CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
A hefty bonus cheque.
Four words that mean absolutely nothing to Lachlan beyond the fact that he needs to start making concrete plans to get the kids free before Jules turns twenty-one, and money will help. Lachlan doesn’t know much, but he knows in his heart now that twenty-one will somehow be too late for Jules.
So the money means nothing unless he makes it mean something.
Putting it to use towards the life he wants for Jules and Mimi once they’re free is all that money is good for now. He doesn’t know what it’ll look like for them once the dust settles, so it’s better to be prepared.
Armed with Zaitsev’s clever ability to wraparound surveillance, Lachlan, Blaire, Danya and Zaitsev meet twice a week to speak about certain things.
Lachlan explains everything Alistair told him about the attack “gone wrong” although he doesn’t tell Jules, who hasn’t really asked much. He tells them about Alistair’s plans to adopt Vasily.
He tells them about the “bloodlines” remark.
Blaire makes a face of mild disgust when he says that, muttering in French about family traditions.
Lachlan takes his chance.
‘Do you know who Julian’s mother is?’ he asks her. ‘It wasn’t…’
‘It was not Ariadne,’ Blaire says, quick to reassure him. Beside her, Danya skins an apple with his knife. He seems to relax in Blaire’s presence.
‘Who is she, then?’
‘Julian’s mother was Alistair’s wife since he was a young man, formerly Isabel Seravienne before marriage. She died nineteen years ago.’
‘She died giving birth to Jules?’
‘All told, yes.’
There’s something determinedly neutral about her expression.
Lachlan watches her closely. ‘What?’
‘Nothing.’ She chews her lip nervously. Blaire never gets nervous.
‘Holy shit, what?’ he demands under his breath.
She swallows and exhales measuredly. ‘You must never repeat this.’
‘Obviously.’
‘None of you,’ she adds sharply, looking at Danya and Zaitsev. ‘Promise?’
Zaitsev solemnly nods. ‘Yes.’
‘Promise,’ Danya says, eating an apple slice.
‘Fine.’ Blaire closes her eyes. ‘Isabel had another child.’
‘Mimi?’
‘No. This child was born two years before Julian. A little boy who died after only a few weeks.’
Lachlan is floored. ‘I’ve never heard any part of this.’
‘Why would you?’
‘I just…’ He shakes himself. ‘Does Jules know?’
‘No, and this is why I never told you before now because if Julian finds out, there is no reasonable way to prevent it from reaching his father. This knowledge was locked down into near non-existence.’
‘How do you know, then?’
‘Clara told me.’
‘Clara told you?’ Lachlan echoes incredulously, mind reeling. ‘Fucking hell. Wait, so, Julian isn’t the firstborn?’
‘No.’
‘How did the baby die?’
‘Clara said it was birthing complications, but there is no official record of the birth whatsoever. None. Isabel died having Julian two years later and, as you know, Julian himself was sickly. Alistair was so desperate to keep him alive that he founded Helixx.’
‘What was the baby’s name?’
‘Jean-Marie.’
Lachlan frowns to himself, wondering why the name sounds so familiar, the wrinkle ironing out when he makes the connection. Mari.
‘Who was Isabel?’
‘Isabel Seravienne was the eldest of three children born to the sovereign of Aurelion in his prime.’ Blaire beats Lachlan to the punch, answering before he can ask.
‘Aurelion is a small, forgotten principality in the Alps. It still exists technically. Sovereign territory, royal line, old treaties, all of it. But after centuries of escalating debt crisis, the country has vanished into economic dependency and obscurity. Twenty years ago, a deal was struck between the sovereign and Alistair. Isabel was the exchange.’
‘She was sold to him?’
‘Married to him in exchange for an inordinate amount of money. Not enough to revive the country, of course. Just enough for the sovereign to live in outrageous comfort for the rest of his rotten life.’
‘Wait,’ Danya says, looking at Blaire with a deep frown. ‘Does that mean Charlie Foxtrot is royalty?’
Lachlan expects Blaire to shut down such a notion, but instead she nods and says, ‘By the rules of dynastic succession, he’s technically a prince, yes.’
Lachlan stares at her, thunderstruck.
‘Are you fucking serious?’
‘Very.’
‘How could you not tell me this?’
Blaire sniffs with a hint of disdain.
‘Aside from the fact that we never had true assurance of privacy to speak plainly until now,’ she reminds him, tone severe, gesturing to Zaitsev, ‘who Julian’s mother was seemed to be of little concern to you.’
‘Aurelion was a banking haven, yes?’ Danya asks, eating a slice of apple and offering the next to Blaire who takes it.
‘It was before the sinkhole of debt was revealed.’
‘Jules is a prince?!’
‘He doesn’t know that either. Almost no one does.’
For the first time since he’s known Blaire, Lachlan gets the undeniable feeling that she’s being clever with the truth and not quite giving him all of it.
