Crowned: Gowns & Crowns, Book 4

by Jennifer Chance

  “But that makes no sense.” The queen put her hands to her head. “Ari and Edeena were not going to get married. They had no intentions of being anything more than friends. Nothing was going to change that.”

  “I know,” Fran said gently. “But a year ago, in the first brush of realizing that the two of them weren’t following the script he’d so carefully worked out for them, Silas wasn’t so sure they wouldn’t come around. He thought perhaps he could—push them together a bit. Make Ari see how valuable Edeena could be to him.”

  Ari scowled at her. “What are you talking about?”

  Stefan’s face was now lit with understanding, and Cyril’s was too, but Dimitri merely looked ready to kill someone. “What did he do?” the captain asked gruffly. “Specifically?”

  “I don’t know what, specifically,” Fran said. “But he—he did something to Ari’s plane that night.” She swiveled to look at him, and though she longed to reach for his hand, she didn’t. She needed him to recall this moment the way it really happened, taking in the information and judging it on its own merits, not clouded by her leftover panic.

  “I don’t think it was anything truly treacherous, like spiking his gas tank or whatever,” she continued. “Not something that could seriously threaten Ari’s life on take-off. He simply did…something, I think to one of the gauges or monitors, to cause them not to function correctly.”

  “But why?” someone asked, but she couldn’t turn away from Ari. Ari, who stared at her with deep and growing understanding, everything falling into place.

  “He thought that if Ari dumped into the water close to home, maybe was injured, needed to convalesce—well, Edeena would be there. She’s a trained nurse, and the two of them were good friends. If he cast her in a caretaking role…”

  “Oh, my god, she’s going to kill Silas when she finds out,” Kristos interrupted, his voice stricken. “And if she doesn’t, I will.”

  “He was there,” Ari said slowly. “That night, Francesca is right. He was at the airstrip. I thought it was odd, I remember now, because he hadn’t been at the state dinner. Edeena had, but she’d left early with a headache or something, and he’d not shown up at all.”

  “He was waiting for you there?”

  Ari shrugged. “I don’t know. I’d told him about wanting to test new equipment earlier in the week, that I was still making installations, but I didn’t think I’d fly that night. There was the storm, and I figured it was late—night even. I could fly another day. But then I got to the strip to check things out and Silas was there.”

  “What did he say to you?” the king’s words were sharp, but Fran knew Ari’s answer before he gave it.

  “I honestly don’t remember,” he said, wincing as he rubbed his head. “He was excited about the new instruments I’d installed. I—I must have told him about them. He encouraged me to try them out, said the storm was moving east, not west.” He grimaced. “Idiot that I am, I didn’t question what he said. I listened to the parts I wanted to hear—I wanted to get away from him, and the damn fool wouldn’t leave. I got in the plane.”

  “That’s why you felt the leftover threat when you thought about that night,” Fran said. “He was a threat to your family—to you certainly. But maybe to others too.”

  Lauren spoke up then, focusing her attention on Cyril. “If Kristos and Ari are no longer in the picture, who inherits? This Silas?”

  “No,” King Jasen said firmly. “But the succession plan is not public for that very reason, to protect the potential benefactors from untimely deaths.” He pursed his lips. “If Silas was trying to kill my sons to inherit...”

  “I don’t think he was,” Fran said quickly, lifting both hands. “He simply…he just wanted things to go his way.”

  Ari stared at Francesca in disbelief. The man had shot at her—had shouted at her, according to the interrogation they’d completed on his men. The men said he’d been speaking in English, and they weren’t as competent of speakers, but Ari didn’t know if he believed them. Silas’s insults had only been words, however, Cyril and Stefan had said. And words that were not central to the matter at hand.

  But whatever they were, they seemed to have left Francesca unfazed. She looked around with such a gracious serenity, her hair tidied and her dress straightened, that no one would never know she’d been abducted except by her missing earrings. They’d found the second one in the burlap bag, along with a cloth soaked in chloroform.

