by Julie Miller
The crowd had become a living, pulsing entity, pushing forward, nearly encircling them, as if someone was egging them on in pursuit of the prince. All it needed was a spark of panic to flash over into a mob. Carly glanced up at the second-story windows and rooftops. They had no advantage here if things went south. Everyone’s eyes were on Ivan. Who knew how many more people she couldn’t see might be watching them right now? Maybe if she removed the star attraction, the crowd would disband. Carly looked back at Filip. “Where’s the car?”
“Parking garage across from the bookstore. Lower level.” Filip had one hand on Ivan’s shoulder and his other arm extended to keep anyone from coming any closer.
And then she saw a reflection in the display window. A man who didn’t fit with the rest of the fans. He wore a hooded coat, masking most of his face. He wasn’t asking questions, wasn’t taking pictures. And the shadowy maw inside that hood was focused squarely on them.
Chapter Eight
“Why is he wearing a coat?” Carly murmured, feeling the threat rising like the heat on her skin.
Ivan had seen him, too. “That is him.”
“Him who?”
“End Ivan!” someone shouted. The hooded man?
To Carly’s surprise, Ivan lunged toward the threat. She caught his arm and pulled him back. “Are you crazy?”
“That is the same threat the bomber yelled before the explosion in St. Feodor. These people are not safe.”
When she scanned the crowd again, the hooded man was nowhere to be seen. “The best thing you can do for these innocent bystanders is leave. You’re the target. If he loses his target, he’ll move on.” She pushed Ivan back the way they’d come, knocking Filip out of the way. “Cover us. Get these people out of here.”
“What? It is my responsibility to—”
“I’ve got an idea.” Carly grabbed Ivan’s hand and opened the door of the nearest shop, pushing her way through the staff gathered at the windows. She pulled her badge from her pocket and thrust it into the face of a startled clerk. “You got a back door?”
The woman nodded and pointed to the back of the shop as two other people snapped pictures.
“Don’t follow us,” Carly warned. They ran through the store into the storage room, distance dulling the noise of the crowd outside.
“This way.” Ivan spotted the rear exit. Understanding the gist of her plan, he pushed open the door that opened onto a loading dock in the alley behind the store.
Carly slipped in front of him, ensuring the alley was clear before leading him down the ramp and past the trash cans and power poles to the sidewalk that ran perpendicular to the one in front of the store. The blare of honking horns and sound of an approaching siren raised the decibel level again.
“Which way?” Ivan asked, scanning the parked cars and bumper-to-bumper traffic ahead of them.
She pulled him into the street, flashing her badge again to stop approaching vehicles as they jogged across to the center median and onto the opposite side of the street. Carly shrugged out of her jacket and tied the sleeves around her waist to keep her gun masked. “Lose the tie and roll up your sleeves.” Ivan had already fallen into step beside her as he shed his jacket and transformed his look into something more casual, so they blended in with the businesspeople hurrying back to work after lunch meetings and shoppers who hadn’t yet picked up on the mob scene just a couple of blocks away. Carly lengthened her stride to match Ivan’s. They turned the corner and spotted the bookstore. “The parking garage is this way.”
Ivan dipped his head close to her ear, never taking his eyes off the people around them, never breaking stride. “What if there is a bomb back there? Those people could be in danger.”
“Those people are safer now that you’re not there. You’re safer.”
“I do not want to be responsible for any more deaths.”
“If we figure this out, you won’t be.” She caught his arm to stop him as a delivery van pulled out of the driveway in front of them. “Did you notice that the guy in the coat disappeared?”
“I was momentarily blinded by the television camera. I thought I had lost him in the crowd.”
Carly glanced over her shoulder to see if the man was following them. But there were too many people, too many buildings and streets and cars to focus in on just one of them. “It might be a coincidence. A lot of the homeless people wear all their clothes, coats included. It could be nothing.”
“It is not. He was there for a reason.” Ivan sounded certain. “Perhaps you were right, and he set a trap for us. He was using the crowd to move us toward it.”
“Moving toward what, though? And where is he now?” She had her gaze on continuous scan now. “And where are Filip and Danya? Shouldn’t we be running into your security team?”
“Perhaps they stayed back to help with the crowd.” He tilted his head toward the man running down the entrance ramp into the parking garage just half a block ahead of them. “There’s Eduard.” He urged her into a jog. “Come on. When we get to the car, we will be safe. We can compare notes of what we saw back there.”
Carly spotted two bicycle officers maneuvering through the gridlock of vehicles. A black-and-white was coming down the hill from downtown. Good. Backup was arriving. Hopefully, soon enough to keep all those people safe. She could focus solely on Ivan now.
They hit the gated entrance into the parking garage. She saw Eduard Nagy racing down the ramp to the lower level.
The clerk in the booth waved to them. “Hey, you’re that prince on TV.”
“Prince Ivan?” a voice from the sidewalk called to them. “Get his picture.”
“He’s not as handsome as those British princes.”
“I can’t believe I’m this close to a real prince.”
It was starting again. People milling together at the entrance to the garage. They couldn’t get trapped by another mob. “Ivan?” Carly prompted.
