Chapter 7

Royal Grounds, Porenza

Sophia’s majestic chocolate mare carried her through the deep green canopy. The creature had grace and was truly beautiful. When she rode, she always took a different beast and didn’t ask for a name. It was safer for the animals if she never expressed a preference. It also helped prevent her from getting attached, as she was wont to do.

“What did Irina say? I’m guessing you told her about Viktor being in my room?” Sophia cringed, having thought of nothing else for the last thirty hours and counting. At least she’d been able to draw Jen aside last night and tell her what had happened so she would know to watch the other guards.

Jen sidled her mount next to Sophia so that the beasts clopped slowly together now that the path had widened. “I filled everyone in. We have a new safety procedure for hotels.” She could feel her friend’s tension. Jen hadn’t liked any of what Viktor had done. The security breach was personal to her. So far, the guards hadn’t said a word, but it had only been a day.

“You would tell me if the asshole threatened you?” Jen asked. Again.

Sophia sighed. “No. I told you everything.” Jen was well aware of what had happened. She hadn’t wanted to share quite so much, but the guard had been damned relentless.

Soon enough, the pinks and blues of the sun rising over the crystalline sea came into view. Porenza was a small country, a small island with a large tourist trade. Its popularity lay in the quant cobbled villages and plethora of spas that catered to the wealthy. One entire side of the island could be accessed only via private mega yacht.

“She said she needed to speak to you ASAP. I’m not sure if Viktor is the topic of the call or if it has to do with Jean Luc,” Jen said in answer to Sophia’s earlier question. For Irina to be secretive and want her to call immediately set her on edge. She normally didn’t talk to anyone while in Porenza. All messages were relayed through Jen.

Sophia nodded. They were almost to the clearing that would drop down to the crashing sea below. This was as private as she could get on the palace grounds. Off the grounds, she’d have Antony and Marco watching her as well as Jen. This was as far as she could stretch her cage—a cage that felt stifling, especially surrounded by water. And she’d only been in Porenza one night of her weeklong stint.

She took a deep breath of the salty air. The humidity from the storms of the night before still saturated the air, even though the only clouds were making for an admittedly beautiful horizon.

Sophia swung down to the soft tufts of grass with ease. Jen did the same before pulling the private cell from her pocket. They set the horses to graze, and Sophia couldn’t help sliding her hand down a sleek flank as she accepted the phone from her guard.

It was already ringing with a video call, and Irina’s face popped up after only a second. The look on her friend’s face ratcheted Sophia’s tension. “What happened?”

“Everyone’s alive. But a few things came up. I debated waiting to tell you until you got to London, but I know you’d hate that.” The heiress sighed and rolled her neck before continuing. “This was what the Belgian got from Jean Luc.” A photo of a paper filled the screen. Sophia couldn’t see it all, but she didn’t have to. Her heart stilled, and all the air left her lungs.

Shoulders tense, she demanded, “Why would he have that?”

Jen was at her side, looking at the image. “What exactly am I looking at?”

Irina’s face came back on the screen, and she answered tightly as Sophia caught her breath. “We don’t know how Jean Luc got it or who the buyer is, yet. And it definitely sounded as if it was a buy on the audio from the club. Before you ask, no account numbers were written on the sheet, so we don’t have a money trail to follow. Kate did say we’re looking at a copy, not the original. The absolute only good news from Paris is that we were able to get the bug back.” Irina’s eyes shifted to Jen as she answered the guard’s question. “This is a sheet from the ledger.”

That admission caused a rigid air of silence before Jen asked, “The infamous ledger from your old boarding school?”

Irina nodded. “Yes. This is a single page, the accounting for the crime that started everything we’re doing. You’re looking at a record of the cover-up our dean implemented after a Saudi prince killed a local boy when we were sixteen.”

Their teams knew of the ledger and had vague knowledge of the history and why it was important to Sophia and her friends. It was a pet project of theirs, monitoring and taking down one elite every year from all the records they’d photographed. They didn’t want to draw any attention to a pattern, so one a year was all they allowed themselves. Besides, not all the bad guys in upper society had gone to La Couronne school. They found others in their day-to-day lives. Even more marks came through DGF Mercenary Group, the front one of the operatives, Cade, headed. The teams took all kinds of jobs that no one else would touch.

“Who would want that information?” Jen asked.

“We don’t know yet. Kate’s team is doing the surveillance on the Belgian. So far, they haven’t seen him make a drop, but he just flew home yesterday. I thought you’d want to know.”

