After what seemed like an eternity, though only forty-five minutes had elapsed according to the austere grandfather clock in the corner of the fitting room, Raphael’s father handed over a credit card to pay a sum so large that it must have been a kidnapping ransom, and his captors spontaneously released them, ejecting them onto the bright, cold sidewalk outside.
The only bright spot of the morning was that while he had been naked in the changing room, Raphael had used the few minutes of comparative privacy to use the phone his mother had handed him. Though he didn’t have Flicka’s head for numbers, Magnus Jensen’s phone number was one of the few he had committed to memory.
Raphael texted, I’ve been compromised. They have taken Flicka and Alina hostage. The Ilyin Bratva is threatening their lives and mine. You are now in control of Rogue Security. Save them. I’m going to burn down the entire operation. I won’t make it out. Do not reply.
Gibraltar
Flicka von Hannover
A comparison and contrast of certain European territories.
The plane departed for Gibraltar at noon, on schedule, with just two Russian guards on board.
Flicka began watching in earnest for an opening to dart away with Alina. Schedule disruptions like this were the best opportunities for slipping away, she had found over the years.
However, when the plane touched down at the Gibraltar International Airport, jostling them all more than strictly necessary, six additional oversized men met them on the tarmac to escort them to the town’s government building, where they could obtain a Special License to be married immediately.
Gibraltar reminded Flicka of Monaco in many ways, especially in that it was exceedingly small and dominated by its harbor and headlands.
Politically, they were different. Gibraltar is a British Overseas Territory ruled by the Crown for the last three hundred years and proud to be British subjects and part of the Empire, while Monaco is, of course, a fully independent principality and its own country, sort of. Monegasques were aware they were descended from Italian nobility and the blood in their veins ran as azure as the Mediterranean.
Gibraltar was located on a splinter of land jutting out from Spain into the Mediterranean Sea. Water surrounds the point except for the small neck connecting it to the Iberian peninsula. Monaco, however, is a small strip of land excised from France by political borders on the Mediterranean coast.
Gibraltar covers a roomy two and a half square miles in area, while Monaco encompasses only about three-quarters of a square mile.
Flicka smiled. She’d asked Pierre once whether they should just carpet the whole country.
And then she flinched, because that was back when she and Pierre had been happy, in their own way.
And then she remembered that he had never really been happy with her at all, except as a royal trophy wife to cover up the fact that he was in the closet about his real marriage to Abigai Caillemotte.
Flicka breathed, holding Alina’s hand as they walked off the runway toward the waiting cars.
Bright winter sunlight warmed the tarmac, though the air was cool.
Alina’s small fingers clutched her hand, comforting her.
Raphael walked beside her and placed his hand on the small of her back, a protective move. She wished she could lean against him somehow, but the Russian guards encircled and rushed them. They’d barely let the customs agent inspect their passports before they’d herded everyone off the plane.
If she and Raphael didn’t get out of this, at least she would have these few happy hours with the two of them, a modest wedding and one honeymoon night in Gibraltar because they had to spend the night in the territory to fulfill the requirements of the special license.
Gibraltar was a beautiful land. It reminded her of the best parts of Monaco.
Both Monaco and Gibraltar have massive, rocky prominences visible from most of the country.
In Monaco, Le Rocher is the monolith overlooking the harbor where the Prince’s Palace and the Art Deco village of Monaco Ville stand. Every square inch of Monaco was utilized as much as possible, and they were building more land by reclaiming the harbor. Houses were built overlooking nearly vertical ravines. One of her favorite crevasses had a church nestled at the nadir of the crack in the Earth.
The Rock of Gibraltar, however, is an enormous limestone promontory surrounded by a nature preserve and home to about three hundred Barbary macaques, the last population of wild macaques in Europe.
The fresh sea breeze cooling her face and soothing her throat and lungs was the same here as in Monaco. Her hair fluttered around her ears, tickling her neck. The crisp air chilled her back, but it was warmer on the Mediterranean coast than in the mountains of Switzerland.
She’d always liked the sea breeze of Monaco with its humid scent of the ocean and sunshine. It was different than the forest damp of Germany where she’d lived at the Schloss Marienburg castle as a young child, redolent of green leaves returning to the rich soil. In Rolle, Switzerland, the profusion of flowers that overflowed from every windowbox and street planter perfumed the air of the town, while Le Rosey school itself smelled like dorms the world over: marijuana smoke and adolescent feet.
The waiting cars drove them to the registry office, where Flicka presented her birth certificate and divorce papers and signed a document certifying that she was free to marry. Raphael presented the same, and Flicka was kind of impressed and shocked that he’d had his divorce papers so readily available.
He told her, “They were in the file with Alina’s birth certificate, which was one of the few things I grabbed from the townhouse in Nevada. When I flew to Las Vegas after picking Alina up from her caregiver Suze Meier, where I’d left her for a week to provide security for Wulf’s wedding in Montreux, I needed proof of the custody arrangement that allows me to travel with Alina without her mother’s permission.”
Because he was, indeed, connected to his ex-wife Gretchen through Alina, legally and forever.
