One Night in Monaco

by Blair Babylon

  Not a good day.

  He’d had worse.

  Maxence drank more of the whiskey. A smoky film clung to his tongue and in his throat, and he rubbed his jaw where Pierre had landed a glancing uppercut before the guards had pulled them off of each other. He thought he’d at least cracked some of Pierre’s ribs with a solid jab to his midsection, and Pierre should have a black eye, too.

  Served him right.

  Violence still swirled in Maxence’s chest.

  The whiskey was telling him that finding his brother again and beating the shit out of him was a very good idea.

  He didn’t know what to do, other than assaulting his brother again.

  Assaulting his brother again seemed like an excellent option, a truly spectacular option, and it seemed even more enticing with every additional sip of whiskey, except that Pierre had threatened Maxence that no one would find his body if Max didn’t leave the building immediately.

  And ditto if Maxence even breathed a damn word to anyone about Flicka’s whereabouts. In that case, Pierre had assured Max, his death would be slow.

  When you have seen your brother make good on threats like that without a moment of hesitation or remorse, you believe him.

  Maxence had to get word to somebody about Flicka, though.

  Pierre seemed to want Flicka right where she was.

  Flicka had told Maxence to leave her there and not tell anyone. Her whispers had rung in his ears like a command he could not disobey.

  Flicka’s tone had sounded like she was hiding and needed to stay there to be safe.

  She was in danger.

  And yet, she had said she was safer where she was than if people knew or tried to get her out.

  She’d told him not to tell anyone and not to do anything to rescue her.

  He hated it.

  He ran his hand through his hair, his dark curls twining around his fingers.

  With every minute that passed, Maxence worked harder to resist the inclination to dial the phone number for her reclusive brother, Wulfram von Hannover, and narc to him where she was.

  Except that she’d specifically forbidden Max to call Wulf.

  Maxence was confused and angry as hell, and he tipped more whiskey into his mouth. The slow burn down his throat felt like courage gathering in his stomach.

  Pierre was only a few blocks away, ready to be punched.

  Maxence could walk there in fifteen minutes.

  He hated this.

  A soccer match was playing on a wide-screen television in one of the casino’s small rooms called the Salle Touzet Sud. He couldn’t quite hear the commentary over the clattering of the roulette wheels and gamblers cheering from the White Room behind him and the soccer fans laughing and chattering around the TVs.

  The Monte Carlo casino was decorated for Christmas, with garland draped from everything that would hold it and twinkling Christmas trees stationed in every corner and doorway. The rooms looked like a particularly festive forest had been magicked into the building.

  He should be thinking about other things to distract himself from the conundrum irritating him. The Monte Carlo casino brimmed with beautiful women, and Max loved women. He loved everything about them, from their finer skin to their soft curves to the sweet scent of them to the sparkly and beautiful clothes they wore.

  The doorway between two rooms where Maxence was standing was half-blocked by Christmas trees that towered over his head and the doorway. He’d been careful not to jiggle the tiny gold-and-glass ornaments that encrusted the tree. The balls and icicles tinkled alarmingly every time his arm brushed the branches.

  Maxence had just decided to inch closer to the televisions airing the soccer match when his old high school friend Simone Maina rushed across the opulent casino room and through the crowd toward him.

  Her lithe figure was a harmonic vibration on a violin string, blurred at the edges of her slim curves by the lights sparkling on the glass beadwork of her white dress. As she neared him, the smooth skin between her eyebrows and under her eyes creased, indicating strain. Her arms reaching for him were slim, dark lines in the room of round, solid bodies held tightly together to avoid contact.

  Maxence set his whiskey glass on a small table behind himself and drew a breath to ask her what was wrong.

  Simone’s natural Afro hair was a sleek halo around her thin face. She was reaching out to Maxence, her fingers nearing the lapels of his tuxedo, and she glanced behind herself in fear. Black eyeliner and eyeshadow in soft sage and glittering gold accentuated her sloe-eyed beauty, and she almost looked like an Egyptian hieroglyphic of a queen.

