The Fighter and the Baroness: A Modern-Day Fairy Tale

by Sunniva Dee

  Helena doesn’t have a sister. This better be a damn cousin. “What’s the baroness’ name?”

  “Baroness Maria Isabella Helena Ludenlowe von Isenlohe,” the girl chirps proudly. “The whole village wonders if she will go through with it this time. A few months ago, they tried, but then she ran off.” She giggles excitedly.

  I storm out of the tavern. Get in my car and race up the hill to gates that are adorned with pink flowers. The weather is damn beautiful, no fucking skies, no other thunderclouds than those in my head.

  Some guard mumbles in German first until he realizes I only speak English. “It is late, sir. They’re already in the church. Do you have your invitation?” he adds apologetically.

  “I do not,” I grit out.

  “You’re one of the American friends, ja?”

  The servant waves me through, thinking I’m upset with him. He says to go to the Madonna Forest. “Shortcut to the church from the left side of the pond,” he says as I step on the gas and speed past him.

  Helena. Just. No.

  HELENA

  My head is a beehive while I stride forward in the tiny church of my ancestors. Our relatives sit on one side each, Gunther Wilhelm’s mother already dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief that’s whiter than my dress.

  My father lets go of my hand, the doubt dark in his eyes. He wants to meet my gaze with the same warning he has offered ever since he learned of my plans. It’s not worth it, Mein Schatz. We’ll find another way.

  I meet the stare of the priest instead. The man I fled from months ago stands beside me, eyes soft and mind high with triumph.

  The investigation is still undercover. We can’t go public with what we have until we know if the results from a specialty lab in Switzerland back us up. The test analyses were pushed back due to a terror attack in a foreign country, so here I am, chaining myself to Gunther and my agreement.

  I’ll find a solution.

  If the test results are solid, we can run a case against him—

  This isn’t so bad.

  My father insisted on a worst-case-scenario prenup. Maybe I can divorce him—

  It’s not so bad.

  Gunther Wilhelm the Fourth will employ lawyers if I insist on a divorce. Expensive ones, high-profile ones, aggressive ones used to winning. I picture the battle and the insecure outcome with Papa as my only lawyer.

  He can’t take Kyria.

  No, I won’t let him. Much can change anyway before my parents are gone and I’m supposed to take over.

  I have no plan besides finding my way back to Tampa. I need to study. I need—I want—

  Gunther Wilhelm the Fourth stares. Maybe he’s being romantic. This should be our moment, I know. He will treat me well. But soft hands drape around my fingers while the priest speaks, and they’re too pale and nothing like the hands I want to cradle mine.

  Strong, copper-bronzed fingers should envelop them, promising love and physical strength and protection in ways this man never can. Instead of his blues, cognac-brown irises should gleam with humor and tenderness when they look at me. I’ve been there. I’ve lived that reality.

  Two days ago my love called me nonstop, and I couldn’t muster the willpower to turn the phone off. His fight is over. Did he win? I don’t even know.

  I keep making my own bed. Or Kyria’s making my bed. My father, my untrustworthy, sneaky fiancé. I—

  I—

  There’s a ring gleaming so brightly in the sunshine from the window above the crucifix. After this, after this, will be the last time I call Victor. I’ll be ripping out my heart when I do, and I pray to God I won’t rip his out too.

  I want to run off again.

  As if my husband-to-be knows, he squeezes my hand in his weak one, and then I realize I’ll probably never be free again. I’m stuck.

  I’ll go through with this. My respite will be in the children I have with a man I can barely tolerate. Oh I hope I feel better in a few years.

  My gaze flickers to Elfriede who’s in the first row next to my parents. Her expression brims with a worry that mirrors my own.

  As Gunther Wilhelm the Fourth holds the ring up for me, that one lethal question hanging in the air, the door is flung open so fast it hits the wall. Solid oak slams against granite, the sound causing the guests to jump and turn, and in the doorway stands a silhouette, someone tall and regal, and even without seeing his face, I know he’s mad.

