Page 99 of Happily Ever After

Catching Up

Dieter Schwarz

I hadn’t been able to check my Rogue Security email for months

because the police or Grimaldi might have traced the login.

Big mistake.

Dieter and Flicka were sitting in the formal dining room atSchloss Marienburg,a long space for the extended table that could seat at least fifty people. Chandeliers dripping crystals blazed above thetable. Shining, silver candelabra stood at attention on the table at even intervals, save for the one that Flicka had pushed aside so she could set up her new laptop and Dieter, sitting across from her, could be distracted by every smile and flinch on her lovely face.

Even though he had work to do.

Dieter had been on his phone all morning, becoming Dieter Schwarz again.

Running Rogue Securitywas more than a full-time job, and the emails had piled up in his inbox over the months,hundreds of them.TheWelfenlegionstationed with Wulfrum’s father had loaned him a computer that morning and a secured phone the night before. With the help of his company’s IT department, which was composed entirely of Blaise Lyon, who was one of the best hackers on the planet, Dieter began to dig himselfout of the mess.

The first thing he did upon receiving the phone the night before, even before supper and hours before he’d sneaked into Flicka’s bedroom, was to check in with Friedhelm Vonlanthen in Nice and begin to organize his current assignment, the safety of Flicka von Hannover. Blaise Lyon confirmed that Aidan Greer had successfully escaped and maintained his freedom after Quentin Saultand the Secret Service had discovered he was a spy. Magnus Jensen and the other Rogues had mostly escaped from the Prince’s Palace and the Winter Ball that night.

Which meant that Dieter had twenty men, Rogue Security andWelfenlegionoperators, who were converging onSchloss Marienburgto bolster their defenses as he sat in the palace’s formal dining room.

Getting plane tickets for the twentyguys who were at liberty had taken some time, and they were all on different flights. Flights out of the Nice, France airport was essentially booked solid. They’d tried to rent a jet, but all the companies had told him that they were sold out. The airport itself was clogged with private planes flying out, stragglers from Pierre’s Winter Ball a few days before. Friedhelm had said that it lookedlike half of Europe was bugging out of Monaco, via France.

This was exactly the kind of operation where Rogue Security needed a damn airplane. If they’d had a private plane available, all the Rogues could have piled on and arrived atSchloss Marienburgbefore midnight instead of this logistical mess. If they hadn’t been able to get out of Nice, they could have rendezvoused with the plane in Turin,Italy, just an hour away.

A few Rogues had managed to wrangle tickets on early flights and had already arrived. More were trickling in as the morning wore on. Having Magnus, Friedhelm, and others in the house allayed some of Dieter’s worry that Pierre might try a military-style assault, like the one Dieter had used as a ruse. They were in a castle. With those guys at his back, Dieter could holdoff an army for months.

The current operation was shaping up. Dieter was satisfied with the increasingly secure defenses.

However, on the email front, Dieter Schwarz had a lot of work waiting for him.

Magnus Jensen and his other lieutenants had been doing their best, but they couldn’t sign contracts for new work, nor could they scout new clients, nor could they sign off on the finished andfinal reports to close completed projects.

As he worked into it—reading the paperwork and signing forms electronically—he grew more comfortable in his skin. All the paperwork shoutedDieter, Dieter Schwarz,at him.

Raphael Mirabaud faded further into his past.

With every report he saw, filled with the names of his ARD-10 friends and other accomplices in the shadowy, quasi-legal world of RogueSecurity, he felt more like a Swiss warrior forged in ice.

As he and Flicka sat at the dining room table, wading through reams of electronic paperwork, an alert sounded on Dieter’s new phone.

He glanced at the text.“Shit.”