“Well, here’s what I want now: a divorce.”
He sniggers. “Of course you do.”
“Moreover, I want helicopter transport out of Sonoman-Versailles for both Saber and me, to a location I’ll program into the Nav after we’ve taken off.”
“Anything else?” His Highness asks, his laughter barely held in check.
“You will take over my father’s residence fees at Languedoc-Roussillon and continue to pay them for the rest of his life. Although that’s a bit of a draw, as he’s so biddable that even without my say-so, he’ll vote however you desire in the future.”
“And what about you, my love? An astronomical annuity, perhaps?”
“Certainly not.” At his raised eyebrow, I continue. “I want nothing to do with your dirty, humanity-crippling money.” I slide a glance over to where Saber has positioned himself, unobtrusively, in the corner. “Trust me, my own money is dirty enough.”
“Is that everything?”
“Have I covered it all?” I ask Saber.
He considers, then gives me a tiny nod.
“Oh no, one more thing.” I lean forward, my hands tightly gripping the armrests. “Don’t look for me. Ever. Make up some Banbury tale for the court and the reporters, but don’t you ever come looking for me.”
He drums his fingers on his desk. “Now is that all?”
“Yes,” I say, confidently this time.
“Good. The answer is no. Who the hell do you think you are? Go to bed.” With that he resumes his seat and starts shuffling the scattered papers into one stack.
I grin. I was hoping he’d choose to do this the hard way. “I know about the Blight.”
“Pardon?” He looks far less amused now.
“The Norwegian Blight. I know your great-grandfather was able to create a resistant strain only because he developed the Blight to begin with.”
“That’s a very bold accusation.”
“I have proof.”
He shuts up, studies me. “And what do you intend to do with it?”
“Use it to get what I want and then hold it over your head, of course. For the rest of my life, if that’s what it takes to keep you from trying to drag me back—or do away with me.”
“Damnation, Danica. You’ve always thought me the villain. Will you lay this at my feet too? I didn’t do it! What do you want me to do, apologize for my great-grandfather?”
“I don’t want an apology; I’m sick to death of listening to lies.”
He studies me with glittering eyes. “What sort of proof do you think you have?”
“A document with both the Blight and Rally CRISPRs, time-stamped 2034.”
He smiles. “Time stamps can be tampered with—I’m not sure a judge would buy it.”
“Who said anything about the legal system? I’d take it to the press.” It’s my turn to stare him down, to lean over his desk with my hands flat on its surface. “They’d eviscerate you and you know it. And wouldn’t that be a shame, just as you’re trying to roll out Sonoma’s newest economic apocalypse. Your promised profits might suffer. And then where would you be?”
His face is flushed. At last—at last—I have him.
“I’m not asking much. You never wanted me anyway; we both know that.” I swallow hard and let him see one shred of my humanity. Like he did a few weeks before we were married, when he made me the offer I should probably have taken, given what I knew at the time. “Let me go, Justin.”
“What the hell am I supposed to tell people?” he asks in a whisper. The whisper of a man who’s had one too many PR crises in the last year.
“That I was young. And foolish. And not ready. That I broke and ran away. I don’t care about my shares. I’ll sign papers reverting them. I don’t care about my public image.” I spread my arms wide. “Make me your villainess; I don’t give a damn.”
He’s silent for a long time, his finger drawing an invisible shape on the top of his desk. I’ve never seen Justin uncertain. Even when he was violent and brutal, he was always calculating. I haven’t seen him so truly at a loss…since the night he killed Sierra Jamison. “And if I refuse?” he asks, so quietly I wouldn’t have heard him if the office weren’t so very, very silent.
“Don’t refuse,” I plead.
“But if I did?”
I shake my head. “I’ll go to the press. You can’t watch me forever. Not with a company—a kingdom—to run. I’m the senior vice-bloody-president of palace security; I’ll slip out eventually, and then you’ll be ruined.”
“Do you feel nothing for me?” He looks up and meets my eyes, searching.
It catches me off-guard and for a moment I don’t know what to say. “I feel many things for you, Justin. It’s just that none of them are positive.”
“These last months. No, mostly the last few weeks, when we truly worked together. A tour de force. I loved it; I thought maybe you did too.” He leans forward on his elbows. “Was it all false?”
I suppose this once he deserves my honesty. “No, Justin, not all of it. To my everlasting shame, no.”
“It’s heady, isn’t it?” he says, a hint of a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth.
“It is. And that’s why I have to leave.” I take a deep, shuddering breath. “There are many ways to become an addict. This path would assuredly be mine.”
Our eyes meet and somehow, in spite of everything else that has passed between us, we share an entire conversation in a look. I blink slowly and break away, as if afraid to be ensorcelled.
“Mateus!”
The King’s barked command cracks through the silence, making both Saber and me startle. Mateus’s head pops in so quickly I know he’s been listening at the door.
“Summon the helicopter.”
My legs start to tremble, threatening to dump me unceremoniously on the floor.
I won.
“Now, my liege?” Mateus squeaks.
“Now!” barks the King.
A soft noise of distress and then the assistant is gone—the door closed again. “It will take me a few minutes,” he says, waking up his tablet. “There are some documents to compile.”
