CHAPTER TWO
MAXIMUSWOKEREADYto kill. He reached for his gun and found it wasn’t there.
“I took it, obviously,” came a now familiar voice.
Annick.
He immediately remembered everything that had transpired. And he had...
He was a fool. One of the most beautiful women in all the world had attempted to seduce him earlier tonight, and he had brushed her off without so much as a second glance. Annick looked at him with her round, pale eyes and had begun to walk toward him after offering her virginity, and he had stood still. He had told himself it was to see simply what she would do next, but the fact of the matter was, he had let his guard down. Which was not something he had done in his life. Not ever.
If he had, he would be dead.
No.He had done it once before. And a woman was dead because of it. But never since.
Until now.
“What the hell did you do?”
“Chloroform,” she said, as if he were very stupid. “An old, but effective method to subdue. And now you are on my private plane.”
“I thought you had no money.”
“Not exactly. We have a limited economy in bad need of overhauling. And if selling a private plane would fix the problems I have, I would. This was obviously left over from the previous regime. The regime that no longer exists. Thank you for that. But like I said, you made this problem. I am pressed on all sides. It is not just Lackland who seeks to take advantage of my weaknesses.”
“This is kidnapping,” he said.
She spread her hands. “So it is. But I find I had no choice.”
“I hate to tell you this, Princess, but you can’t make me do what you want me to. I don’t answer to anyone.” He leaned back in his chair. “I’m no one’s bitch. Least of all yours.”
“What does this mean? Bitch? I do not wish you to be my ‘bitch.’ I wish you to be my guard and my counselor. Very clever of me. You can be all these things.”
“Why me?”
“You know why. You are sent out by your government to depose men. Bad men. You have never once carried out an operation against the innocent, and that is not a credit to any nation, but to you.”
“No,” he said. “I leave the atrocities to others.”
“But you don’t. You don’t leave atrocities. You handle them. You are Maximus King, this famous consultant and maker of social darlings. And you are The King, the military operative who has performed the most clean and precise removals of barbaric governments in modern history, whispered about and yet never really seen. Part of a branch of the military that may not truly exist. So many cover-ups, and coincidences, yes? And so you, specifically, are perfect for me. You will take a public position as my adviser, and given that I spent many years in a dungeon, it is perfect sense that I take an adviser. Adviser in public, guard in private. You are scary.”
“Not to you, it seems.”
“No, but,” she said, “you are to others. And anyway, don’t take it personally that you don’t scare me. I am not scared by much.”
She should be. She was small. Thin.
Her cheeks were round, but only because she was young. If he hadn’t known about her history, then he wouldn’t be able to guess. He knew about the royal family in Aillette. Their murders had been highly publicized at the time. Killed by a man who had their trust. An adviser to the King. That Princess Annick had been spared had been headline news. He had done even more digging into the royal family before he had gone to handle that bastard of a dictator last year. He knew that Annick was only twenty-two.
She was very pretty. Owed to a fine, aristocratic bone structure, and impossibly pale features. Her nose was small and pointed, her lips pale like the rest of her. Her lashes were nearly white, her eyes the softest of robin’s-egg blue. She looked fragile in every way. Like contact with the sun would make her burst into flame. And she was telling him that she did not fear him.
“I lost my whole family. I lost my way of living. I was a prisoner, knowing that my only hope in all the world was, someday, for someone with more power than I to change things. Now I have power. I have a plane. I have a title. That means something. I will not sit back. Not ever again. And if I must die for my actions, then I will. But I will not wait. Not anymore. I am not a coward. And I am very angry that I have had to act the coward in order to wait until I might be most effective. You, I do not fear. I fear a life spent free where I still behave as if I am in a dungeon. That is what I fear.”
He found the most grudging respect burned inside of him for Annick. Grown men feared him. As well they should. And this little Princess had kidnapped him. Something stirred inside of him, and the reaction gave him pause.
For he was not immune to feeling here.
Though for years now he had been.