It was Kir Sokolov’s turn to swear, and Dree laughed and laughed at him.
Finally, Kir said, “Francis Senft was not so smart. Try his usual username and password.”
The drug-dealing kidnapper had a point, so Dree typed in Francis’s usual username and the three passwords he normally used, all of which were based on his parents’ pets and his own birthday.
The computer blinked incorrect password warnings at her and threatened to lock her out. “Nope. None of them worked.”
Kir started swearing in earnest and in Russian now, his voice rising as he first combed his fingers through his sparse hair and then grasped it in both of his fists. His eyes widened as he snarled his obscenities.
He looked as frightened as he did angry, and that worried Dree.
Chapter Four
Sunlight
Maxence
Maxence didn’t recognize the attacker lying unconscious on the floor as he jumped over him.
Even though it was late January and the sun was barely above the eastern horizon, the Mediterranean sunlight warmed the ship’s metal deck. The metal and rivets were warm under the soles of Maxence’s feet as he sprinted toward the side of the vessel.
It was a container ship, as Max had feared. When he jumped over the side, it was going to be a long way down, like jumping off a bridge.
More shouts rang out behind him.
A gunshot cracked the air.
Maxence dodged around the side of the wheelhouse, an enormous building on the massive ship that must have been eight stories or taller, not including the mainmast that stuck out of the top and held the radar array.
The railing was too high at this part of the ship to leap over. If Maxence had taken the time to climb it, he would’ve been stationary long enough for his kidnappers to shoot him.
He kept running.
Far ahead of him, down at the other corner of the wheelhouse building that must’ve been the distance of half a city block away, more people ran around the deck shouting to each other and waving guns.
With that avenue of escape cut off, Maxence had no choice but to try to scale the railing and jump.
He leaped and caught the top of the wall with his hands, stupidly glad that Casimir had insisted they play all those games of basketball where Max learned to dunk. The rusting metal was sharp and sliced into his palms and the pads of his fingers, but he grabbed harder and hoisted himself up.
Hands grabbed his legs.
Maxence kicked, trying to dislodge the attackers, but more hands clawed his bare skin and dragged him down.
His arms slipped off the rusty railing, then his fingers.
He landed in a heap on the deck, relieved neither of his legs had snapped, and covered his head to protect himself from their impending attack.
One hard blow slammed into Max’s side, crashing into his ribs, but a man’s voice started shouting in the Monegasque language for the others to stop.
No other kicks landed on him.
Maxence parted his arms and looked up.
Michael Rossi, the human bulldog who had assassinated Max’s cousin Nico, stood spread-armed like he was holding the others back. The sun shone on Rossi’s bald white scalp, making it look like a skull. “Stop!”
One of the other guys demanded what the hell Rossi thought he was doing.
“He is a prince of Monaco,” Rossi said. “It is a sin to spill royal blood.”
That argument hadn’t been used for several centuries and certainly hadn’t held up during the French Revolution, but Max was willing to go with it. He wasn’t going to push his luck by agreeing, though.
Some of the other guys laughed, but a few of them looked confused enough that no one else moved forward.
Maxence took his arms away from his head and tried to put a stern but regal expression on his face. He just hoped he didn’t end up looking constipated. He settled for the blandly serene look that Flicka cultivated for times when the paparazzi might be lurking even though it wasn’t an official photo opportunity.
Rossi turned and offered Maxence a hand up.
Max accepted his assistance without allowing his utter shock to register on his face. “Thank you.”
Rossi said, “You landed a respectable punch back at your holding cell. Lopez is still staggering around like he went five rounds with Mike Tyson.”
Maxence nodded. “I did what I had to. I hope he’s okay.”
Rossi clapped his hand on Maxence’s shoulder. “He’ll be fine. You just rang his bell a bit.”
Quentin Sault rushed up and pushed his way through the crowd to stand before Maxence. “What’s he doing out of the storage room?”
Rossi laughed. “He knocked Lopez out with one punch when Lopez was bringing him a sandwich and a bottle of water.”
Quentin Sault said, “Shoot him.”
Rossi’s jaw dropped. “Just because the prisoner got a jump on Lopez doesn’t mean we should shoot him. He’s a crew member!”
Sault glared at Rossi. “I didn’t mean Lopez. I meant Grimaldi. Shoot Maxence Grimaldi in the head and throw his body over the side.”
Chapter Five
Narcotics Smell like Acid and Poisonous Plants
Dree
The warehouse smelled like narcotic drugs.
As a nurse who worked in a hospital’s emergency room, Dree Clark had been around a lot of narcotics in her life. Considering that most pharmaceutical tablets were coated with a colored layer to differentiate one drug and dosage from another, you think they wouldn’t have much smell at all, but they did. There was a bitterness to narcotics, a smell of acid and salt, and a hint of an orange poisonous plant warning you not to eat it.
Despite the boxes stacked on shelves to the ceiling marked with innocuous logos and words like candles and souvenir keychains, the warehouse reeked of it.
Dree didn’t mention that, of course. There was no way she was going to tell the drug dealers she knew she was standing in the middle of tons of their stash.
