She looked around as an ambulance pulled up along the clutter of security and police cars. Shock hit her anew. Usually peaceful and calm, her street was coated in violence. Kris lay unresponsive a dozen strides away, stabbed, beaten, and she recoiled a step in a flare of panic. Why would anyone want to hurt him? Frankie and his brothers knelt powerless at his side. Ava hung behind Mark, a hand over her mouth, and Philip stood unmoving beside her.
Then the advisor glanced up at Zara’s apartment windows.
Guilt squirmed in her. Did he think it was her fault? If she hadn’t been so worried about Adam, Kris wouldn’t have come here.
Hands shaking, she pulled out her phone. Something was wrong. Adam hadn’t answered her calls or texts all day, but she stepped back as she called again, following Philip’s gaze to her apartment windows as if to summon him.
A chill shot down her spine.
Her main lights were on. But—it couldn’t be Adam. He only used lamplight. He called the stark LED of the overhead globe tasteless. Then her chill froze over as a figure passed close by the window.
A uniformed officer.
A memory pitched forward inside her like a drunk preparing to vomit, but she shoved it back, unwilling to project that long-ago night onto this one.
Adam’s phone rang out and she spun back to the officer barring her entrance. “Is someone hurt up there?” Alarm pounded in her chest. Why were police in her apartment? Kris had been attacked on the street, but had the men been inside first? Had they broken inside on a random rampage and hurt Adam? “Why are people in my apartment?”
The man regarded her without expression.
“My boyfriend’s up there!” Her distress rose in a shout. “I think he might have been home sick tonight, and now there are police with him. What the hell is going on? Is he okay?”
A small frown darted his brows, and in a low voice, he said, “No one’s home, ma’am, and no one’s hurt.”
“What?” No one’s home? “Oh.”
She stepped back, disoriented. So, where was Adam?
“But,” she said, “why are they in my apartment?”
The man’s face set. “Please wait outside, ma’am.”
Her sense of wrongness grew as she sat on the lip of the curb and stared at the scene. The paramedics had worked fast. Kris was stirring on a gurney as they slid him into the back of the ambulance. Mark and Tommy both moved forward to climb in, and Zara heard a medic state that only one of them could travel with Kris.
“We are one,” Tommy answered with such royal fury, the woman swiftly let both brothers in the back.
In the queasy contrast of flashing lights and black shadows, Frankie stared after the ambulance as it pulled away. She ran a hand roughly over her face, exhaustion seeming to press down on her like a bad hangover, and then, looking around, she met Zara’s stare.
Frankie staggered a little—and Zara knew.
It was that look. The same Zara had been given by the responding officer on the most traumatic night of her life. The woman’s face had blanched with bloodless pity at the sight of her before flattening into a reluctant mask. Just like Frankie’s.
Zara was about to receive very bad news.
Features haggard, Frankie crossed the cop-strewn street to the curb.
Zara wrapped her arms tightly around her stomach, as if that had ever been able to keep her from breaking, and said, “Just tell me.”
Frankie didn’t answer. Her eyes were as hollow as ghosts.
“Where’s Adam?”
Kris was out of surgery by the time Frankie dragged herself into the hospital. Her adrenaline was long gone, leaving her shaky and sick, but she chugged a shitty hospital vending-machine coffee and carried several bags of corn chips through the ward toward Kris’s private room.
Guards were positioned at every turn.
The police had informed her of the attackers’ story before she’d left the scene. They were the remaining members of the anarchist group who hadn’t been involved in palace renovations. They’d received texts from Adam earlier in the day with instructions to keep an eye on his apartment. They were to leave Zara alone, but if anyone else came snooping, they had to report back to him. Beating up a royal had not been part of the plan, but Kris had strolled unprotected within range of anarchist extremists who’d just had a member smoked out of the nest. As far as they were concerned, the universe had slid them a freebie.