HAPPILY EVER AFTER
Runaway Billionaires: Flicka
Book 5
By: Blair Babylon
HAPPILY EVER AFTER
Runaway Billionaires: Flicka
Book 5
By: Blair Babylon
Dieter Schwarz had a gun pointing at his forehead.
To escape and save the lives of herself and two-year-old Alina Mirabaud, Flicka von Hannover walked into the arms of her ex-husband, who wants only her title and her genes in his family tree. She is whisked away to Monaco and held prisoner while her ex plots how many children she will produce for him and his throne.
Dieter must be dead. No one could fight their way out of a warehouse, past dozens of heavily armed Russian mafia criminals.
Well, almost no one.
Will Flicka and Dieter ever live . . . HAPPILY EVER AFTER?
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Published by Malachite Publishing LLC
Copyright 2018 by Malachite Publishing LLC
Table of Contents
Happily Ever After
Special Offers -- Happily Ever After
Happily Ever After -- Table of Contents
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A Fairy Tale, Told By The Stepmother
Negotiation
Choose
1297
Walkabout
Funeral
At Midnight
Escape
Rae and Wulf at the Hospital
Strategy
More Strategy
Elimination of Possibilities
Covert Operation #1
At Midnight
Covert Operation #2
Betrayal
A Spy Arrested
Organization Time
Different, This Time
The Prince’s Winter Ball
Covert Operation #3
Escape
Getting Out
Checkpoint
Refugees
Country French
Like Divorce
When Your Daughter Is Running
Geneva
Dive Hotel in Geneva
The Last Leg
Schloss Marienburg
A Public Statement
Catching Up
Catching Up #2
Burn It All Down
Murders and Suicides
Geneva Trust and the Mirabauds
Flight
Schloss Southwestern
One Year, Five Royal Weddings
Prince Dieter
A Christmas Wedding
Into The Devilhouse
Rogue Security’s Best Assets
Mr. And Mrs. Schwarz
Cliffhanger
A Note From Blair Babylon
~~~~~
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A Fairy Tale, Told By The Stepmother
Flicka von Hannover
Flicka von Hannover sits on the beach, watching the azure ripples of the Mediterranean Sea and digging in the white sand with her toes. She presses a wide-brimmed hat to her head, but the wind whips the white ribbons behind her and flaps the straw brim. The sun overhead shines warmly, and it’s a bright, crisp day. December is the last month of Monaco’s rainy season, but there are always plenty of sunny days to bask on the beach. The brisk breeze blowing in brings the fresh scent of the pure salt water, and it cools your cheeks.
Men in dark suits stand a discreet distance away, but they are blocking any route that you could take to leave. One of them has taken off his suit jacket. Holsters hang under his armpits, and another is strapped to his belt.
Flicka says, “In the fairy tales, I was always the princess.”
She stops as if reflecting on this statement. “Of course, I was. I am the princess. I’m a literal princess. I grew up in a castle. I’ve worn tiaras. People call me ‘Your Serene Highness.’ I am literally a fairy-tale princess.
“But now, I’m the stepmother.”
A few feet away, a small child studiously digs in the sand, shoveling it into a red bucket. She’s wearing long pants and a sweater, but her tiny feet are bare. Damp sand crusts her pink-painted toenails. Her baby-blond hair whips around her head, and she pulls the strands out of her mouth with one hand so as not to interrupt her methodical shoveling.
Flicka muses, “In the fairy tales, the stepmother is always the evil one, the one who drives the princess into the woods or makes her sleep in the fireplace cinders.
“But when you think about it, the father isn’t around. He’s either dead or swanning around somewhere at a war or a conquest. Maybe he’s on progress like Queen Elizabeth the First, wandering his kingdom and making proclamations. But the child’s father is not there.
“But she’s there. The stepmother is there.”
Flicka watches the child, Alina, and sadness fills her bright green eyes. “Maybe she doesn’t know how to be a mother. Maybe she’s never had a baby of her own. Maybe she was a motherless child, too, and her older brother stepped in to raise her because she clung to him so violently and wouldn’t let go, because she knew he was the only person left in the world who loved her even a little bit. Maybe she was just thrown in with this child who desperately needs somebody, but she doesn’t know the first thing about how to do it.
“Maybe the evil stepmother was trying to show the little princess that some people have to sleep on the hearth where it’s warm because they can’t afford the electricity bill.
“Maybe she sent the kid out into the meadow to gather raspberries because she had taught her how to get food, and they needed the raspberries to eat.”
Flicka bites her lip and then says, “Maybe she knew something bad was going to happen. Maybe she had seen the foreign prince coming with his army, and she knew what happened to little princesses who were captured by the enemy. Maybe she knew that in the wild forest, the little girl at least had a chance of survival.”
