Chapter 6 #2
Erin turned to the monitors. The CCTV footage was playing on a loop: the dark car sliding through the frame, the north-east gate, the empty service road beyond.
She watched it three times, looking for something she might have missed.
A detail. A tell. But the driver was careful and the car was anonymous and the credentials were genuine and the whole operation had been executed with a precision that spoke of planning and resources and someone who understood exactly how the royal security apparatus worked.
Arthur. It had Arthur written into every detail.
Not his name, not his fingerprints. Arthur was too careful for that, had always been too careful, had spent seven decades learning how to wield power without leaving marks.
But the architecture of the thing. The patient, methodical dismantling of security protocols.
The use of legacy systems that should have been shut down but hadn't been because no one had thought a seventy-year-old prince was still dangerous enough to warrant the effort.
The casual exploitation of trust and hierarchy and the assumption that credentials meant authority and authority meant safety.
Erin's memories surfaced. The early years of her relationship with Alexandra.
The constant threats. The leaked photographs, the tabloid stories, the whisper campaigns designed to make Erin look like a predator and Alexandra look like a fool.
Arthur's hand behind so much of it, never visible, always deniable, but there in the pattern of it, in the systematic way the attacks had escalated.
And then there was the assassination attempt.
She'd taken a bullet for Alexandra on the steps of a charity event in the early days of their public relationship, when the hatred was loudest and the threats most frequent.
The scar was still on her left ribcage, a puckered white line that ached in cold weather and that Alexandra sometimes traced with her fingertips in bed, gently, reverently, as though touching the proof that Erin would die for her.
She'd nearly bled out on the pavement while Alexandra screamed her name.
The man who'd fired the gun had never been conclusively linked to Arthur.
Of course he hadn't. Arthur's connections were always one step removed, buried beneath layers of intermediaries and plausible deniability and the unassailable shield of royal privilege.
"He has gone too far this time," Erin said. Her voice was quiet but it carried to every corner of the room. "If Arthur is behind this, and he is, whether the paper trail shows it or not, then he has taken a child. He has taken the heir to the throne. My daughter. There is no coming back from that."
Helena raised a hand. "Ma'am, I need to formally caution you against making accusations about a member of the royal family without—"
"Helena." Erin turned to look at her. "My daughter is missing.
The man who spent two decades trying to put himself on the throne has now taken the child who has replaced him as heir.
If you think I'm going to wait for a neatly filed report before I say what everyone in this room already knows, then you don't understand what kind of person you're dealing with. "
Helena was silent. She lowered her hand.
Vic stood up from her chair. She crossed the room slowly, the way you'd approach a cornered animal. "Erin. I know you're right about Arthur. But you need to—"
"Don't tell me what I need to do."
"You need to eat something. You need to sit down. You've been standing for four hours and your hand is bleeding through the bandage and you can't help Florence if you collapse."
"I'm not going to collapse."
"You punched a stone wall hard enough to split your knuckles open. You screamed loud enough for the kitchen staff to hear. You haven't eaten since breakfast and you've been running on adrenaline and fury and it's going to crash, Erin. It always crashes."
Erin's jaw clenched. She wanted to snap at Vic again.
The words were right there, sharp and cruel and ready.
You let them take her. You stood on a bridle path and watched a stranger drive away with my child.
But Vic's eyes were full of tears and her voice was steady despite the shaking of her hands and she was trying, she was genuinely trying to help, and Erin didn't have enough cruelty left in her for another round.
"If Arthur has Florence," Erin said, and her voice was raw now, stripped of its professional veneer, "then Cecilia knows too. They don't operate independently. Cecilia is the architect. Arthur is the executor. They have always worked together and they will be working together now."
"You think the Queen Mother ordered the kidnapping of her own granddaughter?" Helena's voice carried a note of disbelief that made Erin's blood pressure spike.
"I think Cecilia would burn down the palace and salt the earth if it meant reclaiming the power she believes is rightfully hers.
I think she has spent forty-four years destroying my wife's confidence and she has spent ten years trying to destroy our marriage and I think kidnapping Florence is exactly the kind of move she would make because it accomplishes everything she wants: it destabilises the monarchy, it terrifies Alex, it proves that the Queen can't protect her own family, and it clears the path for Arthur to challenge for the throne. "
The room was silent.
"And when I find proof," Erin said, "and I will find proof.
I will make sure that Arthur and Cecilia never see the inside of a palace again.
I will strip them of every title, every privilege, every ounce of influence they've spent their lives accumulating.
And if a single hair on Florence's head has been harmed—"
She stopped. She couldn't finish the sentence. The rage had filled her up completely and it was either speak or break something, and she'd already broken her hand on the service yard wall.
Vic put a hand on her arm. This time Erin let her.
"We'll find her," Vic said quietly. "We will."
Erin opened her eyes and looked at Vic. Her wife’s oldest friend.
The woman who had been there since before the wedding, before the assassination attempt, before the children.
Vic who swore too much and rode horses like a demon and had once threatened a paparazzo with a riding crop outside the palace gates. Vic who loved Florence like her own.
"If it's Arthur and Cecilia," Erin said, and her voice dropped to something that was almost a whisper, "they won't hurt her. They need her alive. She's the heir. She's the piece on the board that gives them leverage. They're not monsters. They're strategists."
She wasn't sure if she was saying this for Vic or for herself.
"They won't hurt her," Vic repeated, and it sounded like a prayer.
"But if I find out otherwise." Erin's jaw set. "If Arthur has touched her, I will end him. Not through the courts. Not through diplomatic channels. I will find him and I will put my hands on him and he will understand what it means to threaten my family."
Vic didn't flinch. She didn't try to talk Erin down. She just nodded once, her eyes fierce, and said, "I'll be right beside you."
The room was silent. The monitors hummed. Somewhere in the building, a phone rang and was answered.
"Get me those financial audits," Erin said to Helena. "And get me everything you have on Arthur's movements in the last six months. Everything."
She sat down for the first time in four hours.
The chair creaked beneath her and her legs trembled and she gripped the edge of the table with both hands and held on.
The rage was still there, hot and bright and enormous, but beneath it the fear was growing, a cold current running under the fury, pulling at her, reminding her with every passing minute that Florence was out there somewhere and the sun was going down and her little girl was spending her first night away from home in the hands of strangers.
Erin pressed her damaged fist against the table and let the pain anchor her.
She would not sleep tonight. She would not eat.
She would sit in this room and she would watch every screen and read every report and chase every lead until Florence was found, because that was what she did.
She protected people. It was the only thing she'd ever been good at, and she had failed at it today in the one way that mattered most.
She would not fail again.