AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She’d killed a man.
Perhaps she hadn’t cleaned her gun properly. Perhaps she hadn’t loaded the tranqs correctly. If she’d taken better care, then the man would still be alive.
Oh, gods, he might have kids. He might have people who would miss him.
She cut a quick look back at Oskar Kruger, his slight, bony frame still shivering on the stage, so lost, so unsure of what he should do. He seemed almost disappointed to find himself alive and the danger over.
No one in the ballroom reached out to him.
No one patted his back to tell him that he’d be okay. Why would they? In their eyes, he wasn’t a boy. He was another member of the poorer classes who should be so lucky to find himself amid the highborn. For wasn’t a servant’s contract in one of the great houses an ambition of their stock? Wasn’t it the rare and lucky slave who got to see an heir at all?
No one moved, not in the entire ballroom, and Oskar stared around the room, unsure of what to do.
Lila finally understood what Tristan had been through, his entire childhood held up by one lone boy onstage, too confused and too embarrassed to speak or weep, so desperately alone in a room of hundreds. Now she understood why Tristan hadn’t reached for her for years and why he’d stolen her palm over and over again.
It hadn’t been because he thought it was funny, but because he wanted her to notice him, to touch him, even in anger or annoyance. He’d been exactly like the boy on stage once, though much younger, clinging to his mother as an auctioneer shouted out the bids.
Perhaps he was still like that little boy sometimes, even now, even when they shared a bed.
Perhaps it was also why Tristan had argued in favor of intercepting Oskar before he arrived at the auction house. He’d wanted to spare the boy the same trauma he’d been through years before.
He just hadn’t said it.
Perhaps he didn’t even know the reason himself.
Lila hadn’t understood then, but she understood now.
Oskar looked back at her, probably because it seemed like the closest thing to comfort he’d receive in the room, not that he likely expected any. His father had run away to Germany, hadn’t he? His sister Maria had gone missing as well, perhaps never to be seen again. They’d both run away and left him behind. Patrick had done the same, promising to take him away to a far-off land where he wouldn’t be a slave. But even Patrick had left him in the end. Tristan and Fry had done the same.
No one would ever come for him. She saw the lesson tattooed in his eyes.
This was the price of Tristan’s failure, of their failure. She’d not understood that Tristan’s emotions had been far too heavily involved.
A group of senators hopped on stage at last, obscuring her vision. As was their way with children, they surrounded him, speaking to him softly, rubbing his back to comfort him. One gave up on that approach altogether and just took the boy into his arms, holding on to him fiercely.
Oskar collapsed into the senator, his tears rising and swelling, his shoulders shaking.
Lila turned back to the gunman and began chest compressions. She worked, annoyed at Tristan, annoyed at herself, annoyed by her stupid dress and coat as they got in the way. Her knees ached on the oak floor, and she wanted to stop.
But she didn’t.
Her father bit his thumb as his entire security detail pounded into the room, a LeBeau militia captain trailing after them. Luckily, Lila didn’t have to worry about closing off the auction house and searching for conspirators, for her father’s security took over immediately.
Taking over also meant trying to get a defiant prime minister to safety. “I’ll leave when my daughter leaves,” her father told the group.
The man in charge glanced down at Lila, the wrinkles in his face signaling his intentions.
“Do it, and you’ll never work again,” Lila threatened as she pumped the gunman’s chest. “I’ll find all the things you don’t want anyone to know, all the things you thought you’d buried years ago, and I’ll show them to the world. You and anyone else who lays a finger on me.”
The man had been around Lemaire long enough to know his daughter’s reputation. “You six, stay and guard the prime minister.”
Half the security detail surrounded Lila, her father, and her mother. Their faces turned toward the crowd as they laid their hands on their tranqs.
“See what I mean?” her mother whispered to Lemaire. “Lila needs a vacation. May I suggest St. Kitts?”
The chairwoman clasped her father’s hand.
Lila ignored her. She had bigger problems. Her father’s people would soon go through every frame of security footage from every camera in the auction house. If she’d missed one, they’d find it. They’d also likely notice her preoccupation with her palm and her hushed whispers to no one in particular.
