Jagor grabbed me and pulled me away from the edge, his strong arms wrapping around me. Neither of us could say anything for a few seconds.
“Did they hurt you?” he asked.
“You got here in time,” I told him, and saw his jaw tighten. “Are you hurt?” I asked. I wanted to run my hands over his chest, check that the blood wasn’t his, but my hands were still tied.
“I’m okay,” he said simply, and searched the soldiers until he found a knife. He cut the plastic tie they’d bound me with and we hugged again.
“What are we going to do?” I asked. We both looked at the palace: at the mass of soldiers around it. The younger soldier was still out cold, but the bald giant was starting to groan.
“Run,” he told me, and led me by the hand.
He had a motorbike parked in the trees just off the road. We mounted up, me behind him. He pressed buttons a little uncertainly. “I stole it,” he told me. “It was easier on the way here: the engine was already running.”
I looked over my shoulder, expecting soldiers to come running at any second. Jagor finally managed to get the thing started and gunned the throttle a few times.
“Do you know how to ride it?” I asked.
“I rode one once in Abu Dhabi. A prince showed me how.”
Before I could protest, we were off, a sudden burst of speed that almost tipped me off the back. I clung to his waist as we sped diagonally across the main road, horns blaring as we cut across traffic. We lurched one way, then the other, and then we were picking up speed, heading back into the heart of the city.
I’d never ridden pillion before – I’m the librarian, remember – but I was pretty sure it wasn’t meant to feel like that. It was as if Jagor was riding an untamed horse: he’d pull it one way, then overcompensate and go the other. When we were going straight, he sat rigid-armed, trying not to upset the bike’s delicate balance.
At first, I closed my eyes and pressed my face against his back, but that just made me feel sick as well as terrified. I settled for watching over his shoulder and trying to warn him of obstacles.
“Car!” I screeched in his ear. The wind was plastering my hair back into my face: I could barely see.
“I know,” he said tightly, and turned, almost smacking into a tree.
Looking back on it, we can’t have ridden for more than five minutes. It felt like hours.
We eventually pulled up in a neighborhood I hadn’t seen before: shabby apartment blocks, some of them derelict, most of them vacant – at least officially. There was graffiti and litter, and the occasional glow of a fire that signaled squatters. I was stunned: I hadn’t thought such places existed in Asteria.
“As good a place as any,” he told me. “Come on.”
We found a block that seemed to be completely empty – a gray concrete monstrosity with mostly broken windows. In the orange light from the streetlamps outside, we found a deserted apartment on the first floor: it had one room with the windows still intact. And there, sitting in the corner on the bare floorboards, we could finally rest.
Just stopping after all that running felt strange. My limbs turned to lead: I felt like I’d never move again. The quiet of the apartment, after hours of sirens and bellowing crowds, was other-worldly. It sank in that we were safe: for the moment. And then I just turned and hugged him and didn’t let go for almost an hour.
***
Later, when I’d cried and he’d wiped my tears away, we told our stories.
He listened, the fear in his eyes growing, as I related how the crash team had pulled me from the opera house and why I’d fled. “I invited them,” he muttered. “They were loyal to the coup leaders the whole time, and I invited them right into the palace.”
I told him how I’d cut the collar off. “You did the right thing,” he told me. There was pain in his eyes: he found it just as much of a wrench as I had. When I pulled out the broken collar to show him, his eyes widened in amazement and delight, and he hugged me. “You kept it,” he said, “my God, Lucy; you kept it.”
When I told him how a man had nearly claimed me, he pulled me into his arms and stroked my hair. “That won’t happen again,” he told me. “We’ll both get out of here – together.”
He’d woken after I had, buried under the other bodies. Apart from a cut above his eye and a few bruises, he was unhurt. “I stumbled out in the smoke,” he told me. “I asked someone in the street: they said the crash team had taken you. I didn’t see them – they must have given up looking for me, or thought I was dead.” When he’d seen the army in the streets and realized a coup was in progress, he’d stolen the bike and ridden to the palace, hoping I’d go there.