“As long as you’re not stalling.”
His hand stills over the tablet. “I haven’t much of a choice, do I, lady wife?” A growl edges his voice and I know I’ve pushed as far as I ought. I resume my seat, and there’s no sound but the rubbing of the King’s feathered stylus on his tablet and the ticking of a clock on the wall.
“I’m not going to find crown jewels in that bag of yours, am I?”
I laugh, then stop myself, lest I expose the depth of my relief that he’s cooperating. “No. Even I can’t nick jewels out of the royal vault. At least I don’t think so—last time I tried, I wasn’t in charge of security.” At that, he looks up and raises an eyebrow, but I merely stare back, my gaze utterly unwavering.
He looks away first.
Only then do I say, “I’m taking only those things that are inarguably mine.”
The King grunts and taps at his screen a few more times, a bit more firmly than necessary. “There, done,” he says, turning his tablet around and sliding it closer to me. “Drawing up papers is made a bit easier by the fact that I recently ordered the divorce of another couple. I hope it isn’t habit-forming.”
“Indeed,” I say ruefully.
“They’re not coming back, by the bye, are they?”
I flick my eyelids up, peering over at him, unsure of what the proper response should be. Does it matter now if he knows Lord Aaron and Duke Spencer aren’t returning? “No,” I finally say. Just the one word.
“I thought not,” he says, handing me the quill.
But when I reach for it, he doesn’t let go right away, holding the two of us there for a moment. “Be very certain about this, Danica,” he whispers. “If you sign, it’s over. You can still turn arou
nd and walk away. A girl only gets one chance to be Queen.”
I look up at him and see that he’s serious. He would let me go back to my bedchamber, forget this conversation ever happened, and wake up tomorrow continuing my role as the Queen of Sonoman-Versailles.
All the more reason that I shouldn’t. I tug on the stylus and he relinquishes it. “I only ever wanted to be a programmer,” I say softly. “You’re the one who made me a Queen.”
I put the stylus’s tip to the first page and sign my name.
“You there,” the King says to Saber. “Danica’s lover, come witness this.”
“That’s rich,” Saber says.
“The irony is hardly lost on me,” the King grumbles back.
“Do you even need extra signatures?” I ask, handing the stylus to Saber. “You simply ordered the Harrisford divorce.”
“Because Spencer Harrisford was there to back me up. You’ll be gone. An ordered divorce with an absent divorcée simply looks like I’m trying to cover up a death. To be quite frank, I’ve had more than my fill of that, this past year.”
I sign several documents detailing stock ownership and voting rights that simply don’t concern me in the least. I don’t care about anything I’m leaving behind. Only what’s in store.
“Are we done, then?” I ask as I sign the final page of the document.
“Indeed.” The King rises, awkwardly expectant.
“Don’t,” I say, holding up a hand. “Just don’t. Sit back down and we’ll walk out the door. I know where the helipad is.”
The King rolls his eyes, reminding me again of how childish he can be when he doesn’t get his way.
Though I had no intention of spilling this particular secret, his immaturity pricks at me, and I impulsively say, “And I didn’t vote for you.”
“Pardon?”
“At the big vote. My father and I—we didn’t vote for you. Everything you did—your cruelty and machinations. In the end, it was pointless. You didn’t win because of me; you won in spite of me.”
The blood drains from his face in a purely physical reaction he couldn’t possibly have faked. If nothing else, in this I’ve surprised him. No, shocked him.
And it feels amazing.
“Let’s be off,” I say to Saber, shouldering my duffel and tucking my arm in the crook of his elbow. “I’m certain the King has many things to consider before he faces the world again tomorrow.”
Saber, who has always been better at self-control than me, does nothing more than glance back at my now-ex-husband before leading me out the door. As it swings closed, I hear a low chuckle, and I can’t help but smile at the surety that it’s the laugh of a man who can do naught but that, lest he cry.
JUSTIN AIDAN PHILIP KEVIN WYNDHAM, King of Sovereign Versailles, chief executive officer and chairman of the board of Sonoma Inc., president of the Haroldson Historical Society, meditated on the wisdom of murder.
There were any number of ways to lose the company helicopter now speeding its way toward whatever destination his ex-wife had chosen. It didn’t seem entirely prudent to detonate its fuel tanks remotely, though that option would best ensure the deaths of its occupants. A botched landing attributable to manual overrides would be easiest to cover up, but sometimes people survived those. He could just ditch it in the ocean and hope for the best, but the length of that trip would likely alert the passengers to their peril and give them time to formulate an escape plan.
“Sir?”
A raised index finger was all it took to silence Mateus. It wasn’t hard to guess what the man was thinking—that every passing moment brought them closer to losing their quarry. That every second of silence was a new opportunity for escape. Danica was a loose end, no denying it, and Justin wasn’t the kind to leave loose ends.
So why was he reluctant to pull the proverbial trigger?
