Page 70 of A Queen and HER Bad Boy
He groaned and drew back. “I’m checking on that rescue team going after Peder and Polly.”
The two were still missing and neither of them were answering their phones. Not a good sign. He could only pray that their friends hadn’t been lost in the floods… but their location wasn’t all he was hunting!
Bris’s fingers slid from his. “I contacted my father. He’s organizing rescue efforts for—for the survivors. He’s found backers willing to help.”
And those kinds of favors had more strings attached than Achilles wanted to think about, but what choice did they have?
“Father told me that he has… been on the hunt for Aggie Mnon for a while.”
And Chises Mnon hadn’t bothered to warn them. Typical. “Well, we found him,” Achilles’s voice came out harsher thanhe intended, but her father’s silence had put them at great risk. “Why keep this from us?”
“He wanted us to concentrate on… other things.”
What? Like their marriage? Securing the crown? Or even more likely, Chises Mnon wanted nothing to scare them away from what he considered their “duty.”
“Who broke that psycho out of prison?” he asked.
“He says he doesn’t know. Someone with padded pockets, someone who can benefit from the chaos of a Tirrojan Civil War.”
Rich and corrupt. That could be anyone. The Earl of Alexopoulos? Anyone in the High Consortium! Or… Aggie had said something about his father being the one to blame. That was it! Achilles was done with stumbling blindly through the darkness; finished with being a puppet; he’d get the truth, even if that meant dragging the information into the light himself. “I’ll be back soon.”
Leaving Bris after everything that happened felt like losing a part of himself. But she was safe—her security was here; the doctor was checking her vitals. She’d be fine! Achilles tore himself away, striding through the marble corridors. Once again, the gold-embossed walls and red carpets gave way to rougher stone as he descended into the bowels of the palace, where ancient barbarism lurked beneath their civilized veneer.
O Skia acted like he knew what was happening, and it made a strange kind of sense; after all, the Island of Aeaea seemed to be the center of their country’s troubles—from the mysterious massacres caused by Operation C.I.R.C.E., to a battle for resources that impoverished their people, to their hero whispering darkly of his father still being alive. He’d have the answers!
Deeper and deeper, Achilles wound into the belly of the palace until the glitter of modern civilization was barely recognizable.O Skia had said that he’d talk for a price. Maybe Achilles wasn’t willing to let him go, but he’d work out a deal with him that he’d be insane not to accept.
Returning to the iron-barred entrance where bare bulbs cast harsh shadows over medieval stone, he faced the security chief—a heavyset man with graying temples and beefy hands. Once again, the man watched the prince with unease.
“Let me see O Skia.”
“I’m… I’m not sure where he was transferred,” the man stammered over an answer that seemed rehearsed. “Your Royal Highness, you’ll have to take it up with Phoenix.”
“You don’t know where your most dangerous prisoner is?” Achilles’s voice turned to a hiss, knowing he sounded threatening and not caring. Something strange was happening here. Insubordination or incompetence? It was all unacceptable. “Get me to the Shadow in five minutes or I’ll find a new security chief.”
The man plucked up his walkie talkie and immediately started talking furiously in their native tongue, “Irthe opos akrivos ipe oti tha erthei. Ti thelete na tou po?”
If he thought this “foreigner” wouldn’t understand, he was sadly mistaken. The guy was desperately pleading for help with a “situation.”
“Tha miliso mazi tou!” a voice crackled through the receiver. Achilles understood every word, just as much as he recognized the owner of it—Phoenix, that power-hungry usurper, who promised to take care of this little “problem.”
Would Phoenix show this foreigner his place then?
Strange, yet unsurprising, that the chancellor was already safely ensconced in the palace after leaving his sovereign to die. After Achilles had returned, he’d learned the traitor had hardly lifted a finger to retrieve them. The man was so assured of his jobas Chises Mnon’s cockroach that he’d forgotten to fake his duties and keep his bread and butter alive!
True to his word, Phoenix appeared around the corner like a specter in his immaculate uniform. “You cannot imagine my relief at seeing you alive.” His reproachful, glittering pale eyes showed that he blamed Achilles entirely for that accident in town, likely for the storm and the flooding too!
Phoenix might have tricked him into believing that this rage stemmed from his desire to protect them, except for one itsy bitsy hiccup: “Judging by the swiftness of your departure,” Achilles said, “I’m unconvinced that you truly cared what happened to us.”
“A crisis at the palace called my attention—”
And stole precedence over his sovereign’s safety? “What happened to our security? One second they were there, the next gone… did you not expect us to survive to complain to your puppet master?”
“And this coming from the man who’d assured me that he knew what he was doing?” Phoenix didn’t attempt to hide his scorn. “Are you prepared to listen to my warnings now?”
“It seemed you were doing everything in your power to make it a fatal mistake,” Achilles snapped back. “I don’t care if you turn your back on me, but Bris is a different story. She was almost killed by Aggie Mnon.”
Phoenix’s stony silence reeked of disapproval. Taking a deep breath, he bowed curtly. “I will do everything in the future to ensure her life is never again placed in danger.”