She’d kept her hands on the laptop’s keyboard, just in case those jerks were distracted enough that she could send an email to somebody or notify the cops or something through the computer. But even though Kir continued to indulge in his tantrum about her not knowing Francis’s passwords and the driver was just standing around looking bored with his hands in his pockets, one or the other of them was always looking at what she was doing.
So she watched them out of the corner of her eye and tried to figure out who on Earth she would even contact with a computer anyway.
Maybe she should email her sister to say good-bye.
That way, Mandi could call their parents so at least they’d know something had happened to Dree, plus Mandi would know not to wait for Dree to get her any more money for her son Victor’s expensive autism therapies.
Victor’s sweet face, terrified by the world around him that he couldn’t comprehend, rose in Dree’s thoughts.
Dammit.
Plus, Maxence was out there somewhere, and he’d obviously known he was being kidnapped. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have shoved his phone in her hand with it already calling someone so she could tell them what had happened. Something had caused Max to have that sudden change of heart. One minute, he’d been insisting Dree go with them so she would be safe, and a few seconds later, something had made him shove her into the crowd, shouting at her to run.
He was in danger, too.
And she needed to find him. When Maxence’s motorcycle had broken down in Nepal, she’d promised she would always come find him.
So, she had to get away.
It was that simple. She just had to.
Dree waited, standing motionless for a few more minutes, while Kir Sokolov and his driver got into an argument in some harsh language she assumed was Russian.
Their shouting intensified. Their hand gestures widened.
Their voices bounced around the bare steel support beams and aluminum siding.
It was getting pretty chilly in th
e warehouse with the wind blowing in the open garage door back by the van.
Open.
Garage.
Door.
Dree tugged her white and silver cape more closely around herself, thinking hard.
A lot of joke websites had popped up during the last political election in the States, and Dree wracked her brain, trying to remember their website addresses until she finally came up with one.
She clicked the URL bar, typed in the address, and then said, “That’s weird,” just as the screen flashed red and black and a siren started blaring. She exclaimed, “Oh, my gosh! What’s it doing?”
Kir Sokolov jumped toward the computer and shoved her out of the way. “What did you do to it?”
“Nothing! The bank website must have been hacked. I was just sitting there trying some different passwords that Francis used, and all of a sudden, it wigged out!”
“You went to a porn website!” Kir Sokolov accused her.
Dree gasped, laying her hand at the base of her neck like she was clutching her pearls. “I did not! Just because you got a computer virus when you were watching porn doesn’t mean that’s the only way to get one!”
The computer screen stopped flashing and turned to a truly obscene animated graphic of a man wearing a plaid shirt and sporting a chode the size of a fireplace log, abusing a cartoon pig.
The computer blared, “Hey everybody! I’m watching porn!”
Sokolov began stabbing the keyboard frantically with his fingers. “No, no, no. Not this computer!”
These two buffoons had allowed a prisoner access to a vital computer? Oh, they deserved everything they were going to get.
Kir Sokolov and the driver kept shoving each other out of the way, trying to rescue the computer, and were thoroughly occupied with their technical problem.
Dree began backing away.
The computer screen changed to a different animated graphic of another man grabbing his butthole and yanking it until it appeared to be a foot wide. The computer yelled again for everybody to notice it was showing porn.
The two men flinched and then redoubled their efforts to regain control of the computer.
Dree made it past the van to the garage door, and she slipped around the side and into the night.
The winter night was colder than the warehouse had been inside. She began running through the parking lot toward the dark street. The frigid wind sliced through her thin ball gown.
Gravel slid under her high-heeled shoes, which she hadn’t known were worth thousands of dollars but Kir Sokolov had been pretty sure of it. Still, slipping and sliding, she made it to the road, which seemed to be in a semi-industrial part of the French town.
The bright lights of traffic flickered in the dark street at an intersection just a hundred yards away.
Dree ran.
If she could reach that intersection, there should be more people around, and she could probably find a store or a hotel to duck into and lose her kidnappers. Maybe she could figure out how to use Max’s cell phone that she’d shoved into her bra, but it was probably locked, and she didn’t know his PIN and couldn’t figure out any other way to unlock it off the top of her head. Or maybe she could find a store clerk to call the police for her, if she could communicate with him somehow. Dree didn’t speak French.
Tall skinny trees lined the road, a dark wall on the side. If somebody was following her, she’d veer off the road and go overland.
She couldn’t hear any cars behind her, but her breath was rasping in her ears and her heart was trying to beat its way out of her chest as she pumped her legs and sprinted on the asphalt road. Dree was not a runner.
At the intersection, the fenced-in lots on the corners were dark, closed for the night. The block building with a sign that bore a car and a wrench was probably an auto mechanic.
All the way down the street, the empty road sliced between darkened businesses. The plants, leafless for the winter, swayed in the cold wind. If she’d been in New Mexico, a tumbleweed would’ve rolled across the road at that point.
Dree kept walking through the commercial area of town. Streetlights poured yellow light at the street like spilling mustard.
