m ready.”
It’s a performance worthy of the Parisian stage. I shout at M.A.R.I.E. for emergency response, and within two minutes security is there and I’m letting my pent-up emotions flow freely. Saber fawns over me like I’m a helpless female, and I let him—all the better for our new audience. He responds to nearly all of the questions on my behalf; hard to have differing answers when only one person speaks.
I expect things to be far more difficult, but within about ten minutes, medical aides in white scrubs have arrived with a stretcher. Less than an hour later, the security man who ran a quick digital scan of the room is handing me a tablet with a dictated statement. There’s a place at the bottom for each of us to sign.
Clean, fast, efficient. Easy. It’s baffling to watch the death of a human being swept to the side with so little fuss. Not even an elderly person who’s reached her time—a woman in her early fifties. I have to wonder if the simplicity of it all is down to the fact that I’m soon to be Queen. Everyone in Sonoman-Versailles knows how much we as a country benefit from avoiding political scandal, and, well, I’m nearly the most famous person at court now. If I’m connected to a suspicious death, the entire country could well be shrouded in suspicion.
One of the aides turns to me with sad-looking eyes and asks if I’d like to accompany my mother’s body down to the morgue. “It sometimes helps people achieve closure,” she says.
I suppose this is what someone who doesn’t hate her mother would do.
With a quick nod, I try to look serenely bereft, then tilt my head to Saber to indicate he should follow. We trail the stretcher down the hallway to the lift, where the aide presses a button and we descend into the rarely seen basement levels of Versailles Palace.
“It’s not a morgue in the full sense of the word; we so rarely have need,” the woman says, smiling patronizingly at me as we enter a rather bare room. “You said up in your apartments not to disturb your father at this time?” she queries.
“That’s right,” I say. “He’s…not well.”
“All right.” She glances down at her tablet. “I’ll give you a moment alone while I file my reports. Please request assistance from M.A.R.I.E. should you need any.”
Then she leaves through a plain door with a little square window in it, and I watch until she disappears from view.
It really is a modern world down here. Modern and sparse. The walls are white, not a fresco or gilt buttress to be seen, and other than Saber and me, everyone is wearing maintenance jumpsuits or those shapeless so-called scrubs. I feel hopelessly out of place, even though my neo-Baroque life is situated just meters above my head. Will I ever feel at home once I’m out in the world?
“I can’t believe she’s gone,” I whisper. “She’s been the driving force in my life since…forever. And now—conquered. But not really. Maybe not ever.”
“How do you mean?”
“She’ll have planned for this, somehow.” Assuming her death didn’t trigger some sort of release, at minimum I’m going to have to track down the video of the King’s confession in that dark hallway. There might be multiple copies, depending on how carefully she tried to inure herself against the possibility of dying in a mysterious accident. Well, the joke’s on her; she truly did die in a mysterious accident, but the King had nothing to do with it. “Everything I’m wrapped up in can be laid at her feet, because she wasn’t content simply controlling my father’s shares. She always wanted more.”
Saber crinkles his brow. “Family trait?”
I let out a snort. “Please. No. My father never even wanted what he got, much less more of it. Given half a chance, the King would probably…” My words trail off as the realization slams into me. “My father. The King. What have I done!”
I TEAR FROM the room as quickly as I can, my skirts raised high, ignoring the clattering of Glitter containers and sprinting for the lift. Hopefully the woman in the office will assume I was overwhelmed by my emotions. And she won’t be wrong—they simply aren’t emotions that have anything to do with mourning my mother. As soon as the lift doors close, I slump against the wall.
“I’m so foolish,” I mutter.
“I don’t understand,” Saber says, breathing hard.
“My father. I left him completely vulnerable. I always think of my mother as the powerful one, but she was only powerful because she controlled my father. My father is the source of power. He’s the one with the votes.”
“Votes?”
“How soon could Justin have really heard?” I say, speaking more to myself than to Saber. “Mayb
e I’ll be on time.” But I’m not optimistic. A death in the palace—especially his future mother-in-law? His Highness would have been informed immediately.
And unlike me—a novice at the power game—he would have seen his opportunity instantly.
The doors to the Grayson apartments are closed and all is quiet. I tap in my code tremulously, half anticipating that it will be denied. Were I the King and I arrived first, I’d lock me out. The fact that the doors respond to my code and open gives me a spark of hope.
The empty atrium gives me another.
A quick code entry and facial scan get me into my father’s office, and my heart races when I see the room cordoned off with tape barriers but otherwise empty. I want to yell for him, but my heart feels as though it’s blocking my throat. Without a word to Saber, I turn and hurry down the hallway, not bothering to muffle the clicking of my heels. I swing around into my father’s bedroom, my shoes skidding beneath me as I take that final corner.
The King is standing behind my father, who’s bleary-eyed and sitting in a small armchair. On his shoulders rest the King’s many-ringed fingers, clasped almost protectively.
But I know who the predator is here.
I hate that he’s caught me off guard, and I force myself to pause, to stand tall, chin lifted, shoulders rolled back.
“My love,” the King says mockingly. “We were just discussing you. When I broke the unfortunate news of your mother’s death, your poor father expressed a wish to make some rather long-due amends to you.”
“Step away from him, Justin. He just lost his wife.”
“You fear for his safety?” His Highness asks melodramatically. “I wouldn’t dream of harming him.”
“I should say not,” I snap. “You need him.”
“I do indeed,” replies the King, almost jovially.
I feel rather than see Saber approach, slinking along the wall so he remains out of sight of the King but just within my own vision as I linger in the doorway. I remain silent. His Royal Highness has not yet made his play, and I’ll not reveal anything that might assist him.