A Great Prince: A Royal Bad Boy Romance (9 page)

Nikolas was happy, really happy. For the first time in a long time. In all his partying and carousing, he’d felt “good,” sure, he’d felt pleasure, but not this… not happiness.

He was in a basement, late at night, surrounded by his old crew. Men he’d raised to high positions, men he’d put into “do nothing” jobs, all of them men with whom he’d fought on the streets. He had a gun strapped in a shoulder holster, and a knife in his boot. He was going to war, only this time on the side of good.

Here was Count Barnabas of course, his trusted second. And Baron Erik, the only baron in the world with full sleeve tattoos, ready to break bones, along with his own men. And he had Peter and Adam, veteran “second story men” who’d broken into István’s office and photographed the evidence of collusion with the Burgenland bankers. And Aron, the sneaky little pickpocket, who’d somehow showed up when Peter and Adam had. And a couple dozen other men, hard men, hand picked by Barnabas.

And Karl Lengyel. “The one honest man in the room,” Nikolas said to him jokingly.

“Not any more,” Karl said with a smile, clapping him on the shoulder.

Nikolas flushed. He was stunned.
So this is what it’s like, to feel real pride.

“Okay,” he said to the men. “Here’s the deal. We’re moving against István, all his men, and all his supporters. The army, the police, the secret services.”

Nikolas knew he had it now – the air of command, that royal tone he’d so envied in Francesca. That natural authority, to which men gravitated. And now he knew where it came from – not from accident of birth, not from a sense of entitlement. It came naturally when he spoke truth, demanded justice, invoked might in the name of right.

He had become a man to be followed. A man other men would die for.

He held up a sheaf of papers. “These are arrest warrants, signed by me. If we move fast enough, arrest the right people at the top, we can…”

His cell phone rang. He reached into his pocket and pushed the volume button to silence it. “We can do this.”

Peter spoke up. “So we’re overthrowing the government?”

Nikolas grinned. “No. After all,
I
am the government.”

They laughed. He went on. “They don’t have a legal leg to stand on. They gave me this authority, and now I’m using it.”

His phone rang again. He cursed and pulled it out. It was the number of Francesca’s burner phone.

“What’s up?”

She was sobbing. “You have to run.”

“What?”

“Run. They’re coming for you. My father is dead, they killed him, and they’re going to put Leopold on both thrones.”

Nikolas’ eyes narrowed. “Are you okay?”

“I’m… they doped me up, but… I’m coming out of it. I have friends here, and I need to run. They’re going to help me. You need to go, too.”

“I’ve got arrest warrants for…”

“I know. And they know, too. Run, Niko.” There was a rustle on the other end. “I have to go.” She hung up.

Nikolas saw black, then red. He looked around the room. Men looked back, ready for action when they saw the look on his face. He looked at every face… including the one that wouldn’t meet his eyes.

“Aron. Look at me.”

“Niko, I…”

“I am your king, Aron,” he said softly. “Niko is gone.”

The other men turned on the little pickpocket. “It’s for the best, N… Majesty. They told me you’d been brainwashed, by… him!” Aron pointed an accusing finger at Karl.

“Take him outside and—”

Nikolas stopped. He turned to look at Karl, whose face was impassive, unreadable.

“No. Tie him up and leave him here, for his new friends to do with as they will.”

“Niko, no, God, please!”

He held up a hand. Aron went silent. “Listen.”

They could all hear it, the rumble of trucks pulling up outside. “We’re trapped.” He pulled his gun out of its holster. “None of us will get out of here alive if we sit here.”

“There’s a tunnel, Majesty,” Barnabas said with a smile, checking his AK-47, ready to kill.

Nikolas laughed. “Of course there is, Count Barnabas. You’d never put me in a corner with no escape, would you?”

“Never, Majesty.” He directed two men to start moving a heavy cabinet, behind which was concealed a secret tunnel.

Barnabas waved at three men. “You, take the top of the staircase. You three, the bottom.”

The men looked at Nikolas and saluted. Nikolas saluted back. The order was clear – the three at the top would die to buy time, as would the three at the bottom, but they would give their king enough time to escape.

He turned to Baron Erik. “Get Karl out of here first.”

