Page 9 of Mercenary Princess

Chapter 4

Paris, France

Sophia and Jen had barely exited the car when they heard a door off the underground garage fly open. Sophia smiled as one of her oldest and closest friends, Irina, practically jogged her way to them. The Russian-American heiress had her long blond hair piled in a knot on the top of her head, and she’d encased her lean model body in blue and white running leggings and a hoodie. Her green eyes were bright as she whooped with excitement. “We’ve already got more than we’ve had in months, and Jean Luc just pulled up at Élysée Palace!”

Jean Luc was at the French president’s residence.

Some of Sophia’s lingering anxiety fled at Irina’s excited greeting. When her friend pulled her into a tight hug, the rest melted away with the warmth. They hooked arms and headed to their “war room” through the door Irina had come through.

Sophia was safe in Irina’s house. No more watching for tails or keeping up a serene façade. There, in the company of those who knew her secrets and loved her despite her flaws—maybe because of them—she could simply be herself. She felt her lips curve at that thought. She only wished she could stay there longer than a few hours. Maybe hide out for a month or a year. No matter how burned out she got, she wouldn’t stop doing what they were doing. Her work mattered. The organization they’d built, along with a mercenary front, gave her a purpose she could actually be proud of. As a bonus, it had long since passed self-sustaining. Their investments had increased exponentially over the years. A zing of pride filled her for having personally cultivated many of those ventures.

They’d come a long way in the past eight years since she, Irina, and their friend Riot had witnessed the dark underbelly of their world and took up a cause they’d refused to relinquish. Her lips twitched as she remembered how incredibly idealistic and naive they’d been—young, but wise enough to have roped Riot’s dead brother’s best friend, Forde, into their big plans for bringing down a murderous Saudi prince.

She remembered meeting Forde. At the time, he’d been no more than an aristocratic playboy sailing through university on his family’s connections. Having his best friend’s sister and her teenage friends emotionally blackmail him had wiped away all that signature charm and replaced it with a resigned sense of horror. Nothing about getting him on board had been easy, but they’d done it.

Eight years later, all four of them brought something important to the table. They each held unique connections to the wealthiest and most corrupt members of society, and they all fostered public personas that made them appear unlikely threats to dangerous men and women doing bad deeds.

A princess, an heiress, and a rock star’s daughter walk into a bar…as Irina once irreverently joked after far too many drinks in university.

In reality, the three of them had been walking out of a pub that grizzly night.

Tensions had already been high as they’d slipped from the small local pub near their Swiss boarding school, La Couronne. The instant she and her friends exited the warm confines, they were hit with a blast of frigid air and a strong sense of foreboding. Then came a blast of icy wind, whipping Sophia’s hair against her cheeks, bringing the coppery stench of blood and death into her lungs.

Sometimes that scent came to her in her sleep, haunting her almost as much as the image of the boy crumpled in the blood-soaked snow, his swollen, vacant eyes staring up into the dark canopy of the wooded path leading back to the school. It had been the pub owner’s son, left like nothing more than garbage, dead leaves kicked over his beaten body.

Everything else about that night was hazy. Sophia barely remembered fighting Mischa, Irina’s loyal guard, as he ordered the three of them away from the crime scene. They’d cried and told him to do something, to call the authorities. Her stomach clenched with the memory of flashlights in the dark, and the heavier sense of fear that had nearly crushed her. It felt like hours passed before Mischa wrangled them into Irina’s dorm room and paced like a man possessed as he gave them a harsh lesson in reality. He’d been so furious that the lecture had been half in Russian, half in English.

They’d known who’d done it. It had been obvious even though they hadn’t seen it happen. The blatantly cruel Fahd, the Saudi prince from their school, had groped the dead boy’s young sister, and then the boys had nearly fought in the pub. She still remembered Fahd’s sinister smile as the prince said something to the boy that they couldn’t hear. The prince and his friends left. She and her friends had already felt uneasy around Fahd, so they stayed at the pub until it closed to avoid running into him.

If they hadn’t stayed so late, they might have prevented the boy’s murder. Or have been caught in the middle of it—three girls and Mischa against the prince, his security, and his friends.

Mischa had demanded they stop crying for justice. He emphasized the prince would never pay for the boy’s death, but they would pay if they spoke out against the Saudi. He spat those words over and over, attempting to drill it into their horrified minds. He cursed and barked at them for hours and said they had not seen the prince kill the boy, so they would do nothing. Then he laid out what he believed would happen next and demanded they watch and wait.

The events that followed proved Mischa right. It seemed the dean of the school had been paid well for the cover-up, a fact they’d uncovered after breaking into his office. They’d learned a great deal the night Riot had cracked the safe into Dean Chadwick’s office. They’d found his secret ledger—an accounting of bad deeds covered up by the school. Two decades of “services” had been accounted for in that leather-bound tome.

It had codes Sophia and the others deciphered easily enough. Descriptions of “Excessive Grounds Damages,” “After Hours Concierge Services,” and “Courtesy Public Relations and Legal Document Fees” all indicated cover-up services. In Fahd’s case, the dean had paid off the authorities and had “cleaners” stage the scene and eliminate evidence. All the fees for that night totaled upward of two million dollars, all seemingly paid to the school by the Saudi family, if the “paid in full” notation had been correct.

Not all the accounting notations had been about students committing crimes. Some were about security breaches that had to be cleaned up. Children of the wealthy were often targets for ransom. Elite families paid a great deal to La Couronne to have extreme security features and rooms for the children’s private guards, should the family wish to send their own protection details, as Sophia’s and Irina’s families had done.

Most of the students learned their way around the tight security for trips to the pub and likewise, but private guards were constantly around, most turning a blind eye to whatever their charges were doing. The overall sentiment being that as long as the kids were breathing, they’d done their jobs.

That ledger and the events that led them to the dean’s safe changed their lives.

They hadn’t gone to the authorities.

The local boy’s death and their sleuthing had cemented the fact that some of the elite had too much power and protection to confront directly. They hadn’t been completely naïve, even at sixteen. They’d each had their own family skeletons to drive home what they’d learned. If they hadn’t done something in their world, who else would have?

Taking down Fahd had been their first act of justice, but not their last. Between their ledger marks, they’d taken mercenary jobs no one else would touch. She hated taking so much time between ledger jobs, but destroying the powerful took a lot of preparation, and those activities couldn’t be linked back to them.

What truly made her edgy was that Jean Luc seemed to be a different breed than the other upper crust they’d taken down. The half dozen other marks had flaunted their untouchable status and were arrogant in their abuse of power. But if Jean Luc’s name hadn’t been in that ledger, they might never have known to delve deeply into his life.

“What’d you find out?” Sophia asked as she, Irina, and Jen stepped into a semi-dark room full of glass monitors and sound equipment. The screens of bright-blue and crimson lettering and audio waves partially illuminated the space, which was occupied by the two other people she’d been expecting to see. In the far corner, Lauren, Irina’s personal assistant, had her long legs curled under her as she chomped on a sandwich, which was probably the reason for the bacon smell in the room.

“About time you got here,” Lauren said, spinning in the office chair with a mouthful of food.

Jen headed in Lauren’s direction, likely to use the computer console next to Lauren’s to access the hotel’s security feeds for any clue about who’d potentially followed them. That thought sent a wave of renewed unease through Sophia, but she leashed it. No use worrying when she didn’t have enough information to do anything about it.

James sent a hand up without even looking away from his monitor. The guy’s thick, short dreadlocks were squashed by the massive headphones he wore, and his fingers glided masterfully over the keys.

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