Page 1 of Stay Close
CHAPTER 1
Edie
The moment the planetouches down at Queen Magda International Airport, I take a picture, capturing the frozen landscape. It’s blurry and sophisticated. I post it to Pixy.
The caption is dry. “Arrived in Sondmark. Looking forward to participating in these historic negotiations. #tradedeal #Sove.” It works with the image I want to project. Edie Spencer: international lawyer, great hair haver, someone who definitely got asked to her eighth-grade dance.
Never mind that an hour ago, I was unwrapping the heatless curls in the tiny forward lavatory, shaking them out with a squeak of delight and a whisper of gratitude.Thank you, surprisingly helpful YouTube teens.I freshened up my make-up, and though it was difficult to get a good edge on my eyeliner when we hit turbulence over the North Sea, I persevered.
Disembarking, I sling a long coat over one arm and follow a line of passengers waiting to have their passports stamped.
“Where are you traveling from?” asks the customs agent when she calls me forward. She’s probably never witnessed anyone in the history of airline travel as professional as I am.
“Arlington, Virginia, USA.”
“Where are you staying?” she asks, her English accent clear but marked.
“The Summer Palace.”
Her brows shoot up, and she straightens her shoulders. “Business or pleasure, ma’am?”
Ma’am. I get a little thrill when people call me ma’am, like I’m a grown-up person with a mortgage and a fancy coffee machine. It never gets old. “Business,” I reply, trying to sound like being a guest of Her Majesty Queen Helena is something that happens to me every day.
“Weelkommeto the Kingdom of Sondmark,” she says, inking a cherry-red stamp in my passport.
I pause before the last security barrier, using my phone to check my appearance. No signs of anything in my teeth. My credentials will speak for themselves—I entered Cornell at 16, Harvard Law at 19, and was taken on at Knickerbocker, Gouss & Astor as the youngest hire in 154 years. I’ve been a workhorse for them, a wunderkind, but it’s time to level up. I can’t let a smear of lipstick or a badly buttoned blouse derail me.
I scan the waiting area for my bodyguard. My roommate, Sara, howled when I told her. “Bodyguard? Like,Sworn to protect you at all costs, even if it means taking a bullet in the armand being sexily nursed back to health in an abandoned cottagebodyguard?”
“They call them personal protection officers,” I corrected over a glass of wine. “I think they’re supposed to look like Greg From Accounting, these days. Discreet, reserved, and completely ignorable.”
But as my gaze arcs over the reception area, I wonder how I’m supposed to find someone who blends into the woodwork.
“Black Swan Protection,” I whisper. “Black Swan Protection.”
Though I’ll be staying at the palace, my security detail is my own. The fewer favors I owe my hosts, the better. I spot the neon yellow sign reading “Edith” and I release a breath. That’s me. This is one of the benefits of having a name no one has used in sixty years.
I shoulder through the security doors and make a beeline for the sign when I see a flash of movement closing in fast. I identify it as a hurricane of tie-dyed scarves, but that can’t be right. Despite how bouncy my hair is, I’ve been on a transatlantic flight for eight hours and my bewildered mind struggles to make sense of the information coming at me.
The human hurricane maintains its vector, and I shrink away, pulling my luggage to my chest. Black-suited arms enclose me in a blur of motion, pulling me down. I brace for impact, but when it comes, I hardly budge. Instead, a clatter of metal hits the ground and a gloppy mess slides after it. I sniff. Of allthe things I expected to encounter today, nowhere on the list was lemon pie.
Dead silence covers the entire terminal and then a man shouts, “LeaveSoveto the sea!” The shout is taken up by dozens more. “LeaveSoveto the sea! LeaveSoveto the sea!” Through a gap in the arms which have gathered me close, I see restless, angry faces, protestors forming a circle, holding makeshift signs and puppets, their chant accompanied by a pulsing, humming music. Surely that can’t be a didgeridoo. Not in Sondmark.
“Leave the bag,” the man holding me commands, his accent intense and obviously American. “I’m your protection officer. When I say, run straight for the doors and break left.” I wait, the sound of my beating heart loud in my ears. Then comes his signal. “Go!”
I go. He charges the weakest part of the circle, crashing into a crowd of reuniting families and college students, dragging me after him.
“So sorry,” I shout, half carried, half tripping, the man pulling and steering me forward. He shoves me through a heavy door and into the freezing air. My leather cross-body bag—one the Wise Internet Mentors have told me to pay good money for because I’ll use it forever and never have to have it replaced—drags along the pavement, through jagged puddles of ice. The coat, purchased because I love it and you can take it anywhere—a palace, for instance—drops next to a grimy cigarette bin.
In near panic, I try to wrench my hand from his to retrieve it. His grip is too strong.
“Where are we going?” I gasp, wishing I’d opted for the “Visiting a Scandinavian country in the depths of winter” boots instead of the “Going straight from first-class into a private town car and thence to a palace” boots. We skip the crosswalk and I dodge through traffic, scrambling up filthy mounds of snow only to fall into the slurry of muddy slush at the bottom.
He yanks me to my feet and pushes my head down. “Black Fiio, two o’clock.”
I’m a sensible girl, an accomplished lawyer, and I know not to get into a strange car with a man who may or may not be who he says he is—much less a man who doesn’t care that I lost a coat you have to make an appointment to buy. “Wait—”
He does not wait. He hauls me along as a flurry of commotion breaks out near the terminal doors. The protestors are on our tail, darting into the flow of cars, risking their safety on nothing more than reflective vests, homemade signs, and the good nature of their fellow citizens. Their chant is unbroken. “LeaveSoveto the sea!”