  “What the fuck is going on here?” he roars into the room. It’s surreal, unheard of, so unacceptable it will be spoken of for decades. My heart hammers against my chest, my bodice becoming too tight. I pant—

  Victor’s voice, gravelly with emotion, is thrown back from the church walls. “Helena! What are you doing?”

  A few men stand. No one makes a move to step out from the pews. My love stalks up the aisle, and he doesn’t even look at Gunther Wilhelm when he jerks me away from him. He swings and pulls me with him toward the door. I have this déjà vu, this beautiful déjà vu, from a club in Florida.

  “Baby, I need to stay,” I whisper. He doesn’t want to hear me.

  “Let go of my wife!” my fiancé yells, his pitch more nasal than ever.

  “Did you marry the prick already?” Victor asks, sparing me a glance as we half-run toward freedom. “We’re getting it annulled.”

  “No, but…”

  “Good. Makes shit easier,” he growls.

  Gunther Wilhelm the Fourth catches up with us, grabs me by the other arm, and begins to tug. “She’s mine,” he whines.

  “Oh hell no,” Victor says, voice menacing. The groom of this make-believe wedding still shakes my arm like I’m a ragdoll. “I’ll give you three seconds. If you’re not off my girl by then, I’m putting you to sleep.”

  “Someone help!” Gunther Wilhelm tips his head up, but his eyes are wide with a mixture of fear and petulance. “We have a wedding ceremony to complete and a dinner to attend. I’m going to dance with my wife tonight, under the stars on the terrace of my castle.”

  “Fuck you and your stars,” Victor mutters and stalks on with me.

  I see it just in time. My fiancé grabs a silver candleholder and lunges it toward Victor’s head. I move on instinct, put myself between them. The pain shoots up my arm as the metal connects with the palm of my hand.

  From then, everything happens quickly. In two sobby groans, Gunther Wilhelm the Fourth folds to the floor with a hand twisted onto his back and Victor’s knee pressed into his shoulder.

  “Can’t breathe. Can’t breathe,” he whimpers. I don’t know why he says it when it’s obvious that he can. Victor lets go, straightening and entwining my fingers with his again. There’s a growl he’s trying to hold back in his throat.

  Gunther Wilhelm grabs the trail of my gown. He isn’t even in an upright position yet. “Isabella Maria Helena,” he puffs. “Don’t do this to us.”

  “Okay, that’s it. I’ve had enough BS.” A muscle in Victor’s jaw ticks with barely contained anger before he gives in, responding to his own statement and punching my husband-to-be smack in the nose. The way the blood splatters looks completely wrong in a church. And the way Gunther Wilhelm the Fourth snivels is completely embarrassing.

  The room dissolves in chaos behind us as we cross the threshold and escape into the fresh air of the forest.

  “Don’t leave!” Mama squeals in there. “Helena, come back!”

  “Mama, I won’t—I’ll be back.” My pitch cracks with the adrenaline rush I’m experiencing. I need to fix the situation. Rectify it, because it changes nothing that Victor barged in and interrupted the wedding. I have to go through with it.

  VICTOR

  I’ve got my fingers in her hair. She’s pressed up against the back of a Madonna statue, because it is where I stopped her. Helena kept running, losing her shoes on the way down the hill, and I grabbed them one by one, listening to her breath making erratic choices while she ran.

  The statue is tall, blue, and wide enough to support
us while I find her mouth. She groans, trying to give me her cheek, but I ask, “Don’t you want me to kiss you?”

  She relaxes and returns to me.

  “Victor, I need to do this for Kyria.”

  “Will you be happy with him?”

  Her breathing doesn’t slow down. If possible she sounds even more upset. I envelop her in my arms, rocking her tight to me and savoring her mouth. “God, I have missed you so much.”

  “Me too…”

  “Then why didn’t you pick up the phone when I called?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? I had to get married!”

  “No one has to get married.”

  She tells me a story then, of betrayal from someone she once trusted. Of W.G. the Fifteenth being a manipulative jerk.

  “How the hell were you going to reward him for that?” I ask. “There have to be other ways to help Kyria. No one has to jeopardize their freedom for a property, and to a goddamn criminal at that. We don’t live in the middle ages.”