Flicka drags her long fingers through the sand and watches the sun-warmed grains fall into the furrows. The wind blowing from the sea tugs her sweater and yours. She’s wearing a simple gold band on her left hand. It’s not a wedding ring fit for a princess. It’s one a soldier would have given her.
“While we were in Geneva, if I would’ve had half a chance, I would have sent Alina anywhere else. The Ilyins probably wouldn’t have taken her to the warehouse that night, if she hadn’t been at the Mirabaud estate. I wanted to give her to one of Raphael’s sisters to keep or to raise, but every time I tried to talk to one of them, Sophie or Valerian wouldn’t allow the subject. I think Anaïs and Océane were trying, but they couldn’t figure out how to get her, either. Alina would have been so much safer with them. They might have been able to protect her.
“She’s still afraid of the dark. She won’t get in a car at night at all. I have to put her to bed while it’s still light out, or else she sobs until I crawl into her bed with her and stay until she goes to sleep. She has nightmares. She’s so young that I hope she’ll forget it and be okay.”
Flicka reaches over and touches Alina’s cheek.
Alina leans into her hand but doesn’t pause in her sand-shoveling.
Flicka drops her han
d and stares at the sunlight sparkling on the wavelets and ripples that stretch to the horizon. “So here’s to the stepmothers, the ones who risk everything for a child who isn’t biologically theirs, because the child is their husband’s child, and she loves both of them so much that she would do anything, absolutely anything, to save either one of them, even when her husband is gone and maybe dead, and the child is the only thing she has left of him.”
Negotiation
Flicka von Hannover
The princess and the prince,
negotiating a treaty.
Flicka’s shiny shell snapped tightly around her body and mind.
She sat forward on her chair—her spine ramrod straight, her hands folded on her knee—and smiled as graciously as she could. She had pinned Raphael’s alpine mountaineering badge to the shoulder of her black dress for strength.
A wide, executive-style desk separated her from His Serene Highness Pierre Grimaldi, her ex-husband.
The dark wood of the desk was mahogany, she could see, and the intricate carvings on the front were fine, sixteenth-century craftsmanship. Morning Mediterranean sunlight streaming in the windows glowed on the gold-tinted plaster of the walls and in the rich finish of the desk’s wood. Dust motes danced in the bright sunbeams, buffeted by the invisible atoms of air.
They were two princes, negotiating on the battlefield, even though the war was over her body. She was a Hannover royal, a kingdom won on the field of war. Her ancestors, warrior princes, had increased the kingdom’s glory by leading the charge at the heads of their armies.
Flicka had read Dieter’s textbooks on military philosophy and strategy when they had lived together in London, and she’d edited his undergrad essays on tactics and strategy and his master’s thesis on war and business. Carl von Clausewitz, the long-dead military philosopher whose thoughts and writing reminded her of Dieter Schwarz in so many ways, said that during war, one must pursue one great, decisive aim with force and determination.
One great, decisive aim.
Flicka’s one goal was escape, for herself and for Alina.
Everything else was secondary to escaping.
Sun Tzu, that ancient tactician, had said, “Know thyself and know thy enemy. A thousand battles, a thousand victories.”
Flicka knew herself and her lineage, and she knew Pierre Grimaldi.
Paintings of Pierre’s noble ancestors hung on the far wall away from the windows so they wouldn’t be damaged by the sunlight, even though all the windows of the Prince’s Palace in Monaco were glazed with UV-blocking and bulletproof glass. Some of the noblemen and noblewomen had been painted wearing their knighthoods and honors, which were medals, sashes, and ribbons like military medals, except that royals award them to each other for no reason other than to curry favor or reward loyalty.
Flicka picked out the sashes and medals she knew.
One of Pierre’s ancestors wore the French Order of the Rose, a sash and a pin awarded by the Bourbon kings of France, now extinct along with the kingdom of France.
Another of Pierre’s ancestors from the eighteen hundreds—judging by his small wig and the fashion of his military uniform—was clad in green velvet robes heavily embroidered with gold and the nearly round breast star and necklace of the Royal Hungarian Order of Saint Stephen, founded by Holy Roman Empress Maria Theresa in 1764. Empress Maria Theresa had used induction into the order to cement her and her son’s claims as rulers of the Holy Roman Empire by bestowing it upon nobles and royals who were loyal to them. It was a public political reward.
Back in those days, chivalric orders were created for a purpose.
Flicka noticed that there was no portrait of the first Grimaldi Prince of Monaco in this room.
Pierre’s Italian noble ancestor François Grimaldi would have been depicted in his disguise as a harmless monk, an innocent man of God, and clutching a long knife. He had begged the castle guard of the Prince’s Palace for shelter during one cold night. Once François Grimaldi had infiltrated the fortress above the headlands and harbor, he slit the throat of the guard who had taken pity on the traveling monk and opened the defenses, allowing his men inside to butcher the rest of the guards and take the palace and the country.
