The Founder Who Ruled A Country

Chapter Eight: The Word That Would Free Him

"There's an easy way out of this," Detective Pasco said.

It was past one in the morning, and the interview room smelled of burnt coffee and old paint. Lucien sat with his wrists cuffed to the steel rail on the table. Pasco sat across from him with his sleeves rolled up and a thin file he had not bothered to open, and the red light on the camera in the corner blinked steadily above them both.

"I was at the airport, Kerrigan," Pasco went on. "I saw that old man bow to you. I heard what he called you." He leaned forward. "So here's how this goes. If you really work for Valmorre, the embassy can confirm it. One phone call, one word from you, and the whole thing goes away. You walk out of here tonight."

Lucien looked at the camera, then back at Pasco.

He could end it in one sentence. He knew exactly which one. My name is Lucien Varenne, and I am the reigning Prince of Valmorre. The words were right there, as easy as breathing, and they would open every door in the building.

But the moment he claimed the crown to save himself, the promise was finished. He had kept it through the lawsuit, the board vote and the bankruptcy, and he had broken it only once, for Zara. He would not break it for his own skin. And it would not stop there. Somewhere in the palace, Casimir was waiting for exactly this. A recording of the young Prince using his title to escape a foreign court would be the last piece of evidence the Council needed, and Pasco's little red light was ready to give it to him.

"I'd like to speak to my lawyer," Lucien said.

Pasco's jaw tightened. "That's it? That's all you've got?"

Lucien said nothing.

Pasco tried for another forty minutes. He tried threats and he tried sympathy, and toward the end he tried something close to pleading. Lucien sat through all of it in silence, his eyes on the table, until the detective finally swore under his breath, gathered the unopened file and walked out.

They put Lucien in a holding cell a little after three. He sat on the narrow bench with his back to the wall and listened to the building hum around him, and he did not sleep.

* * *

Zara was at the gates of the Valmorran embassy by seven.

She had not slept either. She wore yesterday's clothes and a fresh bandage, and she carried the royal decree in her hand like a weapon. The guard at the gate read it, made a short call, and opened the gate without a word. Being a Counsellor of the Crown, it turned out, still meant something here.

The ambassador received her in a quiet office overlooking the garden. Odalys Ferrand was the woman who had walked into the precinct with the red-sealed folder and set Zara free. She was in her fifties, silver-haired and composed, and she rose politely when Zara came in.

Zara did not sit down. "They arrested him last night," she said. "Lucien Kerrigan. They're calling him a foreign agent. You know exactly who he is, and so do I. All you have to do is confirm it."

Odalys did not answer right away. She looked at the decree in Zara's hand, then at the window, then at the papers on her desk. She looked everywhere except at Zara's face.

"I'm sorry, Counsellor," she said at last. "I can't do that."

"You walked into that police station for me. You can walk in there for him."

"I have orders." Odalys's voice was very quiet. "They came from the Regent's office during the night. Valmorre will not confirm anything about the detained man. Not his identity, not his status, nothing at all."

Zara stared at her. "He is your prince."

Odalys finally met her eyes, only for a second, and what Zara saw in them was not indifference. It was shame. Then the ambassador looked down at her desk again.

"I have my orders," she repeated.

Zara walked out through the garden without another word, her bandaged hand pressed against her ribs to stop it shaking.

The country Lucien had refused to use was refusing him now. His own family had left him in a Harbridge cell.

* * *

Help came from the last person anyone expected.

At four that afternoon, Dev Sahni walked into the public prosecutor's office with a backpack over one shoulder and the look of a man who had not slept since the summit. He gave his name at the front desk and asked to see whoever was in charge of the Lattice investigation. When the receptionist asked what it concerned, he said, very calmly, that he wanted to confess.

A deputy prosecutor took him into a small conference room. Dev sat down, unzipped the backpack and laid its contents on the table one by one. Three hard drives. A notebook. A phone in a plastic bag.

"I kept all of it," he said. "I always knew they'd turn on me one day. It was supposed to be my insurance."

It was everything. Bank records of the money Bastian Vail had paid him to walk out of Lattice with its code. Messages from Vail's head of security telling him exactly which files to plant on Zara Bennett's laptop, and when. Copies of the planted files themselves, with dates that proved they had been created on Vail's servers weeks before they ever touched her machine.

And a list of every private payment made to Senator Cordell Rayne, the ones that had never appeared in any campaign filing.

The deputy prosecutor went through the bank records slowly, page by page. Then she stopped and read one line again.

"These payments to Rayne," she said. "They didn't come from Vail."

"No," Dev said. "Look at where they came from."

The payments had come from a private account in Valmorre. There was no company name on it and no person's name. In every record Dev had saved, the account holder appeared under a single code name.

The Chamberlain.