“But what’s happening?” I asked. “Why the coup?”
Jagor ran a hand through his hair. “The bike had a radio: they must have taken the radio and TV stations, because they’re broadcasting their lies.” He hesitated. “They’re saying we’re criminals, Lucy. They’re offering a reward for information on us. And they’re threatening that if people shelter us, they’ll be killed.”
“The public won’t side with them, though - will they?”
“I don’t know. They’re telling the people - especially the poor - what they want to hear.”
“Which is?”
“What the poor always want to hear. That they’ll do better under the new regime; that the palladium mines will be sold off and the money redistributed.”
There was a long silence.
“I need you to explain to me—” I said quietly.
He sighed. “It’s complicated, Lucy.”
“Why are there slums like this – slums you never told me about – when Asteria has more money than it knows what to do with. You have a 747—”
“I know,” he said sharply, but I couldn’t stop myself.
“We fly around the world; we spend weeks in Paris and Monaco and there are people living like this – here, in Asteria?”
“I KNOW!” and his shout was deafening in the bare, echoing room. His fists were clenched as he tried again. “I know,” he said. He put his head back against the wall, staring at the ceiling, and tried to explain.
“They only found the palladium in ’85. The first mine didn’t get going until ’86. Before that, we were poor. Really poor: most people lived off the land. We’ve gone from that to being one of the richest nations in the world in less than thirty years. We suddenly have a mineral economy, but it doesn’t employ that many people: machines do all the work these days. We have money, but not enough jobs. We spent millions modernizing the farms so they could compete with other countries, but that only put more people out of work. That whole section of the population that used to work the land – it’s going to wind up behind a desk. That’s the way rich economies go. Only here it’s happened in fast-forward. We’ve built schools and hospitals and highways and airports, but farmers can’t retrain as construction workers overnight. So however hard we try, some of them – a lot of them – are out of work.”
“But the money from the palladium.... You could afford to pay them all enough to live on – more than enough!”
He closed his eyes. “When the country got rich, under my father, he kept spending the same way he always had – just more. We didn’t have a welfare service in those days and the farmers were almost self-sufficient. But we’d been used to spending on the military – we had to protect ourselves, since we didn’t have any defense treaties.”
“And the bigwigs in the military got rich.”
He stared at me, his eyes big and sorrowful. “That’s why I was working with my father on a defense agreement with the French. Once we were secure, we were going to cut the military right back so we could afford to lift people out of the slums.”
Suddenly I understood. “That’s why the military staged the coup: you were going to take all their money and power.”
Jagor looked like he was going to be sick. “And that’s why they poisoned my father: they’d heard he was going to sign the trea
ty - that he was on my side. I’d convinced him, Lucy: it’s my fault! And that’s why they tried to kill us at the opera house. Wipe out or imprison our family, and there’s no-one but them to rule.” He sighed. “I knew they were angry but I never thought they’d do something like this. I was stupid.”
“You weren’t stupid. From what Sarik said, the white-haired man arrived and got them riled up. So who’s he?”
Jagor shook his head. “I have no idea. Sarik was the only one who had a hope of putting all this together and I don’t know where he is. He wasn’t in the lobby when the bomb went off, but....” I tried to imagine what he must be going through. His best friend and his only link to the truth, gone.
He suddenly slammed his fist on the floor, making me jump. “It would have worked, Lucy. Another five years and we could have helped the poor. Now the military chiefs will score one last big pay-off when they sell the mines, then flee the country with the money. Foreign corporations will move in and run the mines without giving any of it to the people.” He looked at me. “I know my country’s not perfect, I know it’s unfair, but it’s changing fast. Thirty years ago, we had children dying of diseases you’d wiped out in America. Now we have some of the best healthcare in the world. We could have solved the problems – this could have been....” He sighed. “This could have been paradise.”