  Rage knifed through him again. “He went a little too far to ensure things went his way. That gun was loaded. You could have been killed.” he growled, then shifted his gaze to Cyril. “What’s the recourse here?”

  “We need to gather more information,” Cyril began, ever hesitant, and Ari’s temper frayed further.

  “What additional information is needed? The man abducted Francesca, moved her without her consent, locked her in a storage room and threatened her with a loaded weapon. And for what? He couldn’t think he was going to endear his daughter to me with that.” He wheeled on Francesca. “What is it he wanted from you?”

  Her gaze held his steadily. “He wanted me to go away, Ari. That’s all.”

  “Go away where?”

  “Away from you,” she gave him a small smile that made his heart twist. “Silas isn’t alone in his prejudices. He saw Kristos falling in love with American, and here was—well, he thought that here the same thing was happening all over again with you. You were fraternizing with an American woman instead of ideally one of his daughters, but failing that, then one of the daughters of Garronia, someone who understood the class system here, the rank of nobility.” She shrugged. “He’s not wrong. I’m not familiar with the hierarchy of Garronia’s nobility. And if he was a true nationalist…”

  “He’s no nationalist,” Ari fairly spat the words. “He dared to insult you like that?”

  “Ari,” Francesca shook her head, fixing him with a gaze that almost bordered on chiding. “They were only words.”

  “No, they weren’t only words, there was a gun as well,” Ari said, and when Francesca moved to speak again, his father interrupted her.

  “Ari is quite right,” King Jasen said, to his surprise. His words were chillingly cool. “Silas threatened you with bodily harm regardless of what the rest of his commentary contained. He took you against your will, held you against your will, threatened you and I am sure insulted you to your core, as well as frightened you.” He frowned. “We’ll have to manage this appropriately, but he can’t remain at large.”

  “His poor daughters, though.” Queen Catherine was watching the king too, but Ari knew that whatever he decided, she would support. She’d support anything Jasen thought was for the best interests of Garronia.

  Clearly Francesca was also more concerned with Garronia than her own welfare, but Ari wasn’t. Not right now, anyway, perhaps not ever. His country was his life, yes, but Francesca was becoming his every waking breath.

  “Silas’s daughters shouldn’t carry the burden of their father’s inadequacies,” Jasen said. “And to some extent Silas’s actions will come out. The country is not so large that one of its noblemen being rebuffed by the royal family will go completely unnoticed. Especially as a relation to the queen.”

  “They’d planned on leaving anyway,” Ari said. Exhaustion suddenly caught up to him, and he sagged in his chair, passing a hand over his brow. When he refocused on the table, he realized everyone was staring at him.

  “Leaving when?” his mother asked. “Soon?”

  “Reasonably soon.” He rocked back in his chair, summoning the details. “Edeena said they’d be going to America as soon as Marguerite has her twenty-fifth birthday in a few months. The lot of them come into an inheritance then. She said their mother had property that Silas was selling off, but the American estate wasn’t moving. So they could spend a few months there, getting away from him.”

  “Marta was always too good to him,” Catherine snapped. “Her property had been in the fam
ily for generations. I cannot imagine Silas got good prices for it.” She focused on Jasen. “What can we do to help ease their way? I don’t want them here when Silas’s infamy comes out.”

  “If we’re careful, it won’t come out,” his father said, and the queen pursed her lips in a flat line. Ari had seen that look before. Apparently Jasen had too.

  “We’ll come up with something,” he said gently. “In the meantime, what else do we need to know?” He shifted his gaze to Francesca. “Was anyone else aware of his attack on you?”

  “I don’t think so,” Francesca said. Her voice remained calm, almost serene, despite what she’d endured. All Ari could imagine was holding her in his arms, yet she seemed so far away from him.

  “He seemed pretty certain about the course of action he wanted me to take,” she continued. “And I truly didn’t get the impression was waving his gun around for much more than bravado. He didn’t shoot me, after all.”