  Rough abrasions and the darkening plum of bruises covered her slim throat.

  Maxence’s heart fell as rage rose in his body. Her husband, Estebe Fournier, must have thought people wouldn’t notice the damage to Simone’s dark-bronze skin. Estebe had always been a bully when they had been at school together, and he’d been excellent at creating incidents where he could deny his guilt.

  About twenty feet behind her, two men in dark suits pushed through the crowd, their eyes intent on her form.

  Other men in dark suits—all with the nearly shaved heads and odd bulk of the paramilitary security profession—converged toward them from another side of the crowd.

  Wait—wasn’t that—

  Maxence could have sworn he recognized one of the men. Maybe all private mercenaries and bodyguards were beginning to look alike to him. Many of his friends employed dozens of them.

  Maxence opened his hands as Simone rushed into his curtained alcove and whispered near his shoulder, “Help me.”

  He whipped off the midnight-blue jacket of his Tom Ford tuxedo, stepped around her to block what he was doing, and dropped it around her shoulders. The distinctive way her white dress popped against her umber and ebony skin would have drawn their pursuers’ eyes. His coat changed her slim, feminine silhouette and white dress into a black-ish box, and his white shirt was visible instead of his dark tux.

  In crowds, pursuers follow shapes and colors, not specific people. Changing what she looked like from behind would slow her pursuers, who were probably either her husband or his security men.

  Her picked-out afro, though close to her head, was still a black, distinctive shape in the crowd, though. Estebe’s security men would orient on that.

  He looked around for a way to camouflage her head as he wrapped his arm around her shoulders and hustled her through the crowd gathered around the poker and roulette tables in the pale blue and faint gold White Room.

  The crowd gathered around the televisions to watch the soccer match had probably slowed Estebe’s men down a little.

  The White Room of the Monte Carlo casino had a terrace but no stairs to the ground floor. That room was a dead end.

  They went sideways, along the walls, toward another doorway.

  As they passed one particularly boisterous roulette table where the ball had just dropped onto the wheel and the gamblers had erupted in cheers, a woman raised her arms.

  Her dark red scarf fluttered behind her.

  Maxence snatched the silk scrap out of the air and flipped it over Simone’s head. She grabbed the ends and held them under her chin as they raced around the edge of the room.

  With that bit of disguise, they might have a chance to escape.

  Maxence guided her around to the entrance to the other connecting salon, the Salle Touzet Nord. There, he led her between the jangling slot machines and another crowd clustered around back-to-back televisions playing the soccer match.

  They hurried toward the casino’s main lobby and the exit to leave the casino.

  “Not the front entrance,” she whispered, her voice frantic. “He has people waiting for me there.” She had tucked the red silk around her face like a hijab, altering her profile still more. Perfect.

  Maxence reversed his direction and grabbed Simone’s warm hand to pull her after him, heading for another way out of the casino.

  Other people might
have become disoriented in the maze of windowless rooms with flashing, clanging slots and shouting poker dealers and bejeweled roulette patrons, as was intended, but Maxence had spent half his childhood summers and all of his teenaged ones in and around the Monte Carlo casino in Monaco.

  Yes, he’d been a popular person to visit during school vacations.

  “This way,” Maxence said, his voice low as he leaned close to Simone and spoke to her under the maddening racket of the casino’s gambling rooms.

  Fortunes were being won and lost—mostly lost—as they sped between the flashing tables, the black-tuxedoed men, and the sparkling women.

  One woman, hardly more than a girl, shrieked as they passed. Simone flinched, bobbling as she bumped the backside of another man at the next poker table.

  Maxence wheeled her in front of himself and muttered an apology to the man as they trotted away and into the next room.

  The man blinked, unsure he’d seen whom he thought he had before the crowd closed behind them.

