THE EXILED PRINCE SON-IN-LAW STRIKES BACK

Chapter 4: A Lost Masterpiece

It took Sasha two days.

She called me on the evening of the second day, while I was carrying boxes of old picture frames into the basement of Ashworth Fine Art and Auctions on Regent Row. I stepped into the shadow of a storeroom and put the phone to my ear.

"Found it," she said. "You were right. It's ugly."

"Tell me."

"Anton's company is sending one painting to the Spring Auction. Only one. It's called Winter Over Kestrograd. The catalog says it's a lost masterpiece by a famous Kestrovian painter, missing for eighty years and found in a private collection."

"And?"

"And Anton is going to buy it back himself." I could hear her typing. "Through a company called Northline Arts. It's hidden behind three other companies, but I traced it. Northline belongs to Rask Energy. He's planning to bid ten million dollars for his own painting."

I closed my eyes. I'd grown up around bankers and ministers; I knew this trick. "He's washing money."

"Exactly. Dirty money from your uncle's government goes into Northline. Northline pays ten million for the painting. The money comes out the other side looking clean, like a normal art sale, and nobody asks where it came from."

"And the Ashworths take a f*e and smile."

"A very nice f*e," Sasha said. "Ten percent. One million dollars. Enough to keep your mother-in-law in pearls for a year."

"It's worse than that, Leon." Her voice dropped. "The painting is fake."

I opened my eyes. "How do you know?"

"Because I found the man who painted it. A forger in the south who does work for Rask Energy. He finished it five years ago, and the money for it came from the same Ministry account." She paused. "Here's the part you're going to hate. Anton isn't planning to keep this quiet forever. In his private emails, he says that after the wedding, he'll 'let the truth come out.' When the forgery is discovered, the auction house will be blamed for selling it. And the person who signed the auction papers..."

"The director," I said.

"Victoria. She'll be the one investigated. She could go to prison for fraud, and Anton walks away clean, with the money washed and the Ashworth name in his pocket."

I stood very still in the dark storeroom.

"How sure are you?" I asked.

"The forger was proud of it. He sent pictures of the half-finished painting to a friend. I've got the pictures, the dates and the payments." She paused. "Leon, I'm sure."

Upstairs, I could hear Victoria's voice in her office, calm and clear, talking on the phone to a buyer about a painting from the last century. She worked late every night. She knew every painting in that building. She loved this place more than anything in her family.

And Anton planned to use it to destroy her.

"His rescue is a trap," I said quietly. "And the auction house is the bait."

"What do we do?"

That was the question. I walked slowly between the dusty shelves, thinking.

The simplest answer was money. The Sable Court had money. Not the royal treasury in the vault, which I couldn't touch, but twelve years of careful work: small companies, smart investments, loyal people who gave what they could. If I pulled hard enough, I could find thirty million dollars.

But I couldn't walk into the Ashworth dining room and hand it to Beatrice. Leon Grey, the stray, the penniless driver, paying off the family's debt? They'd ask where it came from. Rupert would call the police. Edmund would start asking questions. And within a week, someone would whisper the name Leon Grey to someone in Kestrograd.

I couldn't tell Victoria the truth either. Not about the painting, and not about me. If she knew who I was, she'd be in danger every hour of every day.

"Sasha," I said, "can a company buy someone else's debt?"

There was a pause. Then a slow, delighted laugh came down the line. "Leon. You sneaky..."

"Can it?"

"Of course it can. Banks sell debts all the time. If the right company walked up to the Ashworths' creditors with the right offer, they'd sell that thirty-million-dollar debt in a heartbeat. They don't want an auction house. They want money."

"Set one up," I said. "A new company. Clean, quiet, with no link to anything we own. And make sure it's ready to buy that debt on the night of the auction, not one minute before."

"Why wait?"

"Because if the debt disappears before the auction, Anton will know someone's fighting him, and he'll change his plan. I want him to walk into that room believing he's already won."

"What do I call the company?"

I thought for a second. "Raven Holdings."

"Very subtle," she said dryly. "And the painting? If the debt's paid, Victoria still sells a forgery."

"Leave the painting to me."

I hung up and stood in the storeroom for a long moment.

Raven Holdings. It was a stupid, proud little joke, and I knew it. But for twelve years I'd hidden every part of who I was. Maybe one small name, buried in a pile of legal papers, wasn't too much to ask.

Then footsteps came down the basement stairs, quick and light. I knew those steps. I stepped out of the shadows with a box of frames in my arms just as Victoria reached the bottom of the stairs.

She stopped when she saw me.

For a second, neither of us spoke. The single bulb above us buzzed.

"You're still here," she said. "It's late."

"The frames needed moving."

"At ten at night?"

"Rupert wanted them done by morning."

"Rupert wants a lot of things." She sighed and pushed a loose strand of light brown hair back into its pins. For a moment she looked very tired, younger than twenty-seven.

She looked at me the way she looked at paintings, carefully, as if she were searching for a crack in the paint. Then she glanced at the phone in my hand.

"Who were you talking to?"

"A friend."

"You don't have friends, Leon," she said. It wasn't cruel. It was just a fact she'd noticed and never thought about until now.

"I have one or two," I said.

"Where? I've never seen them at the house. Not once in three years." She frowned slightly. "I've never seen you get a letter. Or a call. Or a visitor."

"Maybe they don't like big houses."

She almost smiled. It was so small and so quick that I nearly missed it. Then she was the director again.

She held up a glossy sheet of paper, a printer's proof for the cover of the Spring Auction catalog, and turned it toward the light.

A snowy city of red roofs and stone bridges glowed on the page. A palace stood on a hill above it, its windows full of gold.

Winter Over Kestrograd.

"Anton's painting," Victoria said softly. "It arrives at the auction house tomorrow morning. My mother wants it on the front of the catalog." She tilted her head, studying it. "It's beautiful, isn't it?"

I looked at the palace on the hill. The palace that had burned with my parents inside it.

The artist had painted every window full of light. In the corner, the east wing, where my bedroom used to be, glowed gold in the snow. Whoever made this fake had studied the real palace very carefully.

"Yes," I said. "It's beautiful."