  “Well he shot at you,” Nicki observed dourly. “That’s bad enough.”

  “And he could have hit you.” To Ari’s surprise, it was Stefan who spoke. “It’s been many years since Silas has shot anything more than a paper target. In his hands a gun could be deadly, regardless of his intentions.” He swiveled and looked at the king, then at Ari. “It’s possible that his concerns are not his alone. If there is popular unrest about the family’s romantic entanglements, we’ll need to get out ahead of it. It will be easily managed, but shouldn’t be ignored.”

  “Then we manage it,” Ari said, leaning forward. Francesca leaned forward too.

  “It’s not entanglements plural,” she said quietly. “Please let me be clear on that. I’m not going to drag the royal family into any more turmoil.”

  Ari started, turning to her in surprise. “Francesca—”

  “No, Ari,” she said, and there were tears now standing in her eyes. “You—all of you. You have to know who and what I am before you say anything else. I’ve put off owning this for far too long, and I see now that’s been the wrong decision.”

  She visibly swallowed and for the first time since he’d met her he realized…

  Francesca’s hands were shaking.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Fran felt sick to her stomach, but strangely serene as well. As if she’d been waiting her entire life to endure this firing squad, and now that the rifles were pointed at her, she could finally breathe easier.

  Except in this case, the rifles were the faces of nearly a dozen people who knew her better than anybody on the planet.

  Which was exactly the point. They didn’t know her at all.

  She focused on Stefan. “When Emmaline first attracted Kristos’s notice, you ran identity checks on all of us, pulling up information that was readily available, maybe going a level or two deeper, to make sure we were no immediate threat to the royal family. In my case, you found what I wanted you to find.”

  Stefan’s brows shot up, but Fran lifted a quick hand. “I have no doubt that you would have pierced my identity quickly enough, though that one has served me the longest. The others would have fallen in quick succession.”

  She forced herself to look at Lauren, then Nicki, then Emmaline. There was no outrage or shock in their faces, at least not yet. There was merely confusion. “I was born not Francesca, though it’s always been a beautiful name to me,” she said quietly. “But my birth certificate says Frannie. Frannie Lambert. I was the child of Gus and Maribeth Lambert and I lived about five miles from a bar on the outskirts of Piketon, Ohio. The bar was my father’s, and it’s not there anymore, but Bert’s Bar and Grill was known by about every biker in Ohio and any of the clubs rolling through as well.”

  As she talked, Fran could hear her voice change cadence, slipping back into the same rhythm that’d spiked when Silas had challenged her. She knew that voice, and while she didn’t welcome it, it added a measure of comfort that she couldn’t pull from anywhere else. “Mom and dad split when I was three, and she remarried and lived in the next town over. I stayed with Dad so she could…I don’t know. Focus on her own life or whatever. I spent the next several years of my life on the countertop at Bert’s, or playing in the dirt yard behind the bar. It wasn’t a bad place. The men were rough but they respected Dad and they considered me no more interesting than a puppy. I was simply the newest feature in the bar.”

  As she talked she could picture it. The faded newspaper clippings and snapshots tacked behind the bar, the dollar bills with markered-in notes on how or why they’d been donated to the “wall of shame.” The men—and it had been almost all men, with their long, thinning hair and bulging forearms, most of them bearded or trying to be. The women were few and far between, which was okay because her dad usually employed women as servers and back up bartenders, and any time a girl came around his staff members complained they got lower tips.

  Her dad had run the place, cooked the cheeseburgers and hot dogs and pulled the beer. He didn’t serve wine and he didn’t serve hard liquor. You went to Bert’s for beer and a burger or you didn’t go at all. He always told Fran that going simple cut down on his expenses, but honestly she didn’t know if he could cook anything more complicated than cheeseburgers and hot dogs. She hadn’t minded though.