  Banks of slot machines with low-backed stools filled the room in clusters and lines. When Max had been a child dashing through the casino to escape his sitters, this room had held more poker and roulette tables, but slot machines had a higher return on investment per the space allotted.

  Slot machines filled too much of the public areas now. He didn’t particularly like them.

  Maxence tugged Simone’s hand and pulled her into another alcove. His darkly tanned hand was several shades paler and redder than the cool tones of her black skin where their hands were clasped, and he turned her so he could watch their trail for anyone following them.

  The crowd moved in its usual eddies, swirling around the gaming tables and slot machine banks.

  No one rushed through the masses in their wake.

  Maybe they’d gotten away.

  That other man, though.

  The other security guy pressing through the crowd had focused on Maxence, not on Simone.

  Maxence could have sworn he recognized that guy.

  He watched the assembled gamblers for their pursuers and whispered to Simone, “When I saw you in the casino, I knew something must be wrong. I would’ve bet you’d have stayed on Estebe’s yacht with a good book while he came to the casino for the evening.”

  She shook her head. “Convincing him to let me come here was the only way to get away from him. That yacht is practically a prison. He told the staff not to take me to shore on the tenders.”

  A tender is a small boat to ferry people to shore and is usually stored in the belly of a large yacht.

  While still keeping an eye out, Maxence laid his arm around her shoulders and hugged her like he had when they were at the Swiss boarding school where they’d grown up. “I’m sorry, Simone.”

  She buried her face against his shoulder, and her hair tickled his neck above his shirt collar. “He took my phone. I couldn’t even call anyone.”

  Phone. GPS Tracking. “You don’t have a phone on you now, do you?”

  She spread her arms to the sides, displaying her snug, beaded dress and a micro-tiny purse hanging off her wrist. “He took it away two months ago and won’t let me have one.”

  “It’s good that you don’t have one now. I was worried about him tracking a cell phone.”

  “Ever since I got pregnant, he’s been domineering and violent,” she mumbled into his shoulder.

  Maxence stilled, though he continued to scan the crowd. “You’re pregnant?”

  “We decided to have kids. This wasn’t an accident or me springing it on him. I mean, we’ve been married for three years. We were trying.”

  He ducked his head to look at her, and he felt a smile grow on his face. The small swell of her tummy rounded the front of her dress just a little. “You’re pregnant?”

  “About three months. Maybe I should have stayed. A baby needs a father.”

  Maxence straightened and glared at the crowd. “Not an abusive one. Abusers get worse when a woman is pregnant, and then there’s usually domestic violence from then on. It just escalates. You did the right thing to get out. You’re protecting yourself and your baby.”

  “I don’t know where to go. I still don’t know what to do.”

  “You took the first step, which was the right thing to do. We’ll figure out what to do next.”

  “I just want to go home.”

  “Mauritius?” he remembered. High school was a while ago.

  “I miss it. I miss my sisters. I haven’t been back in years. There was always a reason why Estebe didn’t want me to visit home.”

  The reason was that abusers isolate their victims from their families.

  Maxence looked around the casino and, in his mind, across Monaco and Europe. “After we get out of the casino, they’ll wait for you at the airport in Nice. We’ll have to go farther.”

  She nodded. “He’ll be so mad.”

  Yes, abusers get angry when their victims leave. “I’ll get you out. Do you have your passport?”

  “It’s the one thing I have in this ridiculous purse, and I hid it so he couldn’t find it. I’m so stupid. I can’t believe I let him do this to me.”

  “No.” Maxence ducked to look her directly in the eyes. At six-four, he was always ducking and stooping to look at people. His hand slipped around the back of her neck, under the scarf. Her skin was satin under his fingers, and her wiry hair brushed the top of his hand. “No, you’re not stupid. You got out. You saved yourself. That’s the first step, and it’s the hardest one. Trust me on this. The first step of escaping, when you have to break away and get out, is always the hardest. He had you on his yacht anchored offshore, right?”

