Page 84 of Hell Bent (Portland Devils #5)

“I would,” she said. “I think that’s a great idea.”

“Obviously,” I said, “you couldn’t drive it until you were sixteen, but it’s going to take us a while to get there anyway. School, training camp, the season … Think you can defer gratification for a year?”

Ben’s Adam’s apple bobbed. He was still red in the face. He tried to say something, but couldn’t get it out. His chin quivered, and he looked around desperately.

“Hey,” I said. “Hey. Let’s go upstairs a minute.

” I looked around at the others. “Maybe you’d do me a favor, Elise, in the meantime.

We’ll get an inspection, and do whatever else you think we ought to here, make sure we’re buying the right thing.

But Alix says you’re a genius at this stuff.

Before we get our hopes up too high, would you poke around a little, make sure we’re not missing something big? ”

She said, “I’d be delighted to.”

Alix looked at me, like, You’re kidding. You smooth talker. And I looked back at her like, Who, me?

Plus, I really did want to make sure our house was legit.

Three bedrooms upstairs, plus a sort of extra space next to the master that was perfect for a nursery. I got a flash of Alix sitting in a rocking chair by the big windows, feeding that baby, and a thrill went straight through me.

I turned back to Ben and said, “Let’s go figure out which room you want.” If a guy was going to cry, he needed some privacy to do it. And somebody with him to tell him it was OK, too. Somebody who loved him.

We headed out, but at the last minute, I turned back to Alix and said, “You know that trip to Germany with your grandmother in June? To look for the tiara?”

“Yes,” she said. “What about it?”

“You want a couple of escorts?” I asked.

“To carry the bags? Fetch ice packs, possibly? Maybe even pay for that fancy old hotel that’s right by the palace, and insist that you really do need to lie down to sleep on the plane?

We could pretend to be rich for a little while.

Just until we go back to being normal in our almost normal house. What do you say?”

“Oh, my,” Alix’s mother said.

Alix’s face broke into a smile. “Yes,” she said. “I’d like that …” Sh e had to stop and take a breath. “I’d like that very much. And I love you.”

“Fortunately,” I said, “I love you more.”

Ben probably groaned.

I didn’t care.

For Alix’s grandmother’s story and more of Alix and Sebastian, order the next book in the series, Hell to Pay (Portland Devils, Book 6) today! Release date: Nov. 1, 2025. Read on for a sample chapter!

Hell to Pay – Chapter 1

Prologue

The Royal Palace, Dresden

13 February 1945

The strangeness of it, like I’m in another life. A life lived in a book, felt from a distance.

The thrumming hum of the bombers, which seemed to reach into my very bones, has gradually died away.

So has the weird music of the planes’ cargo: the bombs that whistled and sang their way down through the Dresden night.

And the worst thing: the bone-jarring impacts that made the walls tremble and the brick dust fall around us, even here in the cellars beneath the Residenzschloss, whose massive sandstone walls have been standing for hundreds of years.

The interior has burned once already, centuries ago.

Fire once, again, always. Fire follows my family. My father’s only fear.

The explosions aren’t jolting through my chest anymore, though the ancient building still shudders around me. Outside, the winter night is cold and drizzly, but I feel hot and breathless, and when I look around the cellar, I see wide eyes and bodies shocked into stillness.

The whole thing has lasted, my watch faithfully reports, only fifteen minutes. The electricity has flickered again and again, but it hasn’t failed. As proof of our survival, the all-clear sounds its steady blare, loud enough to hear even down here.

It was bound to happen sometime, I try to tell myself. It’s happened everywhere else. Hamburg, Berlin, Frankfurt, Nuremberg … everywhere. Blockbuster bombs and incendiaries. Always the same. It doesn’t help.

For a confused moment after the siren fades, I think the planes have returned.

There’s a sort of dull roaring sound that I can’t place, and the feeling of heat, of choking, hasn’t gone away.

Rise above the weakness, I tell myself, as my parents have always told me.