“Yes.” Sophia hated being out of the loop. She couldn’t do anything from Porenza, but knowledge was power. “Has anyone gone to La Couronne?”

“Cade went in last night. The ledger was gone, and a brand-new one was in its place, one with only a few recent entries. He and Sean didn’t see any clues to where it went. La Couronne has a new dean. Apparently, old Chadwick died earlier this year. Cade’s going to check with his widow and search her house tonight. We don’t have a clue why the new dean wouldn’t have the old ledger with the new one.”

She, Irina, and Riot had left the ledger exactly where it had been after taking photos of every page eight years ago. They hadn’t wanted Chadwick to know it had been found. Since their names weren’t anywhere in that tome, they’d never been worried. She’d assumed, as they all had, that one day they’d check it for new potential bad guys. Unfortunately, they’d never had a shortage of power-abusing men and women to go after, so going back hadn’t been high on the priority list.

Sophia blew out a breath, feeling her hands tremble. “What about the Saudi family?”

“James has been monitoring everyone related to Fahd for years. Nothing’s pinged. Cade’s making calls to contacts in the region, but why look into what the bastard did a year before his death?”

“Fahd’s old friends?” Sophia ground out. “Weren’t their initials in the margins as witnesses?” She was going by memory.

“Neither has any apparent link to Jean Luc. Not that we’ve found. They’re still being monitored, but we’ve got tails in place now, too, in case they’re digging into the past. One is working in Dubai and doesn’t have any plans to head to Belgium, and the other is in New York. Same thing—no plans to hop over to Belgium. I doubt either is our buyer.” The two men had been on James’s watch list for years because of their friendship with Fahd. So far, they’d kept their noses clean or they wouldn’t be doing so well in their business ventures. Forde would have seen to it.

When it seemed there was nothing more, Sophia shook her head. “I don’t like this.”

“Neither do I. It feels off,” Irina admitted.

Why that page? Why and how did Jean Luc get it? Nothing made sense, but it made Sophia nervous to think of how that very operation could come back to haunt them. They’d covered their tracks more through the years as they’d learned from their mistakes. It had been seven years since Fahd’s death—a long time. But if the Saudi royal family learned what had happened all those years ago, heads would roll. That family had enough money to dig up whatever they wanted.

“Okay. I want to know everything that happens.” She normally went radio silent in Porenza. Jen was always connected to the team because she had more freedom while on the island. The guard could leave the palace during her time off, and the security head at the palace seemed to be comfortable enough with the woman now that she’d been on Sophia’s protective detail for close to two years. Jen had no problem sneaking in her own equipment and private, secure cell phone.

Irina nodded. “And I want all the details on Viktor being in your hotel room, but it’ll have to wait. I’m almost to the airport. Mischa is having problems with his knee, so I’m going to LA now.”

Sophia frowned. “Is he okay?”

“I think so. Aunt Olenka’s saying one thing, and he’s saying another. I just need to get there.”

They disconnected, and Sophia stood looking out at the turbulent sea. She and Jen would need to head back to the palace soon.

Jen had seemed just as lost in thought as Sophia before she asked, “Could the boy’s family be looking into the murder?”

Sophia blew out a breath as silence waged between them. She didn’t like talking about the murder. It haunted her nightmares enough. The teams had all been told the basics—a sort of history lesson about how their enterprise got started with many details left out. “The boy’s family knew exactly who killed their son.” She hated those long-ago memories. It hadn’t mattered that they’d avenged the boy’s death. He shouldn’t have died at all. “The entire family worked in the pub they owned—mom, dad, and three kids, including Joseph.” She almost choked on the constriction suddenly tightening her throat as she’d said his name. Joseph.

The memories wouldn’t stop. “Days after Prince Fahd killed their son, he showed up at the pub and didn’t even bother to hide his cut and bruised fists. We followed him there. We still wanted to do something, anything, after discovering Joseph’s body. Mischa kept telling us to stop, but we couldn’t stop.” She clenched her fists before adding, “The bastard’s friends went with him to the pub, but at least they looked uncomfortable and a little sick. Not Fahd. He laughed and drank. The owner’s daughter hid in the shadows that day and every day after. Her family couldn’t kick the prince out of their pub. They were scared; we could see it. Joseph had only made the mistake of trying to protect his thirteen-year-old sister from Fahd’s groping the night he was killed. Joseph stood up to him. The poor girl had kind of shrunk into herself from that point on. And there wasn’t anything we could do.” Except go to the pub every day and suffer with the family until they found a way to make the prince pay.

