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“You will need to head through the long room for access to the dungeons from higher up. The main access is from the guard’s station outside. But there are secret tunnels behind the false walls. If they still open at all. Where are you?”
“Looks like a gallery. Blue walls and…”
“Yah. The galerij. Through that and then take the stairs to the top floor. Right, then second left.” Alex hurried on, his feet travelling silently now that he might be getting close to something. He turned up the stairs, taking two at a time and then round to the right until he saw the doors lining the corridors. First door on the left, second. “There is a fireplace, a brass eagle at the side of it. You move the wings forward, yah? The old wall might still open.” He quietly opened the door, unsure why the fuck he wasn’t just kicking it in. Damn these cunts and their archaic thoughts of lineage. Christ, Pascal would always have made a better ruler than Fabrice, regardless of his kinks. “Is it still there?”
“Yes,” he said, walking through what was an empty room of sheets and dust cloths draped over furniture.
“Push on the wings at the same time.” Alex did, and the groan that came from the old structure made him step back immediately and look up at the walls. Nothing. “Open yah?”
“No.”
“Again. It opened when I was a boy.” He was still a fucking boy. A stupid fucking boy who could have made this all so much easier than it had now become if he hadn’t have fucked most of Berlin and acted like a reprobate all those years.
He growled beneath his own breath and pushed on the wings again, hoping it would work this time. Again a groan echoed, but this time something shifted in his eye-line, the wall panel moving a little. He walked to it and pushed, trying to hook his fingers behind a small ledge and pull. A puff of debris exploded in his face, and he coughed from the amount of it entering his eyes and lungs. He stumbled back a little, wafting his hand around, and then watched as the wall seemed to open of its own accord slowly.
“I’m in,” he said, looking into the dark recess.
“Yah, good. Three floors down. Be careful, the steps crumble. What can I do?” Be a fucking man and step up, that’s what he could do.
Alex entered the space and held his hands out to the walls, unable to see a fucking thing. “Where are you?”
“Roma.” Rome to here. Around three hours with traffic and a private jet.
“Get here and show your worth.” He hopped down a few more of the collapsing steps, trying to avoid killing himself in the process of finding someone to kill. “We need something else to prove Pascal’s place here. The ledgers have been taken. There must be more of them in the rooms you spoke of.”
“Yah, there will be copies. There were always two sets of ledgers made.” Good.
“Thomas?”
“Yah.”
“Quickly.”
He switched off the phone call and illuminated the torchlight on it, focusing it forward. He had women to hunt, and a man to save.
Chapter 21
Elizabeth
“You and your bloody nakedness,” I spit out, quietly, given our predicament. Lilah looks back at me, her hands tugging at the binds behind her back.
“I didn’t know we were about to be kidnapped.”
“Well …” I don’t know what to say. Neither did I. If we have been at all. Still, if we had some sodding clothes on it would be helpful. “ … you should have. You live with Pascal, for God’s sake. You should have been prepared for anything.”
I look around the area, which I suppose is an old dungeon of some sort, and then draw in a long breath to try calming myself down. I don’t even know how long we’ve been in here now, or why. And if it wasn’t for Lilah deciding she needed food, and then heading us out into the corridors with nothing but blankets wrapped around us, maybe we would never have been here in the first place.
There were four of them. All of them immaculate in full guard uniform, as they hauled us off to wherever here is like we were some kind of criminals. We’re not, not that I’m aware of. Lilah, obviously, kicked and screamed her way here. I didn’t know what to do, so I patiently followed dutifully in case Alex had something to do with something I wasn’t sure about. It was quite possible to be fair, and we were naked roaming around the halls of a palace. Might be an etiquette thing. Who knows?
“Of all the times to be naked,” I mutter, looking down at myself and trying to wriggle my own rope ties again with no luck. “Bet those men thought we were hilarious.” My fingers keep wrestling the knot, absolutely sure I can break whatever hold is wrapped around my wrists. “Could we have made it any easier for them? Two bloody women wandering the halls without any clothes on in a palace. You’re a fucking idiot, Lilah.”
“Oooh, feisty.”
“Fuck off. I don’t even know why they’ve done this. Why?”
“Oh, stop it. Calm down and keep trying to get out. You know you should be able to with all those knots and things he normally puts on you.”
“And then what? You have noted the size of those bloody doors?”