“Majesty, our duty is to—”

“Is to obey me. Listen. This isn’t sentiment talking, is it, Karl?”

The old man looked at him. “No. Nikolas is right. I’m the opposition, the voice of moral authority, if I do say so myself. If the people see me allied with him, they don’t have a leg to stand on.”

The gunfire started at the top of the stairs, and the first body tumbled down to the basement.

The first man to die for me,
Nikolas thought, pain crossing his features.

Karl grabbed his hand, clearly seeing what was on his mind. “No. The men who die tonight die for their country. Make their sacrifice count. Let’s go.”

The old tunnel’s supports shook as heavy vehicles bounced overhead, bringing more troops to the shootout. Dirt fell from the ceiling as Nikolas and his men rushed towards the end. It was ironic, Nikolas thought absently – the tunnel had been used by his people to escape Nazis, Communists, and now his own alleged troops.

The gun battle was moving closer to the tunnel’s opening, and Nikolas knew that meant more men dying.
My men,
he thought grimly.
And I will avenge them.

“Faster!” Barnabas shouted, as bullets began to pursue them down the tunnel. They reached a heavy metal door, padlocked.

Erik fumbled with the key, as their men returned fire, delaying the troops.

“Here,” Barnabas said. With his half-missing hand, he deftly stabbed the key into the lock and opened it.

Nikolas grinned. “Half a hand and you’re still faster than Erik.”

Erik laughed. “Shut up, Niko.” Royalty was forgotten by all of them in the heat of battle.

Nikolas pushed Karl through the door, firing his Tokarev down the tunnel. Only when his magazine was empty did he let Erik and Barnabas push him through the thick steel door and slam it shut behind them.

“We made it,” Nikolas said to Karl, but his smile faded as he saw the ashen color of the old man’s face.

Karl smiled, and lifted his hand from his white shirt, revealing a red bloom.

“Oh God,” Nikolas gasped. “He’s been shot.”

Karl let himself sag to the ground. “It’s okay, Nikolas.”

“No. No, no no… Barnabas, help him up…”

Barnabas didn’t move. “Niko. It’s a liver shot.”

“No. NO!”

Karl held up his bloody hand. “Niko. Come here.”

Niko fell to his knees, sobbing. “You… you can’t die. You’re the… shit. You’re like a father to me.”

“This is for the best, don’t you see?” He coughed, winced. “I’m a martyr now. Obi-Wan. More powerful than you can possibly imagine.”

“We have to go,” Erik said, listening to the uncanny silence on the other side of the door. “They’re going to blow the lock.”

“Karl,” Nikolas said, clutching his hand. “What do I do?”

“Be yourself, Nikolas. Your true self. The man I saw that night in the basement, the man who stopped my assassination. The people will follow that man.”

Karl winced with the pain. “Go,” Karl said, clutching Nikolas’ hand. “Promise me you’ll see this through.”

Niko gripped his hand back, hard. “All the way to the end. I swear it, Karl.”

The old man smiled and closed his eyes, his grip relaxing.

“Niko,” Barnabas said. “Now. We go and we avenge him, or we stay and die.”

Nikolas stood up. “Yes. Let’s go.”

“Highness… Highness!”

Francesca groaned, pushing away the hands shaking her by the shoulders. “G’way…”

“Wake up! We have to go!”

The terror in the voice reached some primal center in her brain, bypassing the fog of drugs in the rest of her head. She opened her eyes. “What?”

It was Gustav, her old stable master. “Is it time to ride the pony?” she mumbled.

The old man smiled. “No, Highness. You’re ready for the ‘big horse’ today. Come on, let’s go.”

“Mama won’t want me to… oh. Oh God.”

Everything flooded back to her now. Her father, dead, her mother, dead, her stepmother, in charge, and Nikolas…

“Nikolas!” she shouted, bolting upright.

“Come on, Highness. We have to go,
now.”

She looked at Gustav wonderingly. The horseman had refused to retire, and she had seen to it that he’d had his way there.

“Why?”

“They are going to arrest you for your father’s murder.”

She laughed, astonished and indignant. “Impossible.”