  “When I got to be about seven years old, someone reported me as not being in school, so I split my time between school and the bar after that. Dad could never take me and it was another few miles up the road, so I got good at running negotiations. I’d get a biker to take me home if it was late and dark, or to take me on to school after dad opened up the bar. He opened early, six a.m., and there was usually someone sleeping it off in the back shed. Sometimes I guessed wrong about who I could trust, but never so wrong that I got hurt. And as I got older, I found the same kind of kids on the playground. Most of them with more money than I had, but that wasn’t saying much.” She shrugged. “Mom eventually wanted custody, though her husband creeped me out. Dad fought it and threatened to take her to court, though that was a bluff. He didn’t have any money. Worked, though, and that’s what mattered.”

  The next part was the important part, and Fran blinked, trying to keep her voice steady through it all. “We had our share of troublemakers, and one of them, one night, left to go…home. When he was done with what he did there, he took his truck out of the garage to head back to Bert’s. Never made it. My dad had left early that night, I don’t know why. He was broadsided by that same man before the guy ran off a bridge.” Fran shook her head. “Never saw it coming, they told me. I sure didn’t see it coming either.”

  She sighed. “I was only fifteen though. I wasn’t going to live with my mom and her sick-o husband, and I wasn’t going into foster care. I looked old for my age and, well, I knew some things. Some people.” She glanced over to Ari but she couldn’t fix on his face, the pageant of her own memories crowding him out. “I learned new things too. How to make fake IDs, create disappearing trails. How to turn the internet into its own identity factory. I learned how to find out who’d died and who’d simply disappeared, who’d lived and run and lost themselves. I used that information for myself, but…” she swallowed. “For other people too, sometimes. People who needed help.”

  The tears were falling now but she couldn’t care about her mascara anymore. She’d never told so much at once to anyone. She’d never told all of it, ever. But Ari had to understand, finally. They all did. “One life led to the next, and to the next. I eventually faked an older ID so I could get my GED without anyone asking questions, then re-fashioned it with a different age to take the standardized tests and enroll in college. The scholarships came unexpectedly, and that’s how I managed such a nice school that no way could I afford.” She flattened her hands on the table, looking straight out at nothing. “Once I managed that, it was a matter of building the new life around me. The blended family in Michigan, the dog. The hot dog parties.”

  Nicki’s soft voice cut in. “You made up the hot dog parties? We would have had hot dogs
more often if I’d known that.”

  The interruption was so unexpected that Fran blinked, and finally her eyesight seemed to clear. It was no longer her father standing at the end of the bar, her mother’s sneering face with her husband leaning too close, the countless parade of weathered, slow-eyed bikers in front of her. It was Nicki and Lauren and Emmaline, sweet Emmaline, whose face was tracked with tears. It was the king and queen sitting so close together their shoulders touched, their hands firmly clasped as if no storm could ever part them. It was Cyril gazing without any expression at all, Stefan with his eyes on Nicki, and Dimitri grinning at her like she’d given him a favorite birthday present. And beside her, still beside her, there was Ari, staring at her as if she was still his whole world.

  “Are you finished yet?” he rumbled and she coughed a startled laugh that came out more like a sob, her voice choking when she could speak again.

  “I’m not finished,” she said. “Everything about me is a lie. My passport, my high school transcripts, my college application. Grad school wasn’t because this ID finally took, this one could finally help me. But I broke laws, I—” Fran stopped, waving a hand at him. “Stop looking at me like that!”

  Ari shook his head at her, but he still didn’t stop gazing at her with his heart in his eyes, which meant he still didn’t get it. But then he started talking and it was even worse.

  “You haven’t said anything to me this night that is a problem, Francesca. Why would you think it is?”

  “Because I’ve broken the law—American law, probably international law. I’m pretty sure I bent a few of Garronia’s laws as well, and I’ve only been here a few days!”

  Beside Ari, Dimitri snorted. “I want to see some of those IDs you’ve fashioned. We could use that skill.”

  “Dimitri,” the queen’s voice was a warning, but it was still too warm, too loving, and Fran felt the hysteria rise up again within her.