The Founder Who Ruled A Country

Chapter Four: The Palace

Zara had not answered her phone in nine hours.

Lucien had called her back the moment he read her message, while the jet was still rolling toward the runway, and the call went straight to voicemail. Aurelio reached the security officers on the second ring. They were already running for their car, four minutes from the garage, and when Lucien told the pilot to turn around, Aurelio laid a hand on his arm and said quietly that four minutes was four minutes, and that his grandfather might not have four hours. So the jet climbed. Somewhere over the ocean the satellite link dropped, and Lucien spent the rest of the flight staring at a phone that refused to ring.

Valmorre rose out of the mountains in white stone and glass, lit from within against the dark, a city stacked along the cliffs so that every window seemed to hang above the valley. He had not seen it in two years. A car met him on the airstrip and carried him up the switchback road to the palace, and the guards at the gate saluted a man most of them knew only from photographs. Lucien barely noticed them. Aurelio stayed behind in the courtyard with a phone pressed to his ear, and Lucien climbed the stairs to his grandfather's rooms alone, expecting a deathbed.

He found Prince Florian sitting up in a chair by the window.

The old man was thinner than Lucien remembered, his collar loose around his neck and a blanket folded over his knees, but his eyes were as sharp as they had ever been. A chessboard sat on the table beside him, halfway through a game. He looked up, and surprise crossed his face before anything else.

"Lucien," he said. "What on earth are you doing here?"

Lucien stopped in the doorway. "You called me last night. You said you were dying."

"I've been dying for two years, if you ask my doctors." Florian's brow drew together. "But I called no one. They haven't let me near a telephone since the stroke."

"It was your voice, Grandfather. I'd know it anywhere."

The old man was quiet for a long moment. When he spoke again, his voice was low and hard. "Then somebody borrowed it. Forty years of my speeches sit in the national archive for anyone who wants them, and these days a clever machine needs only a few minutes of a man's voice." He looked at Lucien's hands. "What is that you're holding?"

Lucien had forgotten the envelope. He had carried it unopened across the ocean, and now he broke the red seal and read it standing by the window. Casimir's handwriting was as elegant as ever, and every line of it was polite.

In seven days, the Royal Council would vote on a motion from the Regent to declare Lucien unfit to reign. The grounds were set out plainly. He had lost his company to a lawsuit. He was under investigation by a foreign government. And he had used the seal of the Crown to protect a woman accused of espionage. Casimir closed by saying he took no pleasure in any of it, and that he hoped his nephew would come home to answer the charges in person.

Lucien handed the letter to his grandfather. Florian read it twice, and his thin fingers tightened on the page until it creased.

"So that is why someone wanted you home," he said.

It made sense. A frightened young prince, summoned to a deathbed, walking straight into a vote he had no time to prepare for. Lucien was still turning it over when the door opened and Aurelio came in, a little out of breath, his phone still in his hand.

"Your Highness. I have word from Harbridge."

Lucien's whole body went still. "Tell me."

"While we were in the air, Miss Bennett went into the old Lattice garage. Two men were waiting inside. They cornered her and demanded the master key to the Lattice code." Aurelio paused, choosing his words with care. "The one thing Vail's people were never able to steal."

"Is she hurt?"

"Our officers reached her in time. She has a cut on her hand and a cracked phone, which is why she hasn't answered you. The men ran, and they got away with nothing." Aurelio's voice softened. "She is safe, sir. She is angry, but she is safe."

Lucien let out a breath he felt he had been holding since the runway. Then the relief drained away, and something colder took its place.

He understood the whole design at once. Casimir could have sent that letter to Harbridge. A vote did not need Lucien in Valmorre, and no one had needed to fake a dying man's voice to win it. Somebody had wanted him on that plane, nine hours from the one person who could open the Lattice code without him, with a letter waiting on his seat to keep his mind on the crown. The call had never been about bringing him home.

It had been about getting him away from her.

Florian was watching his face. "Lucien," he said quietly. "Whatever you're thinking, think it carefully."

"I am, Grandfather."

He kissed the old man's forehead and stepped out into the corridor, and his uncle was already there.

Prince Casimir came toward him with his arms open, silver at his temples and grief arranged neatly on his face. He pulled Lucien into an embrace that smelled of cedar and expensive wool. "My boy," he said. "Thank God you came. I'm so sorry about all of it, the company, that poor woman, this ugly business with the Council. We'll face it together, you and I." He drew back and gave Lucien a sympathetic smile. "You must be exhausted."

Lucien embraced him back and said nothing at all.

Casimir squeezed his shoulder once and walked on toward the Council wing, his footsteps fading down the long marble hall. Lucien watched until he turned the corner. Then he looked at Aurelio.

"Ready the aircraft again," he said.

Aurelio did not ask why. He only nodded and reached for his phone.

The Council could vote without him. He was going back for Zara.