It wasn’t as though murder made him squeamish. He hadn’t intended for Sierra Jamison to die on that fateful night, but he couldn’t deny it had been thrilling to watch. Would have been more so if he’d known in advance it was going to happen. Killing Angela Grayson had been less thrilling, but deeply cathartic. She’d been satisfyingly distraught when he told her he’d located and destroyed every copy of the video she was using to blackmail him. The heavy dose of papaveris atropa he’d forced on her had been just what the doctor ordered. It was almost a shame Danica would never know the favor he’d bestowed on her that day. Likely she’d be grateful; hatred of Angela Grayson was just one of many things they had in common. But, pity, it was more important for Danica to believe him ignorant of the drug.
In the years since his coronation, Justin had often capitalized on ignorance. People tended to believe what they wanted to believe. If they hoped something was true, they were much more likely to believe you when you told them it was so. Foolishly, blatantly ridiculous things. The high nobility, who hoped their endless plotting was clandestine, believed him when he said their offices were unmonitored. The Frenchman who called himself Reginald, who hoped he could revenge himself on Sonoma for indignities so ancient as to be irrelevant, believed Sonoma would actually have such lax security that its most important new product could be smuggled onto the black market with predictable regularity. Danica herself, who hoped she was smart enough to manipulate the King, believed that getting what she wanted meant she’d succeeded.
Though, on reflection, she had surprised him on more than one occasion. Was that why he hesitated to end her life? Some gentlemanly scruple, that a worthy opponent ought not be done in so underhandedly? Or was it the things she’d done for him that he’d been unable to do for himself? That tryst between Aaron and Spencer—they’d been careful enough that neither M.A.R.I.E. nor his private monitoring network had caught on. Without Danica, the damned activist might still be running his society of vandals and thieves from right here inside the kingdom they despised. And she’d killed the Frenchman too, with so much style Justin was tempted to watch the replay from the video feeds of her stolen bots again, this very instant. She’d turned out to be something of a prodigy in that regard; the program she’d loaded into those bots was amazing work, already being tweaked for inclusion in the next palace security update. For all she’d sought to undermine him, she’d proven invaluable time and again.
Had she actually voted against him? Or had she only said that to make him squirm? The idea that he might have actually won over the court in spite of the Queen’s shares—was that success or failure?
It was hard to muse on murdering someone so delightful. So ruthless, so competent. There simply weren’t enough competent people in the world. That was why the new line of bots would succeed, never mind what soft hearts and soft heads feared. The only humans who would suffer were already deadweight on humanity’s highest aspirations, anyway. The strong would survive.
Well, most of them.
“Mateus, tell me honestly—am I getting sentimental in my old age?”
“I…beg pardon, Your Highness?”
Justin Aidan Philip Kevin Wyndham, King of Sovereign Versailles, chief executive officer and chairman of the board of Sonoma Inc., president of the Haroldson Historical Society, did not want to kill Danica Maeve Grayson Wyndham. What he felt for her might be the closest thing to respect he’d felt for another person since his parents died. What he felt for her might, he thought, have even been something approaching love.
“Blow it up,” he said, decision made. Best be sure—no sense leaving a potential rival alive to interfere later. No sense leaving loose ends. “Then let the detox people know we’re ready to move on to phase two of the papaveris trials. The more indulgent courtiers should begin feeling the effects of withdrawal quite soon.”
“Very good, sir.”
The King of Sonoman-Versailles retrieved two tumblers and a crystal decanter of his finest cognac. Splashing the exquisite liquor into each glass, he sighed.
“To my
Queen,” he said, toasting her one last time.
“Ah…Your Highness?”
Justin glared darkly at his manservant. Mateus usually knew better than to interrupt his King.
“She’s—” Mateus swallowed, clearly nervous. Ridiculous man; if Justin was the kind to kill servants for their incompetence, he’d have no servants left. “She’s locked me out of the controls, sir. Some kind of virus. She’s—”
“Give me that!” Justin snapped, closing the distance between them in three long strides, snatching Mateus’s tablet, glancing over the remote interface to get some idea how Danica had managed to hack the helicopter controls so quickly.
The tablet screen went dark.
The room went dark.
And then, softly at first, but with increasing volume, Justin Wyndham heard singing.
It took him a moment to place the words.
Que veut cette horde d’esclaves,
De traîtres, de rois conjurés?
Pour qui ces ignobles entraves,
Ces fers dès longtemps préparés?
Français! Pour nous, ah! quel outrage!
Quels transports il doit exciter!
C’est nous qu’on ose méditer
De rendre à l’antique esclavage!
It was the national anthem of France, playing through the palace loudspeakers.
All of them.
Danica hadn’t hacked the helicopter. She’d hacked M.A.R.I.E.—who was now blaring a seldom-sung verse, the one about conspiratorial kings and breaking the chains of slavery, to everyone in Sonoman-Versailles, in the middle of the night.
And as Justin Aidan Philip Kevin Wyndham, King of Sovereign Versailles, chief executive officer and chairman of the board of Sonoma Inc., president of the Haroldson Historical Society, stared at the glass of cognac remaining on his counter—the one he’d intended to pour out in memory of his departed ex-wife—Mateus’s tablet came back on, displaying just four words, a calling card in elegant Baroque script.
Let Them Eat Cake!