“Isla, would you—”
“Tell me what you need.”
“My mobile. It’s on the nightstand in the bedroom.”
“Say no more.” She scoots from my lap with a brief kiss to my cheek, and then I hear nothing but the quick tread of her feet padding down the hall.
Be calm. Be cool.
Moving through every room of the palace, I continue to note the unchanged time. 2:21:15. A few years back, we paid a fortune reinstalling new security at Buckingham. King John’s paranoia that Princess Evangeline’s killer was back had spread throughout Holyrood, forcing the lot of us to put in more hours. I barely slept, barely ate. We never discovered who killed her—an unsolved murder case spanning almost thirty years—but the new security system went a long way in settling the king’s ruffled feathers.
And someone’s tampered with it now.
“Saxon.” Footsteps gain momentum down the hall, and then louder, more urgent, “Saxon!”
Isla.
Heart hammering in my chest, I enter the hallway in three strides. She stands there with my mobile in her hand, her blue eyes big in her face.
I crowd her immediately, reaching for her arms to pull her close. “What is it? Sweetheart, tell me what it is.”
“Clarke, whoever he—”
Snatching the phone from her hands, I turn it over and see a single, unread message flashing across the home screen: HELLPP FIR
“What the hell does that mean?” I check the timestamp of the text, and my stomach, it bottoms out completely. 2:35 AM. Sent ten minutes after the security cameras became frozen in time. Something happened. Something bad, something big, and, without pause, I turn on my heel, heading straight for the living room and the telly.
“Is he one of your agents?” Isla asks, following closely. Unmitigated worry scrapes through her voice. “That text, it sent a chill down my spine, Saxon. He’s in trouble, wherever he is.”
“He’s at Buckingham Palace.” I find the clicker, stuffed between the sofa cushions, and turn on the television. “We have him stationed with the queen.”
To keep her safe. To keep her alive.
Dread becomes a fist locked around my lungs.
Isla’s hand lands on my back, moving in soothing circles. “Whatever happened, I’m sure it’s a misunderstanding. It has to be. Clarke will be fine, and the queen—she’ll be fine too.”
Except that the second the news station appears on the screen, I know that it’s anything but.
Buckingham Palace is on fire.
Flames flicker toward the sky, angry and volatile. Glass windows implode from the heat stored within, shattering into thousands of broken shards, as the camera crew pans from one wing of the historic palace to the other. And then the entire upper floor detonates with a catastrophic boom! loud enough to be heard from London to Edinburgh.
Screams erupt on screen, from the crowds gathered around the front gates of Buckingham. A frenzy stirs, the camera toppling over until the view ends with a sideways shot of the palace on fire, hundreds of feet trampling past in a flurry to flee.
“Oh, my God,” Isla whispers. “Oh, my God.”
I ring Damien without thought, and he picks up immediately. I hear him panting as though he’s running.
“Tell me Clarke got her out,” I bark into the phone, the first thing I say. “Tell me you’ve heard from—”
“She’s stuck inside, Saxon. The entire palace is on fucking fire and she’s stuck inside.”
My ass hits the edge of the sofa as I stumble backward, my eyes rooted to the morose image of stampeding feet on the television and the abject screams filling the quiet space of my safehouse, and the knowledge that whoever did this had it planned.
I see nothing but flames, feel nothing but horror, and hear my hoarse voice rasp only one thing:
“Long live the queen.”
To be continued…