Fahd’s family’s pockets were too deep not to come after anyone who tried to kill the bastard, so murder had been out. That hadn’t stopped them from thinking about it or from trying to get Forde’s help in making it happen. In the end, they’d relented and accepted the plan Forde had come up with.

Sophia shook her head as she looked into Jen’s face. Her friend had gone very quiet, her eyes hard as she waited for Sophia to finish. “Fahd hadn’t cared. At all. He enjoyed tormenting them by forcing them to serve him drinks and keep their mouths shut. Joseph’s life meant less than nothing to the prince.”

She shook her head again as she finished, unable to stop. “Fahd’s family paid millions to cover it up. The funds were transferred within a day. The date stamp was in the ledger as a twisted reminder of how easy it was for them to just wash it away. Fahd killed a child, and his family let him stay at school to graduate. Nothing happened to him.

“Even the dean seemed haggard in those months the prince stayed in school. Do you know the only way the dean could spin the cover-up was to have his cleaners make it look like an animal attack. The kid was fifteen. He’d been beaten until his face and body were a bloody mess, until animal attack had been the best cover-up!” Sophia swiped away an angry tear that had escaped as she remembered those unseeing eyes staring up through swollen, bloody flesh.

“So, yeah, Joseph’s family knew what had happened to their son. They also know his murderer is dead.” Sophia swallowed back the bile and emotion, hating the loss of control. She turned to slide her fingers over the horse closest to her. It was comforting as she relayed the end of the story. “They know because I personally sent them the news clipping.”

Jen stayed silent as Sophia took a deep breath to calm down. Emotional outbursts weren’t like her, and she hated the loss of control. Her friend allowed her the space she needed to get herself under control. Focusing on the sounds of crashing waves against the cliffs and the soft snorts of the horses, she finally gained her composure.

“Why ask about the royal family? The prince is dead.”

“Taking Fahd down didn’t go exactly as planned. His family was protecting him, so we set up an elaborate paternity scheme,” Sophia explained. “His mother was dead, so the king couldn’t kill her for infidelity. But looking into the customs, we discovered Fahd would have been stripped of title and exiled if the prince wasn’t actually the king’s child. We leaked photos of Fahd’s mother and another man. Paternity tests were altered, even the ones Fahd frantically took himself. It took over a year to set it up and have all the players in place. After his exile, we were going to leak the evidence of his real crimes to the authorities. He’d done plenty of horrible things in only nineteen years of life.” Sophia’s lip curled in disgust as she’d finished. “The prince would have been tossed in jail.”

“But he died.”

“Yes. The official reports say Fahd stole his father’s favorite sports car and raced away in a fit of rage after finding out he was about to be cut off, and he died in a horrible crash. What the paperwork didn’t mention was there were bomb fragments found at the scene. The rumor is that the king’s head of security killed Fahd out of loyalty to the king.” It had all been supposition, but Sophia’d always wondered if Forde had possibly had something to do with it.

Forde had protected them from the beginning. They were kids—albeit intelligent, manipulative kids—who’d had a cause. They’d been ruthless in forcing him to help them. As Riot’s dead brother’s best friend, Forde really hadn’t stood a chance against them.

“It’s better Fahd’s dead. Alive, there’d always be a chance his DNA would come to light, regardless that both Fahd and the king were convinced the prince wasn’t family.”

Sophia nodded. It was better. That death was on their heads, yet she couldn’t muster any regret. Fahd had deserved to die. More would have suffered if he’d lived because he hadn’t valued any life that wasn’t his own.

Jen mused, “There’s so much infighting within the Saudi families that I find it hard to believe his father or another family member would be looking into anything he’d done a year before his death, especially not if they still thought he wasn’t the king’s kid. If anything, they’d go to the paternity tests or reports from his death.”

Sophia agreed, but it still made her uneasy. She wouldn’t mention that the infighting that had been waging for years was Forde’s doing. A look in Jen’s direction gave her the impression Jen already knew that part. It hadn’t taken much to get some of the corrupt princes to turn on one another. They’d already been brutal and seething with jealousy, so with some added accusations that some were embezzling royal funds, an internal war had begun.

“Someone would have to have Fahd’s DNA to test against. The testing facility had a records fire about six months after Fahd died. All the records are gone. And the car crash burned too hot to retrieve anything to check against,” Sophia explained. That meant the chance was slim anyone would learn the truth. “Slim” didn’t wipe away all her tension.

The bottom line was that her instincts were saying this was all wrong.