Flicka was still watching for an opening to grab Alina and dart into a crowd, knowing that Spain was only a quick taxi ride away. There, she would be within the Schengen area and thus could get all the way to Hannover, Germany, where her father lived in a house in town. Surely, he would help her. He would probably rant some I-told-you-so’s, and Flicka would tell him that he had been damn right about Pierre Grimaldi, that asshole.
Just please God and the saints and all the other gods she had neglected all her life, please help get the three of them to Germany and her father.
She had absolute faith that Raphael could fight his way out if she weren’t hanging around his neck like an enormous, blond albatross.
Guilt chewed at her.
The Russian guards needn’t have watched Flicka so closely, though.
Sophie elbowed Raphael out of the way and clung to Flicka’s arm, giggling the entire time the cars drove them around the sunny land of Gibraltar. “I’m just so glad I will see my baby get married! It’s just wonderful. It’s just beautiful, and I’m so happy for you. When he disappeared, I thought—oh, I thought terrible things, but now he’s home and getting married! I’m so glad he’s here for this. I’m so glad you’re a member of the family now, Flicka. You’re simply beautiful, and I’m so glad you two found each other.”
Flicka laughed with her and scanned the Russian guards and the traffic pattern around the car, watching for a break where she could grab Alina and run.
A Silver Flask
Raphael Mirabaud
Is there always someone with a flask of whiskey at weddings?
Raphael and his father were standing outside of the church before the service while Flicka and Sophie were dressing in the basement.
Valerian offered Raphael a flask. “For courage?”
The silver flask gleamed dully in the cold afternoon sunshine. The air seemed especially bright around them as the sunlight sparkled on the blue chop of the Mediterranean Sea below the cliff where they were waiting.
Several
years ago, at Raphael’s wedding to Gretchen in Las Vegas, Raphael had taken the flask Wulfram had offered, “For courage,” and taken a long swig of the whiskey inside. The liquor was smoother than he’d expected, almost nourishing in his throat, not burning much at all. It had been so smooth that he had sucked down another deep drought, and then another.
Standing outside that tawdry Las Vegas casino chapel, Raphael had drained the flask.
When he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, the whiskey had already begun to affect him, heaviness draining into his legs like regret.
“Strong stuff,” Raphael had said to Wulfram.
Wulfram had raised one blond eyebrow at him. “That was fifty-year-old Macallan scotch. They only made two hundred bottles of it. That was from bottle number thirty-seven. I hope you tasted it.”
“Sure. Delicious.” He’d turned and stumbled into the casino’s wedding venue, half-drunk, to do the right thing.
Sometimes, the right thing sucks. Sometimes, the right thing is painful and awful. But you do it. Because that’s what adults do.
And Raphael had done it.
This time, standing outside the small, white chapel on a windswept cliff, staring at the silver flask shining in the Gibraltar sunlight, Raphael shook his head. “No, thanks.”
He didn’t need liquid courage this time. Every wisp of his soul was drawn to the chapel and Flicka inside, and he wanted to see every second with clear eyes and remember every moment.
The Wedding: Flicka
Flicka von Hannover
This was how I’d always envisioned my wedding,
with Dieter Schwarz standing with me at the altar.
Flicka and Raphael were married in a small ceremony in a chapel near the sea with the windows open to the cool air. White and pale blue fresh flowers adorned the altar and the antique pews painted with many layers of glossy white enamel.
Between dress fittings that morning, Flicka had called several of the florists who had supplied flowers for hers and Wulfie’s weddings and had them arrange deliveries. A photographer and videographer had also been retained because she sure as heck was going to have evidence of this ceremony, just in case Pierre ever tried to say that it didn’t happen.
Sophie had told Flicka that she had sent an email that morning with the details of the wedding, and Raphael’s sisters, their spouses, and Anaïs Mirabaud were sitting in the pews, looking awake.
Even Bastien, Flicka’s silver fox, was there, sitting next to his daughter and his wife, Lili. She had one eyebrow raised at the affair, but she was smiling.
Flicka missed Wulfie. In any other circumstances, she would have wanted Wulfram, Rae, and her friends to be there, and she wished Wulfie could have walked her down the aisle and given her away, for real this time.
Maybe she would throw a proper party for them someday, but she was getting a little tired of planning weddings.
Flicka’s ivory dress was a slim sheath made of layers of fine lace and tiny pearls over silk. Elie Saab Couture had outdone itself, as usual, outfitting her and Alina. She wore pearl jewelry she had borrowed from Sophie and Raphael’s alpine mountaineering Army badge.
Alina looked like a wee, white-clad fairy in a fluffy, tulle skirt. She walked solemnly down the aisle, carefully dropping white rose petals every few feet onto the dark blue carpet, and then flung herself into Grand-maman Sophie’s arms for the rest of the short ceremony.
The minister welcomed them and said a bunch of something and such other to the assembled, intoning on and on about weddings and marriages and things.
When the minister told Flicka and Raphael to join their hands, she didn’t know what to do with her bouquet of a few white roses, jasmine, and myrtle tied with a pale blue ribbon, and she looked around for somewhere to lay it.