  She takes my kisses, sucking on my tongue. Ever since she left Tampa, she’s been missing in my world. This is it.

  “I can’t see another way, baby,” she whispers. “I’ll have to go through with it.” I hate it when her cheeks streak with tears.

  “Have you slept with him?” I blurt out.

  Helena’s reply comes equally fast. “No.”

  “Thank God.”

  “Tonight I’ll have to though, once the wedding has been executed.”

  “No, you won’t partake in any more weddings today.”

  “Victor, you don’t understand.”

  “Then enlighten me!” I press myself against her, needing her badly, needing that jerk to never ever touch her.

  “My father and I have to acquire firm evidence of what Gunther Wilhelm has done. We’ll get nowhere in court with Peter’s testimony only. It would be word against word, and I just can’t take any chances until it’s all confirmed. I have to go through with it.”

  Helplessness causes rage, and now I seethe. “It’s not what you want, Helena. You can’t mess with your happiness for a handful of money.”

  “It’s not just a handful,” she starts, tears pouring freely now. I can’t hear the rest of what she says, because suddenly I hear myself talking and my mind whirls back to Thailand.

  I’m talking about happiness.

  About money. About goals.

  About… bliss.

  The crown princess. The dragon fighter. “It would make the crown princess and me very happy if we could facilitate bliss for you.”

  “I love you,” I sigh, cupping her cheeks with my hands, forcing her to meet my stare.

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “No?”

  “I love you too,” she sobs, “but it’s not how the universe works. We’re not going to end up together. For Kyria, I have to follow the path I’m destined for.”

  “Do you trust him?” I sink to my knee and slide her feet into her shoes. They look like they’re made of glass.

  “Not at all. Why?”

  “Do you trust me?”

  “Of course I do…”

  “Then come with me.”

  HELENA

  “It’s a wrap!” Papa shouts from his office. He clops down the grand stairway and doesn’t slow down until he’s in the kitchen with Elfriede and me.

  “A wrap?” I’m licking pancake batter off a wooden spoon. Elfriede shakes her own spoon at me, the cookie-maker spoon, unimpressed with my sudden unladylike behavior.

  “Gunther Wilhelm has confessed, and he’s ready to settle out of court!”

  I suck in air so hard I almost choke. “You’re joking, right? He wasn’t going to give up.”

  “I’m one hundred percent serious. My guess is that the crown princess of Thailand hiring the top five lawyers in Germany had something to do with it.”

  “Poor Gunther Wilhelm the Fourth,” I mock-pout. “It must have been difficult for him to be in a bidding war he could never win.”

  My father smiles. “When his team saw our evidence, it didn’t take long for them to lay their cards down. And I think it was a stroke of genius to bring Peter in to the last negotiation.”

  “Yeah, he was such a brave boy.” A rush of gratitude runs through me over Peter, over his hardworking, loyal parents who’ve done everything in their power for us since the truth came out.

  “I need to find Victor.” I get to the grand foyer before I realize that I don’t have all that I need. I swing back and pop my head into the kitchen again. Elfriede is pouring coffee for my father and offering up the first batch of finished cookies. Our kitchen smells like Kyria. Our kitchen smells like home. I sidle past him and over to the burners. Then I grab the plate of freshly made pancakes and pour maple syrup and grape jelly over them.

  “Papa, does this mean that all the damage, all the lingering projects…?” I can’t quite finish the sentence. I don’t know what the settlement entails. Is it a lot? Is it enough money?

  “It means that Gunther Wilhelm the Fourth has to take on the financial responsibility for every single piece of damage he’s been connected to. We can restore every part he has touched of Kyria. It means that money is not an issue.”

  “What about the rest of Kyria Castle?”

  The swan pond needs new ceramic tiles at the bottom. They’re tiny, square, cobalt-blue, and from the eighteenth century, probably impossible to match. The crucifix in the church has dry rot. It’s eating at Jesus’ waist and part of his behind. Which reminds me, the stained glass window—

  “There will be a settlement after the costs of the restoration as well, but the rest, baby girl, will be on us. We’ll find a way. Let’s look at the bright side, okay? We wouldn’t be able to manage more than five big projects in a twelve-month period anyway.