“Eduard!” Ivan pointed out their escape and pulled her into a run beside him. “Start the car!”
Because of its length, the limousine was parked off by itself across two spaces against the far wall.
Carly’s nostrils flared to draw in more oxygen as they raced toward the safety of the polished black car. They were thirty yards away. Twenty. Eduard climbed in behind the wheel. The headlights came on as he inserted the key and started the engine.
A bright light flashed beneath the car’s black hood and Carly skidded to a stop. It was too late to retreat.
“Get down!” she yelled, shoving Ivan toward a concrete pillar.
Strong arms snapped around her, pulling her with him as the limo exploded with a deafening roar. A concussive wave of heat swept over them, carrying them several feet through the air before they hit the concrete and rolled to a stop against the wheel of a truck. Every point of her body was bruised or numb from the crashing fall. Knuckles, elbows, knees, heels. Ivan’s full weight on top of her made it hard to breathe. But even as her lungs protested and her vision spun in circles, Carly clamped her hands around his biceps, trying to reverse their positions and drag him behind the shelter of the pillar.
But in the next second, Ivan shifted, bracing his elbows on either side of her and palming her head, tucking her face against his chest and shielding her body with his as flying metal and burning car parts rained down around them.
A heavy chunk of twisted fender clanged down beside them. Carly shoved at his chest, hating the vulnerability of his position. Instead of budging, his hold on her tightened. “Damn it, Ivan. I protect you!”
He jerked once, and she knew he’d been hit.
“Ivan!”
“Shh. Shh.” He brushed his lips against her ear, calming her fears and anger, stilling the fists drumming against his chest, shielding her until the flying pieces of car parts grew smaller and ended with a staccato of tiny fragments of metal a
nd plastic landing on the concrete around them.
The mini crashes of settling debris gave way to people screaming and the crackling whoosh of the fire burning through the remnants of the car. The telltale warning of a car horn followed by the crunch of metal on metal told her there’d been an accident on the street at the top of the ramp. At least one of those drivers had been paying more attention to the crowds and explosion than to traffic. She wasn’t sure what else could go wrong.
And then she knew. “Eduard?”
When Ivan inhaled a deep breath, Carly released the death grip she had on the front of his shirt and rolled him off her. They sat up and Carly pushed to her feet. But orange-and-gold flames swirled through her vision and she stumbled against the pillar. She felt the icy cold concrete warming beneath her hand from the heat of the fire fifteen yards away as she circled around to the other side to see if there was any chance of saving the driver.
But there was no saving the bodyguard, no chance of pulling him from the flames that engulfed the car. Carly’s eyes stung with tears. He’d died in the line of duty. “Poor man.”
What a waste of a good, loyal man. That could have been them. It was supposed to be them.
“He is gone!” Ivan shouted in her ear.
She startled and spun around to see him on his feet, leaning against the pillar behind her. The force of the blast must have impacted Ivan’s hearing. She reached up to cup his jaw, turning his face from one side to the other, checking for pupil dilation and head injuries. She didn’t see anything beyond the charred bits of debris in his hair, which she brushed away.
“The blast must have hurt your ears. You’re shouting.”
“What? I can’t hear you.”
Carly smiled at the unintended humor of that tragic moment so that she wouldn’t burst into tears. She’d like to blame the fumes from burning oil and gasoline on this uncharacteristic urge to cry, but she knew the emotional letdown had more to do with the shock wearing off than it did the sting of chemicals in the air. Shutting off her emotions and relying on her training, she ran her hands over Ivan’s shoulders and down his arms, gently pulling away the shredded material at his elbow to see the oozing skin that had been scraped away in their tumble across the concrete.
But it was hard to check for anything more serious because Ivan’s hands were on her, too, framing her face, feeling up and down her arms. “Are you hurt?”
“I need to call this in.” Was her phone even working? She pulled it from her pocket. Thank goodness. Everything lit up as she swiped her thumb across the screen. She’d lost a shoe in that tumble. She needed to find it and get moving. “And make sure there are no other casualties.”
The man at the gate booth was on his phone already, calling 9-1-1. She gave him a thumbs-up when he asked if they were okay, and he returned to his call, alternately yelling at bystanders to stay back and reporting the situation to the dispatcher. A second man in a maintenance uniform had run up to the blaze with a fire extinguisher, but he was fighting a hopeless battle and had to back away from the heat.
“Carly, are you hurt?” Ivan’s tone had returned to its normal volume. He captured her hand to inspect her scraped knuckles, then caught her chin between his thumb and fingers. “Are you dizzy? Nauseous?”
“I was dizzy at first. It passed. I’m okay.” Her gaze landed on the smear of blood on the pillar and her heart dropped to her stomach. “You’re not.” She moved behind him to inspect the blood-soaked tear in his shirt. There was a one-inch spike of metal protruding from the back of his shoulder. “That shrapnel needs to come out.”
“I’ve been hurt worse.”
That was supposed to reassure her? “Do you have a handkerchief? Something I can stanch the bleeding with?”
He picked up his soiled jacket from the floor and pulled out a handkerchief. He muttered a curse when she pulled the shard from the wound and pressed the cloth against his skin. “You need a doctor.”