Her shoes’ straps dug into her feet, and her arches were beginning to cramp.
A block down the road, and a stoplight blinked on a cross street. Dree jaywalked against the red light to get to the other side of the street because if the police came out of nowhere and arrested her, that would be just fine.
But none did.
As she peered down the street, cars crossed the road a few blocks farther away.
Dree got to walking. She ignored the pain in her feet and in her shoulders where those goons had wrenched her joints when she’d been tied up. She needed to get to that street, and it was just a matter of time until she got to that street.
Graffiti scrawled on the buildings, and Dree wished she could read French. Dead grass spiked up between the panels of sidewalk and poked her ankles.
Dree finally got to the intersection with the more heavily traveled street, but there were just a few taillights off in the distance in one direction, and one set of white-blazing headlights coming from the other.
As the headlights neared, Dree jumped up and down, screaming “Hey!” and waving her dress’s jacket like a white flag.
The sedan slowed and pulled over next to her, obviously having seen her distress.
She was saved. She was saved!
Dree pounded on the car’s window as the glass slid down. “Oh, thank you! Do you speak English? I need the police. Policía? No, that’s Spanish. I don’t speak French. No parlor Frenchy. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Ustedes hablan español?”
The back doors of the car flapped open.
Inside the car’s front seat, a matronly looking woman with mahogany- and oak-colored hair smiled at her. “Dree Clark, imagine finding you here.”
Dree backpedaled, but two thugs had already emerged from the back seat. She only ran a few steps backward before they grabbed her. They forced her into the back seat.
Matryona Sokolov swiveled in her seat, shaking her finger and tutting at Dree. “You should not try to get away. You don’t want to make me angry. Next time, I would send someone much worse than my brother Kir to find you.”
Chapter Six
The Pirate King
Maxence
The crowd surged and pulled back around Maxence, roiling like the choppy ocean around the ship. The sea breeze fanned the stench of unwashed men and garbage toward Maxence, fouling the air and chilling his bare back.
Maxence kept his hands up, ready to fight.
Cold lines impressed his palms and the pads of his fingers. Blood trickled down his wrists.
Men prowled through the crowd, moving around him and walking behind each other. To his left, the morning sun was near the horizon, and its white blast glared on the sea and made it hard to keep track of who was moving where.
Shouts rang out for both sides of the fight about whether to kill Max or not, and he couldn’t tally whether the superstitious royalists or the bloodthirsty kidnappers were ahead in the polls.
Michael Rossi seemed to be staying out of it, for the most part, standing back with Maxence and watching, but he leaned forward on his toes, alert.
Irritated anger surrounded Max’s steadily beating heart. Damn these men for kidnapping him. Damn them for murdering so many people at the Sea Change Gala, including Nico.
Nico.
And damn Quentin Sault most of all, that traitor.
Quentin Sault’s colorless eyes narrowed at Max. “Rossi, shoot him.”
Michael Rossi didn’t move, his eyes spreading the folds around his eyes. “This is not part of the plan. We were to eliminate the usurpers who would launch a coup, not kill an heir to the throne.”
Sault screamed at Rossi, his mouth a cavern that blew foul winds. “Shoot him!”
Michael Rossi took a step backward.
One guy, a tall, lanky man wi
th a faded tattoo of a skull and cross bones like a pirate flag across his chest and shoulders said, “We didn’t sign on to kill anybody in cold blood, especially a king.”
Which was the fault line Max had been looking for.
He straightened and flipped one hand in the air dismissively. “Yes, do it.”
The crowd quieted, staring at him and Quentin Sault.
Sault’s lips peeled back from his teeth, and he fumbled for the handgun holstered on his hip.
Max told him, “Go ahead, Quentin. Do it and get it over with. We’ve both known you were going to kill me someday. I always wondered if you’d wait until Pierre gave the order, or whether you would kill me in my sleep when I was on a mission in Africa where you could arrange for no one to be able to find my body.”
Horror hushed the crowd.
Quentin drew his pistol and pressed the cold barrel against Max’s forehead between his eyes.
Maxence stared down the steel decline of the gun and Sault’s arm at the shorter man. “Do it.”
The tattooed guy shoved Quentin, knocking the gun away from Maxence’s forehead.
It clattered to the deck, and Michael Rossi kicked it farther away. Another man picked it up, admiring its high polish.
The tattooed guy said, “You never said this was to murder a king, Dead Eyes.”
Maxence had never heard of a more apt nickname for Quentin Sault. “So, Dead Eyes, what was the plan? Just a little casual kidnapping for ransom? Interesting that you picked a ship to hold me prisoner on, isn’t it?”
Quentin spat at Maxence, “It doesn’t matter where I stash you or whether you live or die today, or whether anybody ransoms you. All that matters is you’re not at the Crown Council meeting for the election tonight. The money doesn’t matter.”
Rossi looked confused.
The men surrounding Max and Quentin leaned back and looked at each other, scowling.
Royal: A Royal Billionaire Novel (Billionaires in Disguise: Maxence Book 6) Page 2
