Page 14 of The Bodyguard

Chapter Seven

Kayne

“It’s my uncle!” she shouts at me now. “Open the damn door.”

I don’t make a move. Something feels wrong. Yet the only way the man could know about the safe house is if the king himself told him the coordinates.

Neil Johnsen is fifty-five, bald, with brown eyes. He's heavyset but still maintains his strength. He’s the younger brother of the late Queen Anna: ex-army, ex-secret intelligence. He took a bullet for the king fifteen years ago. It hadn’t been a deliberate assassination attempt; at least that’s what the evidence presented.

The trigger was pulled by an eighteen-year-old male, who wanted to disperse the crowd at a rally where the king was speaking. Apparently, he had only wanted to scare the king.

The male belonged to a small group who considered themselves freedom fighters and called themselves Freedom Against the Monarch or FATM. They’re regarded as all noise and no action by Strohamden's law enforcement.

Neil Johnsen is a man both the king and the princess trust without condition.But just as I know everything about him, he knows enough about me to come at me prepared.

The selection of weapons, grenades, AK 47s, and Glocks I have hidden in the cabin means nothing until I know what I’m up against. And I know I’m up against something. This isn’t a social visit. I could tell from the way a muscle twitched in his cheek. The way he kept looking behind him, meant he brought a team of back-ups.

Why?

He knows I’m no match for him and anyone else he puts in my way. Unless he has some sort of insurance elsewhere.

I make the mistake of glancing at the princess.

I would raze the entire planet for her and everyone in it.

“Langley,” Johnsen says and lifts his phone up to the camera. And there it is. His remote insurance because anything else would see him and his men dead by my hands.

The princess closes the space between us and strains her eyes at the tablet.

“I don’t understand,” she says. She doesn’t. She questions why her uncle is showing me a live image of Sophia's six-year-old sister, Princess Lia, in her playroom with her nanny.

She doesn’t see what’s wrong with the picture. The nanny is Princess Lia’s second nanny, not her primary. She’s watching Princess Lia complete a puzzle. There’s a gun on the nanny’s lap, concealed with a napkin, but clear as day to someone with training.

The nanny is focused. That makes her dangerous. There’s also the residual evidence of a stamp on the back of her hand. Red ink. It’s vague, but it tells me she’s been to a FATM meeting.

Johnsen lowers his phone. I’ve seen enough. I know who's in bed with him now.

“What is going on?” The princess is frantic now.

“Don’t say a word. Your uncle is not your friend.”

She takes a step back, horror and disbelief in her eyes as she realizes the truth in my words.

I whip off my T-shirt and hand it to her. She takes it from me unconsciously, but then what she’s wearing enters her mind. She slips it over her head. It’s big enough that it covers her completely and reaches almost to above her knees: at least longer than what she was wearing before.

I don’t even bother taking a gun or any kind of weapon, not when there’s one aimed at her sister too far away for me to protect. I don’t put on another T-shirt either. Until I know what Johnsen has planned, I want to appear as nonthreatening as possible.

I open the door and step aside to let him in. The princess stays where she is. She’s torn between running forward into the arms of the man she thought of as another paternal figure in her life, and standing where she is.

But she doesn’t back down. Even wearing my old, faded T-shirt, she stands up tall and graceful, strong but wary.

Johnsen looks at her as he enters. The surprise in his eyes that she doesn’t run to him is clear. He wanted that. He wanted to have the satisfaction of hugging her and telling her everything was going to be okay and then pointing the gun to her head.

Her unreceptive reaction throws him off-balance for a moment before he continues.

“What have we here? Aren’t you two ever so cozy together,” he says, waving his gun between us. Me shirtless. The princess wearing my shirt. The fact that he’s found us this way irks him for some reason.

I survey the number of men he’s brought with him. Six in total. All of them armed. Four are professional. The other two are new and nervous. They’re all part of FATM. Just like Neil Johnsen is now. Maybe he was always part of the group.

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