One Night in Monaco - Blair Babylon Page 0,21

grimaced and said, “They’re cousins. He was a few years behind us at Le Rosey.”

“Right,” Roxanne continued. “Xan Valentine emailed us a couple of days ago to ask about some inheritance problems he was anticipating because his uncle Rainier, who had no children of his own, had suffered a massive hemorrhagic stroke and was on life support.”

Arthur was watching the two of them. “Do you mean to tell me that Alexandre Grimaldi, that Alexandre Grimaldi, Maxence’s cousin, who may or may not have murdered at least one person, is Xan Valentine?” He rolled his eyes and looked at the ceiling. “Now, I get it. Valentine. He holds the Valentinois duchy, doesn’t he?”

“Yeah, Alexandre Grimaldi is Xan Valentine,” Casimir said with a frown and one eyebrow lifted, like this was obvious. He turned back to Roxanne. “Wait, Alexandre thinks he might get ‘an inheritance?’”

“He wanted to know how to refuse an inheritance,” Roxanne said. “I assumed his uncle got into vacation timeshares or something, and he didn’t want to be saddled with them. I replied that you didn’t do inheritance law and forwarded it to Lallie Antic over in wills and trusts. She’s another lawyer in our practice,” she told Arthur and Gen. “I didn’t think you wanted to stray outside of contract law too much.”

“Rainier Grimaldi is dying,” Casimir said, staring at Arthur.

Arthur had settled back in his chair. He had folded his hands in his lap and had a slight frown on his face. “I asked the security people who met us at the heliport about why we’d received a call when Maxence had only been missing for a few hours. That bothered me. They said Pierre knows Maxence is missing, and Pierre was the one who sent for us.”

Casimir blinked hard and drew in a shaky breath. Roxanne held his fingers more tightly.

Arthur continued, “On the surveillance footage last night, I saw at least five individuals stalking one or the other of them. One group was either following or with Simone Maina. The other appeared to orient on where Maxence was standing in an alcove before she was sighted.”

“Damn it,” Casimir said, running both hands through his thick, auburn hair and combing it back with his fingers, nearly yanking it. “We’re here to find Maxence’s body.”

Roxanne reached over to Casimir and touched his shoulder. He grabbed her hand in both of his and held it to his chest. His heart was thumping under his skin.

Gen extended a hand toward Arthur’s shoulder, too. He didn’t grab her but leaned slightly into her touch.

“This is bad,” Casimir said. “We have to find out where Simone took him.”

“If Pierre has coordinated with the Russian mob to kill him, we’re too late,” Arthur said quietly.

“Maybe we’re not too late,” Casimir argued. “Maybe they just took him somewhere out of the way for a few days until Pierre can lock down his inheritance without his younger brother in the mix.”

Arthur nodded, but he didn’t look up.

Roxanne had become good at reading people, and she could tell that Arthur was humoring Casimir about his hope. He thought Maxence was already dead.

Fear inserted hard, brittle needles into her heart.

“We need to find out what happened to him in any case,” Roxanne said. Her voice was a little shaky. “So we need to find out where Simone Maina went.”

“We didn’t see either of them leave the casino,” Arthur said.

“Do you think they’re still in there?” she asked him.

Arthur looked up at her, thinking, and then shook his head no. His tone was still reserved and resigned. “While absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, I think that we would have found some trace of him if he had stayed in the casino for three hours. I don’t think Simone could have killed him right there.”

Casimir rocked slightly in his chair, still clutching Roxanne’s hand to his warm chest. Fine, auburn hair softened the stones of his pecs and bricks of his abs under her hand. “Jesus, Arthur,” Casimir said. “When were you going to mention this?”

“I was rather hoping to finish my tea, but it appears we’ll be leaving the hotel sooner than I anticipated.” He began buttering rolls and stacking them on his wife’s plate while he continued his deduction of the events of the previous night. “If Maxence had been murdered in the casino, his corpse would have been found within an hour, surely. Hiding such a large corpse in that small pass-through between the rooms would not have been possible, and security