You mustn’t give into fear or pain, hunger or thirst. Those are passing sensations, and you are sixteen now and a leader, not a child anymore.

You must be a model for others. That’s what it means to be a princess.

Across the cellar, my father sits upright.

Unlike our remaining handful of servants, who rushed to the cellar in their nightclothes, he’s still fully dressed in shirt, jacket, and trousers, for he’d been awake, planning with my mother when the sirens began their rising and falling wail.

The fear I felt during the raid was less than the fear I’d felt before it.

I know that, because when I remember, the panic returns, and I have to force it back.

Report to Gestapo Headquarters, Continental Hotel, at 8:00 A.M. on 14 February. Nothing but a dry, businesslike note, and giving the address, too, as if everybody doesn’t know where the Gestapo do their work.

“Not an arrest,” my father told us, reading it. “A summons only.” We all knew better, including him.

When he stands up, though, from his makeshift seat, he is every inch the King, the unfrozen half of his face calm, the hand that still functions steady as he picks up a flashlight and says, “Everyone stay where you are until I’ve gone to check whether it’s safe to leave.”

I stand, too, feeling like I can’t be in this stifling place with its weird, shifting shadows for another minute. “I’ll come with you,” I say.

“Stay here, Daisy,” my mother says. “Until we know it’s safe.”

“Father could need help,” I say. “Or a messenger. I can do that.”

Frau Schultz, the housekeeper, says loyally, “The princess shouldn’t go. I’ll go.”

“No,” says Herr Kolbe, my father’s batman, coughing hard even as he rises. “I will go with the King.”

“Or I,” says Franz, the underbutler, back with us from the war to the East that has cost him his leg.

“I’m young,” I say. “I can run, if running is needed. Your bunions are hurting more than ever today, Frau Schultz, and your lungs as well, Herr Kolbe.” I don’t mention Franz’s one leg.

It doesn’t seem polite. I’m nearly twitching, though, with the need to escape.

The air feels even warmer than before, and I can’t draw a deep enough breath.

My father doesn’t enter the debate. He says, “Come, then, Marguerite,” and heads into the shadows with me gratefully hurrying after.

Up the steep staircase to the heavy door at the top, where my father takes hold of the handle and pushes, but the door doesn’t budge.

He says, still calm, “Put your young back to use, then, and push.”

We shove the door open slowly, against resistance. I am small, but strong, and it finally gives beneath our weight and effort. It is as if the cellar were trying to imprison us, but of course that isn’t so. Something fell against the door during the bombing, that’s all. Something hard and heavy.

Stone. It’s stone. Stone from the corridor that leads from the kitchens. Stone that has fallen through a ceiling that isn’t there anymore.

The air is hotter here. My father says, “Shut the door again,” and we do. He says, “Help me get this rubble out of the way,” and I do that, too, my fingernails breaking as we shove, lift, pull to make a path.

“It’s good we have the axe in the cellar,” my father says. “We may need it to get out next time.” Still sounding so calm, while my own heart is beating into my throat and my breath is coming too fast from effort and strangeness and downright fear.

We hurry through corridors, through the vast kitchen, crunching our way over fragments of Meissen porcelain, dusted by a spilled bag of precious flour and, worse, broken eggs that have just come from the countryside today, their golden yolks taunting us with their uselessness.

On we go, lit by my father’s torch and a weird glow almost like daylight, and then out the kitchen door. Where we stop.

Heat. Ash. Smoke. Flames—not just red, but yellow and white and shooting up to the sky—all around us, like a vision of Hell.

Running figures everywhere. A mother pushing a pram whose wheels jolt over the uneven cobblestones; an old woman and a younger, probably her daughter, holding onto each other as they stumble along; a woman in a kerchief pushing a handcart with two children perched atop her bundles; and dozens more, all headed in one direction: to the river, the mighty, slow-moving Elbe that bisects the city.

Dodging around a crater in the middle of the road that could swallow a car, and hurrying toward …

something. Escape, I suppose, but what escape is there in grass and trees and flowing water?