I was beginning to see what a good ruler he’d make. Good-hearted, like his father, but with this mother’s cunning. All he needed was someone to fill that void in him left by his brother.
“The rioters,” I asked, “whose side are they on?”
“Ours – the royals’. The ones who are siding with the coup are staying quiet.”
I thought about that. I’d seen a lot of rioters as I’d crept through the city. Jagor and his family still had a lot of support: but what could flag-wavers do against an army?
“What are we going to do?” I didn’t mean to say it out loud, but it was there before I could stop it.
“I have no idea.” He looked down at me – open and completely honest, nothing hidden in those deep green eyes. “It’s gone, Lucy: the life I meant to give you. I’m a prince without a throne.”
“I love you just the same,” I said, and kissed him. The kiss stretched out, becoming about more than just affection. It became about knowing that he was okay, that we were okay. He started to roll over on top of me, then stopped and pulled me the other way, so that I was on top. “The floor’s hard,” he said.
I pulled back from the kiss, as if shocked, and straddled him. “Your Highness!” I exclaimed, my hand to my chest. “What are you suggesting?” I hadn’t called him Your Highness in a long time. I knew I didn’t need to, as the Exkella. But right then, it felt good.
Despite everything, he smiled that sly, wolfish smile and ran his hands up my thighs, skimming under the torn-off evening gown. I gasped as his warm palms smoothed over my chill body. Then the dress was up and off over my head and I was leaning forward, kissing him again, in just my underwear now. My hands started working down the front of his shirt, pushing the open edges out so I could kiss his bare chest.
His hands were cupping my shoulders; moving down to my back. I felt my bra come loose and shrugged it off. We were speeding up: by the time I reached the bottom of his shirt and ripped the sides apart, he was lightly stroking my breasts, his palms on my nipples. I leant right down and nuzzled his chest, marveling at the broad curve of his pecs, taking one of his nipples into the hotness of my mouth and lashing my tongue over it until he arched his back and groaned.
We were frantic now, both of us working to undo his belt and pull his pants and shorts down, his cock springing erect between our bodies. He fished something out of his pocket.
“Condoms? You brought condoms to the opera?”
“I had plans: if it got too boring.”
He didn’t even wait to strip my panties off: just pushed them aside and guided me down onto him.
God, that moment as he plunged into me, as the heat inside me finally started to melt outwards and thaw my chill body. I was mud-stained and freezing, exhausted and strung-out and suddenly none of it mattered because I had him, the one thing that mattered. For once, I wasn’t a slave, or an exkella, or a princess, or even his submissive. I was just his love and his lover, and he was mine.
My hands went to his shoulders, caressing the heavy muscle there as I started to lift myself on him, rising and falling, setting up a rhythm. I could feel it in both of us: the same intense need, whipping us into a frenzy. His hands were all over me, as if he wanted to re-learn every curve of my breasts, every line of my spine. There was a burning slash of pain as he moved over one part of my back, but I was so lost in the feel of him that I barely noticed. The need for him was like an ache inside me, demanding that I twist my hips, grind myself against him, every hot millimeter of contact like a drug that made me crave more.
I kissed him again as he drove up into me, my gasps mingling with his, the hard length of him inside me like iron wrapped in silk. He was pumping up into me as hard as I was pressing down, strong fingers hard on the cheeks of my ass as he pulled me to him. My whole world shrank down to the point where we joined, to the pleasure that was arcing out from it. He sat up, his mouth finding my breasts, and as he grunted and pushed deep inside me, I came and came and came.
***
We woke with the dawn – there were no curtains. We’d pulled our clothes back on during the night, sleeping with me half on top of him; my head on his chest, my raincoat spread over us. When I tried to get up, my body laughed at the idea and dumped me on my ass.
“Oww....´ I started trying to rub life into my stiff, aching limbs.