“One travels with my entourage. He is at the hotel.”
“Then that’s where we need to go.”
Ivan braced his fist against the pillar and watched the car burn while she fashioned a makeshift bandage with the handkerchief and her belt around his neck and beneath his arm to keep it in place. Although his breathing was measured and deep, there were no more curses as she doctored his injury. His entire focus was on the burning limo, the people on the other side of the flames and the man he’d lost. “Poor Eduard. I do not even know if he has family. Those files. We need to read them.”
“The flash drive!” Carly fumbled with the jacket still tied at her waist. The material was dusty and splotched with a smear of oil from the concrete, but the flash drive was still there. It was intact. “It’s okay. I don’t see any damage.”
Despite the sirens she could hear in the distance, more people were gathering in the sunlight outside the parking garage entrance. “The man from the ticket gate needs our help to keep everyone away from the fire. I need to find Filip. Where is he?”
After spotting a uniformed officer jogging down the ramp to help secure the scene, Carly punched in Joe Hendricks’s number on her phone. Then she pulled Ivan deeper into the garage. She’d already spotted the basement level entrance to one of the shops above them. “I’m sorry, dorogoy, but we can’t wait for Filip. And KCPD doesn’t need our help. We have to go.”
He tugged her to a stop. “What did you call me?”
“Didn’t I use the nickname right?”
“Your Lukin was perfect.” He leaned down and pressed a quick, hard kiss to her mouth. They traded several emotions in that one brief kiss—caring, relief, worry, a sense of urgency, desire that time and circumstances allowed for nothing more to pass between them. “I might like it if you call me that.” Pulling away, he shrugged into his suit jacket to hide his wounds, wincing at the pain. He took her arm and followed her through the empty part of the garage. “Lead the way. Talk to Joe, and then I will call Filip. If I may borrow your phone.”
“You don’t have a phone?”
He reached into his pocket and showed her his. The cover had fractured like a spiderweb and the screen was dark. “Not anymore.”
“I thought maybe you couldn’t. Because you’re a prince.”
“My country is not so backward that we do not have cells.”
“But security? Couldn’t someone call in a threat or track you? I know some countries don’t allow royalty—”
Her call picked up and Joe Hendricks’s voice boomed over the line. “Valentine? I’ve got 9-1-1 calls overloading dispatch at your location. What’s going on?”
“Bomb in the Forty-Seventh Street garage. Somebody blew up Ivan’s limo. Killed the driver.” Ivan tore the remnants of his phone apart and tossed it in a trash can as they hurried past, perhaps taking her tracking concern to heart. “Looks like traffic is bottlenecking. You’ll need a tow truck to clear a fender bender at the Forty-Seventh Street entrance before KCPD can get a truck in here. About the only good thing is the limo was parked away from other vehicles, so I don’t think the fire will spread.”
She pulled her badge from her pocket and looped it around her neck as they entered the store. She paused a moment to ask the staff and customers watching from the door if they’d seen anything or anyone suspicious in the garage. The general response was no help. They’d heard the blast and had come to look after the fact.
Warning everyone to stay back and let the first responders work the scene, she and Ivan headed for the escalator that would take them up to street level. “I have the prince with me,” she reported to Captain Hendricks. “Ivan is okay. We’re separated from his team.”
“Securing Ivan is priority one. Get him someplace safe.”
“Will do.” She eyed the stalled line of traffic outside the front doors and crossed the street to the opposite side where the cars were at least crawling along. A patrol
officer was diverting traffic off onto a side street to help get a fire engine through the intersection. Ivan stayed right at her side. He flipped up his collar and kept his head down to avoid recognition, but she was aware that his eyes were studying every face they passed as thoroughly as she did. She wasn’t sure where she was leading him, other than as far away from the Plaza as they could get. Did she take him into the nearby residential neighborhood, where there was no hope of finding transportation? Head for Saint Luke’s Hospital that was only a few blocks to the north? He wouldn’t want the kind of attention that came with a wounded celebrity walking through their doors would bring. Maybe, they could at least catch a bus to get them out of the congested area. But why exactly was it so congested? This wasn’t rush hour. And yes, there were tourist attractions and stores and offices in this historic area, but the chaos had gotten crazy fast, before that bomb had gone off. “Sir? We had a mob scene about five blocks from here. Did Milevski call in for backup down at the Plaza?”
“Backup is on its way.”
“I mean about eighty minutes ago, before the explosion.”
She heard the suspicion creeping into the captain’s tone. “I’ll have to check with his department contact. SWAT Team Two just left the building and are en route. But there was no tactical team dispatched before that. I’ll see what patrol officers were sent in.”
“Check social media, too. That crowd got big and rowdy awfully fast. Without enough security on the scene, we had no choice but to hit some back alleys and make a run for Ivan’s limo. We’re lucky more people weren’t hurt.”
“You think this was a setup?”
“That bomb was no accident.” They reached the next intersection where another officer was directing traffic and hurried on across. As more police reached the area, pedestrians were being funneled away from the parking garage to the same side of the street they were on, packing the sidewalk with the crowds she’d been trying to avoid. “We had no other place to escape to besides the limo.”
