The Man Behind the Mask

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“Your Highness, I heard all the noise. What’s afoot?”

“Nothing to worry about,” she coolly lied. “As of now, we have everything completely under control.”

“Ah,” he said, as if she’d actually told him something. “Then I’ll return to my chamber.”

“Good idea.” Brit pulled me on down the hall.

A minute or two later, we reached our destination. She led me inside, helped me out of my robe as if I couldn’t manage it myself and tenderly tucked me into bed.

“I’ll stay right here,” she whispered, standing over me. “Don’t worry. I won’t leave you.”

I did like the sound of that. I wanted her to stay right there beside me until daylight, at least.

But I just couldn’t do that to her. She kept biting her lower lip and fidgeting—and as much as she talked about staying, she wasn’t showing any signs of making herself comfortable. It was painfully obvious that she longed to get back where the action was. Also, it did occur to me that I was going to have to get past being treated like the shell-shocked victim of some terrible tragedy.

I looked up from my nest of pillows into her distracted face and I groaned. “Oh, puh-lease. I know you have things to do. Get outta here.”

To her credit, she actually put up a little resistance. “No, Dulce. I’m going nowhere. You’ve had a brutal scare, one that wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t—”

I sat up, which made her back off a few inches. “It’s not your fault. You know it. I know it. And I’m fine. Honestly. We both know damn well I’m in zero danger, now that I’m back in my own room where no one is going to mistake me for you. You don’t need to be here holding my hand and you don’t want to be here holding my hand.”

“I never said that.”

“Like you had to say it. We both know how you are. You want to be with Eric and Hauk Wyborn and whoever else they’ve called in by now. You want to be on the case, rousting the bad guys.”

She looked at me sideways. “Well. If you’re certain…”

“What? You’re still here?”

She smiled. Fondly. “Thank you.”

“Go.”

She started backing toward the door. “One more thing…”

“What now?”

“I know this all has to be really confusing to you, but I have to ask you not to talk about what happened tonight, not to mention it to anyone. At least not until we’ve been able to decide what to do about it.”

Did I have questions? Oh yes, I did. It was plain as her eagerness to go that she knew a lot more than I did and she was not telling me any of it. But I didn’t really have the heart to keep her with me another minute—let alone to try to get her to talk to me right then. “My lips are sealed. Good night.”

“If you need me—”

“I won’t. Get lost.”

She vanished into the shadows of the short hallway that led to my door—and I instantly wanted to call her back. I heard the door open and shut behind her and I longed to leap from the bed and chase her down the main hallway until I caught her. I would tell her it was all a big mistake to have let her go. I really needed her with me, after all.

Okay, I’ll admit it. I was still pretty shook up, which made it one of those times when my vivid imagination and I did not need to be left alone.

My travel alarm, which I’d set on the ebony-inlaid night stand, said it was 4:35. In California, at 4:35, it would have been maybe two hours till daylight. But not in Gullandria. Winter nights are long there—which meant that dawn wouldn’t be coming until almost nine.

Hours and hours to sit in my room in the dark.…

Yes, a little sleep would have been nice. But who was I kidding? Sleep was so not an option at that point.

I threw back the covers, ran down the short hall through which Brit had left me, and engaged the privacy lock on the door. Then I flew around the room turning on all the lamps. There were only four, not counting the lamp by the bed. I wished there were a hundred.

I didn’t have a multiroom suite the way Brit did, but I did rate a private bath. I went in there and turned on the light and left the door open so I could see the brightness bouncing off the snow-white gold-trimmed tiles.

Better, I thought. Now I won’t have to worry about…what?

I couldn’t have said. I only knew I wanted lots of light. No shadowed corners, no place for an armed kidnapper in a ski mask with a chloroformed cloth to hide.

Following the incident in my sister’s bedroom, I scoured the passageways.

I was seeking any object, any small scrap of paper or cloth, that the intruders—or whoever had given them access to the passageways—might have let drop. I also sought the point where the two traitorous louts had entered.

I found nothing that they might have left behind. But I did find the way they’d come in—through one of the tunnels that ran beneath the hill on which Isenhalla stood. There were four such tunnels leading into the passageways, one for each of the four directions. For as long as I could remember, each of the thick steel doors at the ends of those tunnels had been sealed with a bar and a heavy lock—a lock to which only my father and Hauk had a key.

Someone had cut the lock on the west entry. Knowing Hauk’s men would arrive shortly, I removed the mask and became once again the damaged Prince Valbrand. When three soldiers appeared, I gave two of them orders to stand watch, cautioning them not to touch the door, the lock or the walls. I sent the third man back to Hauk, with a message that a technician should be sent to observe, photograph and dust for prints.

I had no idea where Hauk would find that technician. Any crime occurring in Isenhalla or on the palace grounds fell within the jurisdiction of the NIB—the National Investigative Bureau—which is roughly equivalent to the American FBI. But since an incident in the Helmouth Pass three months before, when Brit and Eric had been set upon by a team of traitor NIB agents—led by the man who’d pretended to be Brit’s friend, the now-vanished former Special Agent Jorund Sorenson—we held the NIB and its people under suspicion. Hauk would have to find some way other than the Bureau to test the entrance for prints and to run identity checks on the two prisoners. I knew he would solve the problem. Hauk was not only strong, intelligent and resilient. He was also unfailingly resourceful.

I left the soldiers to guard the west entrance, donned the mask again and checked the other three entry doors. All of them appeared undisturbed. By then, there were soldiers around every corner. And I had yet to find anything that the intruders might carelessly have left behind.

It occurred to me that my usefulness in the hidden corridors was ended—at least for the time being. So what now?

Should I return to Brit’s rooms, where I was almost certain to find a strategy session in progress: Brit and Eric and Hauk, deciding what the next move should be, debating whether to immediately inform Prince Medwyn and His Majesty that palace security had been dangerously breached—or to wait for a more reasonable hour?

No. I’d leave all that for now, I decided. There would no doubt be a formal meeting come daylight, in my father’s chambers. We’d go over everything in detail. Time enough to talk strategy then.

I began making my way back to my suite. I knew of passageways within the secret passageways, of hidden doors from hallway to hallway, entrances and exits that I would have wagered even my inquisitive little sister had yet to find. I used what I knew, easily avoiding the soldiers who swarmed everywhere.

And then, when I was nearly there, it came to me that I could not bear to return to my solitary, silent rooms.

Not yet.

I took a different turn, passed through other hidden doors. In no time I stood by the section of wall that could be opened to reveal the armoire entrance to the American’s room—and yes. I knew which room was hers.

After the ball, after her tears, after the dance that we shared…

It is not something I can explain. How she looked at me and saw it all. How knowing nothing, she saw everything. How in that look, in that one short dance, she gave me back something I had thought lost forever.

Was it hope?

Perhaps.

Hope destined to remain unfulfilled, but hope, nonetheless.

That night, the night we first met, it became imperative that I discover where she slept. I knew which servants I could trust—the ones who had indulged me as a boy and kept the secrets of my occasional follies as a youth. I asked and it was answered.

Once I knew which room, I knew which hidden entrance would lead me in there.

It was acceptable that I know it, I reasoned at the time. It was acceptable because I would never use that information. I would never actually seek the woman out in her room. It was enough, I told myself in those early hours right after the ball, to know where to find her. It was enough just to know where she slept.…

Ah, what lies a man will tell himself.

Chapter 6

“So, okay, Dulcie,” I said to myself, standing in the middle of the room with all the lights on. “What now?”