  “For now, just think about this: the Star Tower will be brought back to its former beauty.” My father’s eyes glow with delight.

  “True, we have breathing room now. This is good,” I say.

  “Helena.” Papa stands, stare serious again. His hands land on my shoulders as he fixes my eyes.

  “Yeah.”

  “No one has their whole life figured out.”

  “But Kyria needs—”

  “You have to learn how to deal with it. Things will fall apart here, and we won’t always have a monetary cushion to help us. It’s why I work as a lawyer at the same time as I manage the estate. We can’t live off of Kyria as it is.

  “I’m not saying that we’ve exploited all that Kyria has to offer. Much can be done. Much. But that is in the future, once we’re above these hardships.”

  “We can build a gift shop in the east corner of the Madonna Forest,” I find myself saying. “We can open a castle café. The Purple Ballroom can be turned into an exhibit of our jewelry and tiaras. We can take out all the goods we’ve got stuffed into the coffin safe in your office—oh, and we can display some of the gorgeous old gowns we can’t use because they’re too brittle and will crumble—and women’s shoes from the time of great-great grandma Adalheida Dagomar’s days.” I feel my heart speed up with the possibilities.

  “Those are all good ideas. It is the ladies who are drawn to castles,” Papa agrees. “So much can be done, but all in good time and one step at a time.”

  I need to add Marketing to my Business Management degree, because all these concepts suddenly surge in my head.

  “And we can have a yearly fight club!” I exclaim.

  That’s how I stun my father silent. I’m thinking of the plateau at the far end of the rose garden, how it’s open to the elements, to the sky and the moon. A Muay Thai ring could be raised there so easily!

  With the dragon fighter in Thailand, and the Alliance Cage Warriors in America, wouldn’t Kyria Castle have the right contacts to host the most badass, spooky, romantic, and coolest MMA tournament in the world?

  Outside, the sun hangs noon-high, bathing the swan pond in a peaceful glow. I balance my plate of pancakes i
n one hand. Two broad pavers at a time I leap through the portico to the Sun Tower on the east side of the property. To get there, I pass the pathway to the Madonna Forest. The aroma from the pancakes makes my stomach growl, but they’re not for me.

  Inside the Sun Tower, I start on the stairs to the basement. The tower itself has a modest diameter of fifteen meters, but below the ground, it widens into what could be a four-room apartment. We’re still not sure which of our ancestors built these subterranean chambers and for what purpose. Maybe someone was hiding a mistress?

  Weights clang against the floor downstairs. There’s puffing and groaning. Victor spends more time at Kyria then he does in Tampa lately, courtesy of his overdeveloped need to protect me. Of all his quirks, it’s the sexiest one.

  Kyria Castle has been hermetically sealed to anyone we don’t want on the property since Victor kidnapped me from my wedding, but he says he’s not taking any chances on Gunther Wilhelm the Fourth getting one-on-one time with me. I have no complaints.

  “Hey, baby,” I say, setting my eyes on copper-toned skin and a jaw ticking with effort. Victor presses the dumbbells high again, but then he lets them go. God, he’s stunning like this, every muscle strung tight and shining with exertion.

  “Oh looky, it’s my fiancée,” he murmurs. Nostrils flaring, his gaze goes to my pancakes.

  “Nope, it’s not,” I say.

  “No? When’re you going to say ‘yes?’”

  “When the word ‘fiancée’ stops giving me the heebie-jeebies, maybe?”

  “Aww, babe, but it’s me.” He tries for puppy-eyes, but it really doesn’t suit him. He hauls me in with one long arm and flips me over his shoulder.

  “Stop it!” I squeak, which never helps my case. “Careful with the pancakes.”

  Instead of putting me down, he play-spanks my butt. “Here’s for stringing me along day after day after freaking day. It’s time you get some corporal punishment.”

  “But pancakes,” I stutter-laugh. “I made them for you.” He relieves me of the plate without letting go of me.

  “I can’t have pancakes, remember?”

  “You don’t have a fight in weeks. You can, you can. You promised.”