He cupped her chin in his hand, as he’d done when she was a temperamental child, forcing her to look up into his eyes, to know that he meant what he said. “Do you really doubt Alexandra Therese’s ability to do anything now?”

She was fully awake now. “No. No, I don’t. I have to make a call.”

As she phoned Nikolas, she dressed in her riding gear – black jacket, black boots, white shirt, and a black cap into which she stuffed her hair, but black pants instead of the traditional white ones.

“White pants will make you easier to see, Highness. And we must not be seen.”

Her heart hammered as Gustav opened the door of her room and looked down the Palace hall. He saw someone and nodded. “Come on.”

Francesca looked down the hall and her heart leapt. “Klaus!” she hissed. It was her old servant, dismissed by the queen.

Klaus smiled and put a finger to his lips.

“Yes, Highness,” Gustav said, taking her hand and pulling her away in the opposite direction. “You have many allies in this country.”

“But the risk…” she protested.

The hallway ended at a massive portrait of some old Imperial fuddy duddy. Gustav knocked on the frame. She heard a click, and the side of the portrait popped away from the wall.

Gustav opened the secret door just enough for them to slip through.

“Darling girl,” Klaus’ wife Amelia said on the other side, hugging Francesca.

“Amelia…”

“Go. Go and save this country.”

Francesca suddenly realized the stakes. This wasn’t just an escape. This was a revolution. Like Catherine the Great, fleeing her insane husband Czar Peter III, she would have to rally her own supporters and take power.

That show is right… in the game of thrones, you win or you die
, she thought. If they could kill her father, anything was possible.

The spiral staircase was dark, narrow and cold, a relic of ancient regimes. The only difference was that Gustav held a flashlight and not a candle.

At the bottom of the stairs, he knocked on another door, and got a knock back – all clear.

They exited at the rear corner of Schloss Esterhazy, where a thicket of trees hugged the building. There were a few exposed yards between the Palace and the trees, and she held her breath while Gustav looked for any activity.

“Now. Run,” he said, and they did.

Once they were in the trees, she heard a snort. “Bellissima,” she smiled.

Her mare snorted again, acknowledging her voice. The magnificent white horse was fully saddled and ready, and Gustav’s horse Trajan pawed the ground impatiently.

“Where are we going?” Francesca asked as she mounted her horse.

“Across the Schlosspark, then a fast dash across the field and into the deep forest. There are people waiting there for you.”

“What people?”

Gustav grinned. “You’ll see.”

The trees gave such dense cover that the forest was nearly pitch black, until they approached a light source, lanterns and flashlights like fireflies in the distance.

She gasped when they arrived at the rendezvous. There must have been three hundred people there. She recognized so many of them: the kitchen and wait staff from Le Poulet, the fired servants from the Palace, even some old pensioners, friends of Sonia’s from the old days.

Tears came to her instantly. “It can’t be…”

Gustav shook his head. “It is. All these people, here, for you. All your kindnesses are remembered, princess, all the things you did with no need to do them, other than that you are a good person.”

She looked around her. “You should all go home. This is dangerous. My father was murdered and I…”

“God save our rightful queen!” a man shouted from the rear.

“God save our rightful queen!” The chant was taken up, but only for a second.

“Silence!” Gustav shouted. “There’s time enough for that later. Right now, we need to get the princess to safety. We have people on the railway, they have a train that will take you to—”

“No,” Francesca said, something dawning on her. “We don’t flee. We stay.” She turned to Gustav. “The media, the international media, are they at the palace, reporting on Father’s death?”

Gustav grinned. “Highness, are you thinking what I think you’re thinking?”

Francesca smiled for the first time in a long time. “I believe you are. But first, we’re going to need some torches.”

Even in a quaint old town like Eisenstadt, the sight was absurdly anachronistic. Her Royal and Imperial Highness, Princess Francesca Albertine, rode on her horse down Glorieteallee, people gawking at the sight from houses along the route, then gathering their coats and joining the swelling crowd behind her. She rode past Joseph Haydn Konservatorium, and, with a slight tug of the reins, turned her horse and her people onto Route 52 for a few yards, then onto Esterhazyplatz and the entrance to the Palace.