‘So it was buried?’
‘Why would Penhalyx need to bury it? He controls absolutely everything about his legacy, including official records. He never even registered the existence of Mimi until last year. These people live wholly different lives to the rest of the world. You know that.’
‘What does Jules stand to inherit?’
‘Lachlan—’
‘Answer me.’
‘Don’t you dare speak to me like that,’ she warns, green eyes flashing.
‘Not for a moment will you turn your frustrations onto me. You never asked about his mother. You never asked about Mimi’s until recently either.
Your focus has always been the practical matters of security, and, with the greatest of respect, women do not often factor into your mindset.
I understand your focus and work to support you, but it is tunnelled. ’
Lachlan bristles. ‘How is my focus tunnelled?’
‘There is much you do not see.’
‘Like what?’
‘Lachlan,’ Danya warns gently.
‘No, like what? What don’t I see? Tell me.’
‘You are blinded by love.’
‘Oh, fuck off, Blaire. Like you don’t love Mimi.’
‘I love them both, but my love is tempered with that which you lack.’
‘Astonish me.’
‘Detachment.’
Lachlan has to drag the word up to echo it. ‘Detachment?’
‘You love Mimi, but you cannot detach, so she is your daughter now. You love Jules, but you cannot detach, so he is your lover now. You are too involved in all areas with them, and you have no ability to disconnect. For someone as powerful as you, that is dangerous.’
‘Dangerous how?’
‘A blind sniper in a tall tower is everyone’s problem.’
Lachlan falls instantly silent, so hurt that his anger actually takes several seconds to even register beneath the resounding pain of that.
Danya clocks it quickly, rises to stand, kicking his chair away.
‘OK, we are all cranky. Is time to take nice break now,’ he says sternly, putting himself between Blaire and Lachlan. ‘Lachlan, come train.’
‘A blind sniper?’
‘Echo, echo, echo,’ Blaire says, unafraid of him in every way, ‘exactement comme une chauve-souris, mon c?ur. Is that all you know how to do?’
Lachlan, whose French is rudimentary at best, catches the “blind as a bat” drift regardless but is dragged away by Danya before he can dig up a response in kind.
‘Yes, yes, very sexy language I don’t speak, wonderful,’ Danya says, clipped and cheerful.
‘We go train now. Talk later, Bee. Great chat.’
?
Vasily gradually opens up a little.
Losing his brother seems to be a loss too vast to contain. It cannot fit inside his body, so it lives outside for now like a cloud, atmospheric tears for rain and sadness in storms. Both his brother and his father too… gone forever.
Lachlan quietly asks Vasily what he wants to do. ‘I want to stay,’ he says, unsurprisingly. ‘I am happy here and he would have wanted it.’
Vasily is seventeen years old, eighteen come end of year, but it’s a long road until twenty-one, the only age that carries any meaning in the elite echelons.
‘Whatever you need,’ he tells the kid, hand on his shoulder, ‘I’m your man, OK? Always.’
Vasily almost smiles. ‘He really did like you.’
Maybe it’s a way to honour Roman.
Maybe there never will be one.
For now, Lachlan does what he can and without too closely analysing why, he begins putting gradual distance between himself and Jules.
The rain stays for weeks.
Alistair is gone before it ebbs.
Savannah is walking again.
Vasily joins them for meals.
Blaire and Lachlan are not really speaking.
Mimi draws a lot more now, has started to paint too.
Lachlan loves seeing her express herself this way, always looks at each one she shows him from the pile and praises each piece accordingly.
Her collection is a verifiable menagerie of animals. The more she reads about them in books, the more accurately she can draw them.
When she shows him a shark, Lachlan’s throat closes up.
‘Wow,’ he says, keeping the smile in place. ‘That’s… that’s beautiful, baby.’
‘Look, I did the fin so perfect, see?’
‘Yeah, you did. It’s…’ cold ocean at dawn ‘So well-drawn, with the…’ lax arms leaving his middle ‘The gills right there and just look at the…’ water turns rose red ‘Those teeth too, wow.’
Of all that has scarred him from that place, of all the animals and wildlife that crept in during those three days that seemed like months, it’s the shark he never fully saw that haunts him.
Whenever Lachlan thinks of it, he recalls Mikhail Sorrenko, a man he’ll never understand, telling him, I don’t swim in warm water, and Lachlan sees himself handing over the gun that he would use to shoot and kill his own son.
He feels all of it, and then he can’t breathe.
It’s Jules who notices, who pulls him aside, pressing his thumb into Lachlan’s wrist. ‘Are you OK? You’ve gone shock white.’
It’s not OK.
It’s not fucking OK because Lachlan wants to cry.
He wants to sleep for a year and wake to find Roman alive.
He wants to go back knowing what was coming to avoid it this time, to do it all right because if he had done it right, done better, then none of this—