She picked up on their freshly copied scent, making her newly aware of the huge risk she had already asked of her friend. After Ev had refused to let her read the incriminating dossier, “protecting” her in his own ridiculous way, her friend sneaked into her brother’s private office—yes, the room right next door to where they met with Santelle and Carris—and copied every single sheet for her.
Now, he was going to help her do more than read them.
So much more.
But she had to make sure he still knew that. Or if he wasn’t, to give him permission to get out of here while he could. While he could still hope that her brothers would let him keep one of his testicles. After this point, if they ever learned about his part in her plans, the poor guy would probably be singing soprano during his lifetime of palais latrine duty.
She lifted her head and bored her gaze right into Jagger’s caramel browns. “Are you very sure you want to do this, Lieutenant Fox?”
“Are you, Your Highness?”
Though he ended with his typical sarcastic lilt, his tone was mostly serious. She was grateful for both. More than that, she was glad that Jagger knew how much she needed both. “To be honest, I have no idea,” she confessed. “But there are no more easy choices here. If Evrest does not cave to Trystan’s ultimatum, the Pura will release all of this, no doubt adding a few sordid embellishments.”
“But marrying the kimfuk is also out of the question.”
“Regrettably, so is killing him,” she lobbed back, perversely comforted by Jag’s commiserating nod.
“And so we return to the hard part,” he concluded.
“Says the one who does not have to read this whole thing.” Jayd winced while simply thumbing through the pages in her grip.
“Says the one who skimmed enough of it while copying it for you,” Jag countered. “And a good thing, at that. I believe I saw what we are looking for around the two-thirds mark of the stack.”
She dug in a thumb to the approximate spot he suggested, while her friend circled around and sat himself at her desk. He lifted his shirt from the bottom, exposing chiseled abdominals for the three seconds it took to retrieve another item from a hidden pocket in the shirt’s lining. The smart pad bloomed to life as he tapped knowing fingers across the small touch pad.
“Make sure you are looking in the written transcription of the taped conversation between your maimanne and her friend.” His deliberate sneer on the last word was yet another secret solace for Jayd. Clearly, some people were more loose about their interpretation of the word friend. Jagger was not one of them, demonstrated by the risks he had taken just to get up here tonight.
She would say exactly that to him right now if she were not so stressed about getting him out of here before palais security started their late-afternoon sweeps. Which, if she knew Evrest, would be especially vigilant in this part of the complex. For her own safety, of course.
Her safety.
By the Creator. The expression was a joke at this point.
Would she ever feel safe, here or anywhere, ever again?
To get that answer, she would have to take the most frightening chance of her life. Break out of every boundary that, until this night, were her life.
And there was Jagger Fox, grinning like he was simply helping her with an update patch for one of her Alien video games.
“Ermmm…Highness Jayd?” he finally prompted in a matching drawl.
“Uhhh…yes?” she blurted. “What?”
“You going to stand there in a trance about my abs all night long, or are we going to get this show on the road?”
He got a snicker out of Emme for his trouble with that one.
Jayd still struggled between giggling and scowling. Fortunately—or maybe not, depending on how a girl was supposed to perceive things when beholding the name of the man who was likely her father—she was neutral to both, allowing her to plunge down Jag’s proverbial road. “Here comes the show. And its name is Louis LaBarre.”
“On it,” Jagger confirmed, his fingers flying across the keypad.
Requiemme was no longer laughing. “Louis La who?”
“LaBarre.” Jayd was just as stoic about the repetition. She could not afford to be any other way. Not outwardly. Doing so would fan the flames on her inner chaos, and it was too damn soon for anything more than stinging nerves and a roiling stomach. Letting in the rest of the firestorm depended on what Jagger found. If he found anything.
By the Creator, she hoped he found something.
Otherwise, this mission of discovery would swiftly become, as Emme had labeled it already, a wild stab at insanity.
Maybe, in a few ways, it was.
But was staying here any less crazy? Hiding her head in the sand until the day she surrendered to Trystan Carris’s lifelong ownership?
There was always option three. The one where she allowed Carris and the Pura to erode Evrest’s credibility beyond repair.
Wrong. That was not an option.
So she commenced pacing laps around the suite as Jagger kept tapping, clicking, and staring at his pad.
More tapping.
Clicking.
Staring.
For minutes that felt like hours. Then longer.
Jayd kept pacing. Rubbing at her aching belly. Nibbling her thumbnails down to nubs. Contemplating which of her fingers to start on next.
Breathe, Jayd. Breathe.
And believe. Damn it, believe!
She had no other choice. She had no other path.
For a long moment, she paused her pacing. Was this what Louis LaBarre went through twenty-four years ago? Had he stood somewhere in this palais, looking at the whitecaps across the sea, wondering if he would ever see the beauty of Arcadia again? If he would ever see her again? Was that a wrenching decision for him?
Or…not?
Had he been relieved to keep his silence about all of it? About her? Had he even stayed until her birth? Had he given half a thought about her health, her happiness, what she looked like? Or had he been relieved about the cover-up? Perhaps even happy to step away from acknowledging her? From ever knowing her?
As the queries built up in her mind, the ache pushed harder at her heart—and a glaring certainty took over her soul.
No matter what those answers were, she had to seek them out. Had to find the one person on this planet who could fill in so many blank spaces for her. And—oh dear Creator, please—bring her new clarity along with them. A new direction. A solid purpose.
She needed to know, once and for all, who she really was. What she was really doing here. Or anywhere.
But not if Jagger found nothing.
A possibility she forced herself to consider with every new step she took, pacing again through the maddening minutes of her friend’s continuing search. If Jag really did come up short on the hunt for LaBarre, she would have to fall back on a desperate Plan B—aka, the needle-in-a-haystack maneuver. Finding her father would not be impossible. Just harder.
But life never gave anyone a promise for easy. Not even fake princesses. Perhaps, especially not them.
After another collection of long minutes passed, Jayd decided she could give Jagger just another thirty seconds. Then twenty. Then ten.
“Got him.”
Jag’s proclamation had to be the most blessed pair of words in the history of words. After giving herself permission to breathe again, Jayd managed to croak, “Wh-Where?”