Thus, the Italian noble family of Grimaldi had elevated themselves to become the sovereign princes of a tiny slice of French land and a Mediterranean port.
Yes, Flicka knew what Pierre was.
Another of Pierre’s grandfathers wore the thick, gold collar of the Spanish Order of the Golden Fleece, a knighthood reserved mostly now for sovereigns. Flicka’s Aunt Elizabeth had one of those collars but disliked wearing it because of its weight on her aging neck and shoulders. She also didn’t like the small, gold charm that resembled a dead sheep.
In centuries past, being inducted as a knight in the Order of the Golden Fleece meant that the bearer couldn’t be arrested for any crime, up to and including treason. Instead, the knight would be detained in the gentle custody of his fellow knights as suited his dignity, before being tried only by his fellow knights and found innocent, of course.
Pierre wasn’t a member of the Order of the Golden Fleece because he wasn’t a sovereign yet. If he had been counting on that to get him out of being tried for rape or assault someday, it wasn’t going to work.
Also, that sovereign immunity thing had been stripped centuries ago.
None of the chivalric orders and knighthoods and the statuses that they conferred meant a damn thing anymore.
So many worthless trinkets, all for nothing.
But the thin, gold wedding ring on her hand, that meant everything to her and was so much more important than any of that frippery. It meant Raphael’s love for her. It meant her love for him. No matter where Raphael Mirabaud was or if he were even still alive, she had his ring, and she still loved him.
Raphael Mirabaud, Dieter Schwarz, whatever he wanted to call himself was fine with her. He was her Lieblingwächter, and he was alive out there in the world, somewhere.
He had to be.
Flicka lifted her gaze to the man behind the desk and resolved not to look away, for she did not want to appear weak.
Prince Pierre Grimaldi of Monaco was a glamorously handsome man. All the celebrity media said so. Some tabloids devoted photo spreads to candid snapshots of his rippled abdominals and broad shoulders when he emerged from the Mediterranean Sea, water streaming over his muscled physique like a Greek demigod. Slick magazines preferred more elegant pictures of him gambling in the Monte Carlo casino, wearing a tailored suit that set off his thick, black hair, sharp cheekbones, and dark, sultry eyes.
When Flicka had married Pierre less than a year ago, rumors had circulated of increases in the suicide rates of young women who had pined for him, though Flicka suspected that the Palace’s public relations department had manufactured that rumor, as they had so many others. She thought it callous to pretend women had killed themselves over the prince’s marriage, leaving their families mourning for decades. She worried that glorifying the suicides might lead vulnerable women to follow them.
Yet, the Palace PR department had a job to do, which was to make the royal family and thus Monaco seem more alluring, desirable, and worthy for investment and large, corporate expenditures. They did their job well. Decades ago, ninety-six percent of the government’s income came from gambling in the Monte Carlo casino, as Monaco levies no income taxes. Gambling income had dropped to three percent of the government’s budget due to the vast and rapid increase in tourism and convention income. The royal family was essential for Monaco’s image, and thus, its existence.
At that moment, however, Prince Pierre Grimaldi was holding a thin sheaf of paper in his slim hands. His fingernails were neatly trimmed and buffed, as usual. He neither frowned nor smiled. His carefully neutral expression bore a hint of sadness around his eyes.
He was projecting an image every bit as much as Flicka was, and they were both very practiced at it. They had been under the lenses of cameras their w
hole lives, and this meeting was just another performance.
They did have a lot in common. In theory, their marriage had been perfectly logical. It should have worked.
The office’s door stood open to the hallway and other offices outside, a gesture Flicka appreciated. With it open, Pierre’s office didn’t feel quite so much like a snapped trap. The suggestion was that she could walk out that doorway, though of course, she couldn’t. The suggestion was that the presence of witnesses would keep her safe from assault, though no one strolled by the door outside and no voices chattered in the hallway.
Quentin Sault, Head of Pierre’s Secret Service protection detail, stood behind Pierre. He leaned against the wall at parade rest with his hands folded behind his back and stared straight ahead, perhaps at the art behind Flicka and over her head. He hadn’t said a word during the meeting so far nor gestured, except to incline his head to acknowledge her presence when she’d come in. He projected a studied impression of not actually being in the room.
Flicka suspected Quentin was there less as Pierre’s bodyguard and more as a witness to the proceedings, albeit a very private witness.
Pierre drew in a deep breath in preparation to speak, and he stared at the paperwork in his hand, not at Flicka. “First, thank you for returning to Monaco and our marriage. I realize I have breached your trust in unforgivable ways, and I appreciate your kindness and graciousness in your return. I assure you that I will never abuse you nor your trust again.”
Flicka nodded. Pierre surely didn’t mean he had given up his other wife and family, but this situation called for politics, not confrontation.
Happily Ever After (Runaway Princess: Flicka, Book 5) Page 1