“Good morning,” Jagor said. He managed a smile, but I could hear the tension in his voice. That brought everything that was going on slamming back into my head and I groaned.
“Did you sleep?” I asked. However bad I felt, he must feel worse: I’d used him as a mattress.
“For a while. I was watching you sleep. You looked so peaceful.” There was something different, now, when he spoke to me. No more secrets, I realized. We’d finally reached the point where I knew him completely, where he could be utterly open with me, and it was just as our world was falling apart. He tried to get up and gasped. I looked on in sympathy. Every muscle felt like icy concrete.
When we’d both finally managed to sit, I cuddled into him, his chest to my back. I didn’t have to say it. We were both thinking the same thing: what are we going to do? But I knew he wasn’t going to like my answer.
“We could run for the border,” I said gently. He didn’t respond. “That’s what...people do.”
“People?”
I could feel his body going tense with anger. “Rulers – when there’s been a coup,” I said. I turned to look at him. “Jagor, I know it’s difficult, but—”
“So I’d go to...where? New York? London? Beg the government for asylum and live out my life in some townhouse writing angry polemics about our new masters?”
Would that be so bad? I wondered. No danger. Jagor must have money in some Swiss bank account somewhere. I knew from the UN that there were any number of former rulers living in exile. “I’m not saying it’s right,” I said tightly. “But it would work, and we’d be together, and....”
And I don’t want to think about the alternative. But he lapsed into silence and I knew what was going through his head.
“We can’t stay here. Jagor, we have no money.” I looked around at the bare apartment. “We have nothing. They’ll find us, and when they do they’ll kill us – or jail you for the rest of your life.” I pushed away from him so I could study his expression properly. His jaw was set: that wasn’t good.
“I’m not leaving my parents,” he said simply. He glared at me, daring me to challenge him. I knew he meant it: he’d rush headlong into some pointless bid to save them, one man against a literal army. Unless I stopped him.
I bit my lip. The last thing he needed was more guilt
piled on him. But it was the only way to save him.
“What about me? What sort of treatment do you think I’ll get, when we’re captured?” Immediately his expression changed, the doubts starting. Hating myself for it, I pushed. “I’m the personal slave of the Prince: what do you think they’ll do to me?”
He dropped his eyes, his face haunted by the nightmares I’d just injected. I’d have to live with that, now. Eventually he said, “I could get you to the border. See you safely across.”
“I’m not leaving without you.” I was suddenly blinking back big, hot tears. “You know that.”
He put his head in his hands. “I can’t leave.”
I gently put an arm around him. “I know. But you have to.”
I figured I should leave it there: give him some space. I put my back against the wall and stretched my legs. Something burned on my back and I turned, trying to feel for it.
“What?” he asked, watching me. “Let me see.”
I shrugged the remains of the evening gown off my shoulders and crouched in front of him. I heard him draw his breath in. “What?” He didn’t speak for a second. “What?”
“You’re cut – something must have hit you when the bomb went off – glass, maybe. It’s not deep, but it’s open. It needs cleaning and dressing.”
That wasn’t good. This whole block was derelict: I doubted there’d still be running water. I went through to the bathroom and tried a tap. Nothing.
We sat and stared at each other. “Even if we do go for the border,” he started, and my heart lifted, “We can’t do it yet. They’ll be watching the roads. We have to wait for at least a few days – we’ll need food, and water.”
“We can’t go to a hotel. We’re both pretty recognizable.” I looked at his torn dinner jacket. “Especially you, like that.” I looked out of the window – it was still early enough that the streets were empty. “If we’re going to go, we should do it now.”
***
We braved the bike again. Jagor’s driving wasn’t any better in daylight: and now I could see the asphalt rushing past. I clung onto Jagor with both hands, my head wedged against his back to stop the wind whipping my wig off. We rode towards the center of the city, looking for anything that might help us. When I saw a big chain supermarket, I thumped him on the shoulder.
Asteria - In Love with the Prince Page 25