Sophie sent Alina up to the altar, so Flicka handed it to her. The toddler scampered back to her grand-maman holding the flowers in both hands.
Everyone laughed.
Flicka loved that people were laughing. Their joy rang in the small chapel’s white rafters.
The minister was Lutheran, Flicka was glad to see, and he spoke French nicely. It all felt right.
The fact that the wedding was a Lutheran service with a Lutheran minister didn’t matter dynastically for Flicka, though. House of Hannover rules had dictated her whole life, and she knew every word of them. Raphael Mirabaud was a Catholic, as he was from a Swiss-French family. He had been baptized in the Catholic Church, as he had told her late one night when she had been trying to sleep in the Mirabaud mansion. Again, Flicka was marrying a Catholic man, which meant that under House of Hannover rules, their children would be excluded from the line of succession for the non-existent royal throne of the Kingdom of Hannover.
Good. It had never brought her and Wulfie anything but heartache. She wished it would go away.
Besides, she hadn’t received permission to form a dynastic marriage from either Wulfie, the head of the cadet House of Hannover, nor from Queen Elizabeth the Second, her great-great aunt or something, who was the sovereign head of the House of Welf.
Flicka was such a rebel sometimes.
There was still a chance—given that she felt stronger as she held Raphael’s hands, that she felt more like herself than she had for years, ever since she had accepted Pierre’s proposal and her world had closed in—that she might figure out a way to burn it all down.
Fire jumped up in her veins, a purposeful blaze that felt amazing.
Here, in this tiny church on a cliff overlooking the bright blue sea, while Raphael wore a slim, dark blue suit and she wore his alpine mountaineering badge pinned to the shoulder of her wedding dress, she felt like her life had veered back on track, like she had always been meant to be in this tiny chapel in Gibraltar, marrying Dieter Schwarz, and that everything else had been a diversion and a mistake and a lie.
Raphael held her hands in his, his gray eyes reminiscent of calm seas and cool days. He smiled and said, “I, Raphael Valerian Dismas Mirabaud, take you, Friederike Marie Louise Victoria Caroline Amalie Alexandra Augusta, Prinzessin von Hannover und Cumberland, Princess of Great Britain and Ireland, Duchess of Brunswick-Lüneburg, etc.—”
She felt the grin growing on her face. “I can’t believe you remembered all of that.”
“Of course, Durchlauchtig. I know everything about you.”
“I keep thinking your middle name is Leo.”
He drew a breath to continue, and Flicka squeezed his hands, still grinning so hard that she thought her eyes might disappear entirely in the wedding pictures.
But she couldn’t stop smiling.
The Wedding: Raphael
Raphael Mirabaud
Everything.
Raphael drew a deep breath, bringing the cold air all the way down into his body, and repeated after the minister, “—to be my wife, and these things I promise you: I will be faithful to you and honest with you; I will respect, trust, help, and care for you; I will share my life with you—”
Flicka’s emerald green eyes were shining in the sunlight, a little glassy as if from unshed tears, and she was smiling so widely that he wanted to scoop her up in his arms and laugh with her.
“—I will forgive you as we have been forgiven; and I will try with you to better understand ourselves, the world, and God, through the best and worst of what is to come, and as long as we live,” he said.
Every word felt like it overflowed from his heart, a promise like he’d never made before.
She repeated the same words, grinning at him, clutching his hands.
Instead of a tiara, she wore a cluster of white gardenia flowers in her golden hair. They were beautiful.
He watched her gorgeous, green eyes. They remained steadily on him, looking between his eyes, as she smiled broadly, showing many white teeth.
Flicka wasn’t looking for the cameras.
For once in her life, she wasn’t posing for the photo shoot, schooling her expression to be like a serene and beautiful po
rcelain doll, like during that other wedding, the royal event to benefit the charities.
Her smile was over-wide and wrinkling her cheeks, and her eyes were so smushed that they were almost shut. Far from standing straight with her hips turned away from the cameras and her hands clasped in front of her, a regal pose meant to look good in photographs, she was nearly wiggling with excitement as the sunlight sparkled in her hair and glowed on her skin, silken with the colors of cream and roses.
He’d never seen her look so beautiful.
The priest was still talking.
He slid his fingers from her neck up into her hair.
She closed her eyes and leaned her cheek against his hand. Her dark lashes fluttered on her pale cheek, and her skin cooled his palm.
Distant squawking from the minister floated past him.
He tilted her jaw up and kissed her, brushing his lips over hers because he couldn’t resist her, and this moment was for them, for love, and for the rest of their lives.
Her lips moved under his, and she stepped into his arms.
The minister stammered that he pronounced them husband and wife.
With the sunlight blazing all around them, with the woman he loved more than his own life in his arms and pressed against his body, with her mouth under his lips and the moment flowing around them, he desperately wanted to live and to have that life with her.
But saving Flicka and Alina would be enough for him.
At least he was able to marry her. In this terrible universe where evil always triumphs and good men always lose, at least she was his for a few minutes of joy.
With that, he stepped back, held her hand, and led her down the aisle toward the doors that led to the small, stone courtyard that overlooked the sea.
At Midnight Page 16