Women and children and old men, for the brothers and fathers and sons are gone.

And the silent, still figures sprawled on the cobblestones, an arm reaching out from beneath the rubble. I see a foot. Not a body. A foot. The horror of that moment of recognition.

“The railway station,” I say. “It’s the refugees, isn’t it? But why aren’t they in the tunnels? Why aren’t they?—”

“Come on,” my father says, coughing on the words, his lungs scarred by the fire that seared his face and chest and arm when his plane was shot down in that other war, the Great War. The War to End All Wars.

“You need to go back inside,” I say, pulling on his good arm.

Across the way, the Hofkirche, the Catholic church of the princes, stands oddly misshapen, and it takes me a moment to realize that one of the towers is missing.

A jolt of pure fear as I look behind me.

All those flames—surely part of the palace is alight.

“Why are there no firemen?” I ask my father. “Where are the engines? The soldiers?”

“There’s no fighting this much fire,” he says. “Come. We must see what’s happening.”

Around the Hofkirche to the right, the cobblestones uncomfortably warm underfoot, toward Brühl’s Terrace, crowded with people.

Across the river, the grassy meadows packed with more people and, somehow, horses, gleaming white in the night.

The Sarrasani Circus must have been hit, then.

The elephants—where are the elephants? On our bank, more figures hurrying to the left, in the direction of the Semperoper, the opera house.

And everywhere, flames. Smoke rising, ash falling, the stone walls radiating heat like an oven.

“Why are they going to the Opera?” I have to shout it, for the roaring has become louder, and a curious, swirling wind has sprung up, blowing hard and hot, carrying little glowworms on it, curlicues of fire.

The ash stings the eyes and seems to lodge in the chest, as if I were swallowing glass.

How bad is this for Father’s poor lungs?

“The Great Garden,” my father shouts back, then pauses to cough some more. “As good a place as any, if their cellars no longer hold. We’ll have to wait it out for now. Back to the palace. In the morning, we’ll do what we can.”

An hour, then, maybe two, working as I’ve never worked before.

My mother and the servants and I all rushing through the few rooms out of five hundred where we now live our diminished lives, packing up clothing, blankets, feather beds, and precious family photos as the heat and noise grow, as if our belongings matter when Father has been ordered to report to Gestapo.

The unreality of this terrible moment, and the abyss that awaits.

The wail of Helga, one of the housemaids, at the news that the upper stairs are alight, that the attics have already gone, along with the ribbon-tied bundle of letters from her sweetheart, Franck, who hasn’t been heard from for too long.

Captured or killed, who knows? And worse—captured by the Russians, for Franck was sent to the Eastern Front.

The wrongness of not defending the palace from the fire, the horror of imagining the painted ceiling of the Audience Chamber falling, the golden throne within being consumed by flames …

Is it all lost, then? I know it’s selfish to rest my mind on such trivial things for one second, but I think them anyway.

In the kitchens, Frau Heffinger, the cook, and Lotte, the little scullery maid, toss bread and butter and cheese and bacon, potatoes and turnips and carrots, into pillowcases willy-nilly, wrapping the precious few remaining eggs in tea towels and setting them on top.

Lotte cradles the bottle of buttermilk in her arms like a baby, and Frau Heffinger hesitates, then reaches for her prized knives, wrapped in their leather roll.

“In case,” she tells me. “Lucky the wine is in the cellar, eh, and most of the beer as well.” As steady and practical as ever as the heat grows.

As the night glows ever brighter. As the fire roars like a dragon let loose on the city, and none of us understand what is yet to come.

Except, possibly, my father, who always sees more than anyone else, maybe because he refuses to look away.

I’ve thought about that night so many times. I’ve tried to forget it more times than that, but there’s no wiping away things buried that deep. Buried like they are all buried, now, though I don’t know where.

It can be hard to die, I know. But, oh, the pain it can be to survive.

* * *