  She nodded and blinked, her eyes bright with unshed tears.

  “You did it. You tricked him, and you got out. You’re brilliant. Now, let’s finish the job, okay?”

  She nodded, holding the red scarf tightly around her face, and her dark eyes brimmed with tears.

  Oh, no.

  Maxence cradled her jaw and face with his oversized hands. “Look at me. Simone, look at me.”

  She looked up, her eyes huge with fear. One tear hung, diamond-like, on her thick eyelashes.

  Maxence inhaled, pulling comfort and stillness inside of him, and he let it shine in his eyes and waves of it overflow and wash over Simone.

  That’s how he thought about it. It was just a thing. It wasn’t magic. It certainly wasn’t a science.

  He wasn’t a saint, as he’d feared.

  He’d been assured of that.

  Sometimes, with laughter.

  More often, with sarcasm.

  It wasn’t hypnosis because he’d never learned how to do it, and he didn’t swing a pocket watch in front of people or use a hypnotic cadence when he spoke.

  It was just a thing he did, that he’d always been able to do, ever since he could remember.

  He could talk to people.

  He could reach them on a different level than normal.

  He could make people feel what he did, if the subject was important enough, if he loved it enough.

  Maxence held the world in his mind and told her, “You’re safe with me. I’ll take care of you, and I’ll take care of everything. No crying. People look at you when you’re crying. We don’t want that. I’m helping you now, so you don’t need to cry. No more crying. We smile, and we walk through this crowd like it’s nothing, like we’re all alone, just you and me.”

  She nodded and blinked hard, but she was looking at him.

  He had her full attention.

  She believed.

  Maxence whispered to her, “Good. Shoulders back. Chin up. We’ll go out through the Buddha Bar at the end of the building.”

  “It’s not connected to the casino,” Simone said.

  “I know a way through. Here we go.”

  They emerged from the smaller casino rooms painted in gaudy bright blues and golds toward the more exclusive rooms in the back. Maxence shuffled her down a hall toward the very priva
te gambling rooms in the back, but her husband and his staff might be in one of those. Estebe was a high roller. He was almost certainly back there.

  Maxence quickened his pace.

  Simone kept up with him, nearly prancing with her stiletto heels on her long, curvaceous legs that Max would definitely admire later. He placed his hand on her back near her waist in case she slipped on the slick tile. She was clutching his jacket around her shoulders and the scarf over her hair and looking straight ahead as they ducked between people, which wouldn’t draw unwanted attention. Good. She was doing the right things so they wouldn’t catch people’s eyes.

  He dodged into a side hallway with yet more Christmas trees, guiding her with him, where a security guard raised a hand. He stopped with his arm half-raised as his eyes widened, and then he let his hand fall as he stared back into the casino.

  The security guard and the man in the casino had both recognized Maxence.

  They had to run.

  Her warmth under his fingers and palm, even through his tuxedo jacket, distracted Maxence for an instant.

  He pointed at the corner ahead of them. “Left.”

  They pivoted around the corner, dashed down another hallway, and pushed through swinging doors into the lounge of the Buddha Bar.

  Like the Buddha Bar in Paris and others around the world, an enormous ebony statue of a seated Buddha towered over the deep red and obsidian lounge. Curving staircases led to the upper floors with restaurant food service. Rock music pulsed from the block of speakers in the middle of the lounge.

  The crowd in there was more intent on each other than gambling, so Maxence slowed.

  Again, they shouldn’t stand out.

  Maxence and Simone wound between the tables and the knots of people, scooting sideways when necessary, and emerged from the bar’s doors into the chilly December night.

  Stars glowed in the sky. The moon painted bright stripes on the waves of the Mediterranean Sea.

  Maxence said to her, “Let’s go this way, toward the sea. We can go down the terrace and into the garden.”

  “And then what?” she asked, her voice tight.

  Maxence grinned, a little high from the adrenalin coursing through his body. “I haven’t the foggiest.”