There were vans with large antennas on their roofs parked in front of the gates, news crews sending live feeds to BBC, CNN, and ZDF. The soft decorative bulbs used to illuminate the gates at night were no match for the harsh camera lights. Rather than guards in ceremonial uniform, the fence was lined with reporters staring into the glare and reporting live – the guards having moved to the other side of the gates to keep them out.

There were police barricades holding back the people, citizens of Burgenland clearly angry, shouting at the Palace. She wondered – were they shouting for her blood, the blood of the patricidal, regicidal daughter?

Francesca halted at the edge of the road, and her people halted behind her. She swallowed hard, terrified.
This was a stupid idea, I’m a stupid girl…

Then her cell phone rang, the burner phone she’d set up with Nikolas. Trepidation made her hesitate –
What if he’s dead, what if this is his killer?

It astonished her, how much she cared now, how important it was that Nikolas be okay. And not just for their people, but for her.

“Nikolas?”

“Francesca.” The relief in his own voice was obvious. “Your father, it’s terrible…”

“Thank you. Are you and Karl and your…”

“Karl’s dead.”

“Oh my God. I’m so sorry.”

“Me too. But not as sorry as some people are going to be. Where are you?”

“You wouldn’t believe it. At the edge of the Palace grounds, on a white horse, with villagers with torches behind me.”

He roared with laughter, and it warmed her to hear it. “A Velvet Revolution, then?”

“I hope so. And you?”

He paused. “Francesca, it’s going to be violent here. These men won’t go easily. If I don’t… if you…”

“Nikolas. Don’t. Come here, come to safety.”

She could see the smirk on his face as he spoke his next words. “Now, princess, you know better than that. A Great Prince must do what’s right for his people.”

I was so wrong about him. I…

She put it aside. Feelings, even thoughts about feelings, had no place now. Later, she would think about that.

“Yes. You’re right. Nikolas, do what you have to do. But take care. Listen, what you said about Juan Carlos in Spain, gave me an idea…”

He said nothing until she finished. “That’s perfect. But without Karl, I wouldn’t know what to say, what to…”

“Speak from your heart, Niko. You know what Karl would say.”

“Yes… yes, I do.”

“Nikolas…”

“Yes?”

“Take care of yourself.”

“You too, princess. I’ll see you soon.” He hung up.

The media had finally stopped gazing into its own navel and noticed her, and the mob behind her. She flicked the reins and headed towards them.

The mob saw her, pointed, shouted. She prepared herself for the onslaught, for her imprisonment… if she lasted that long.

But then they cheered. “The princess! The princess!” They broke through the barricades and rushed towards her.

Surrounded now by adoring followers, she sat tall in the saddle, her head high, her face composed. The police had an arrest warrant for her, but they were stunned by the sight – something out of history, out of fairy tales, the princess at the head of her people.

She stopped in front of the gates, and the media made a circle around her, their cameras tilted up as if she were an equestrian statue, a conqueror from another age.

Francesca paused. She hadn’t thought of what to say. She had no idea how to…

They cannot eat you,
she remembered Sonia saying, and almost laughed.

“People of Burgenland. My father the king is dead, poisoned by the queen.”

They gasped as she waved a flash drive like a scepter. “On this drive is the evidence of collusion between the queen’s family of bankers and the
gengzters
and oligarchs of Danubia. They are guilty of laundering money from the drugs, human trafficking, sex slavery, loan sharking, every crime that enriches the wicked men across the border.

“Even now, my fiancée King Nikolas moves against his own enemies. He moves in… no. He moved in alliance with the great opposition leader, Karl Lengyel. But Karl Lengyel is dead, shot by Danubian soldiers.

“I, your princess, call upon you to arrest the queen for murder. I call upon you to arrest the bankers, the men behind this.”

She paused, reaching for the words of her mother Valerie’s favorite queen. “I know I have the body of a weak, feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king. Arrest me if you will, but do not stop with me. Arrest all of them, these people who have stabbed us in the heart.”

“God save the rightful queen!” Gustav shouted again, and the chant was taken up, even by the policemen who joined the adoring crowd around her.

It’s done,
she thought.
I won. Now, Nikolas, for God’s sake, succeed in your battle, and don’t get killed…