Page 22 of In Shining Armor

Freedom

Flicka von Hannover

Dieter saved my life that day.

Flicka von Hannover was sixteen years old, beautiful, and loose on the streets of London.

Her Swiss boarding school, Le Rosey, was on summer break, so after she had built a school in Africa by amateurishly pounding nails into boards and tutored students in Indonesia so that she wouldn’t be a total rich brat all her life, Flicka had flown to England to stay with her brother for a few weeks before the new term started.

Just a few weeks before she went back to the high fences and locked dorms of Le Rosey.

She watched through the bulletproof glass of the car that drove her from Kensington Palace to a friend’s house, watching people out there.

People crowded the sidewalks of Kensington High Street as the car bumped along in gridlock traffic. One of the palace’s drivers was chauffeuring her that day, not Dieter or one of Wulf’s couple of other guys.

The tires crunched asphalt as the car stopped.

Flicka craned her neck, looking over the front seat and out the windshield.

Cars were stopped ahead, lining the road into the distance.

On the sidewalks, people bustled as they walked to the shops farther down or into Kensington Gardens.

Just a few more weeks before she would be locked on the grounds of Le Rosey again.

But here she was in London.

Her friend Josephine was staying with her cousins just a few blocks down. Josephine Alexandrovna was eight years older than Flicka, but they’d hit it off when Flicka was little and stayed friends now that Josephine was twenty-four. Flicka knew right where they lived.

Flicka stared out the front windshield again at the lines of cars and lorries that stretched way down the street.

She tapped the driver on the shoulder. “It’s faster to walk. Thanks anyway.”

The driver wrenched around in her seat. “Hey! You can’t walk! Security!”

But Flicka had already hopped out of the car and slammed the door on the driver’s protests. She darted through the stopped cars to the sidewalk.

Freedom!

Flicka walked down the sidewalk, swinging her purse, just like a normal person.

The trees of Kensington Gardens beyond the sidewalk and fence cast long shadows over the sidewalk, cooling her. The summer sun warmed her skin when she walked through spots of sunshine.

She could go for a damn walk if she wanted to. Half the people on the sidewalk were teenagers like her! It was perfectly safe or else everyone would have bodyguards.

Besides, the plan had been to drive her over to Josephine’s. Anybody who was planning anything nefarious would be waiting at the proverbial ends of the diamond, the origin of the journey and destination.

The car could have taken any number of routes between the two points. No one would have expected her to walk.

From an operational security standpoint, walking was an excellent choice.

Besides, she had done it before. Ditching her security was practically a hobby for Flicka.

Sometimes, she just wanted to walk the Earth and see the world.

People bobbled into her just like everyone else. The Brits apologized, and the Canadians, too. Some other people didn’t. Flicka nodded to most, smiling tightly like a British person, and she talked to some of them.

Some of them had Northern British accents, which was really interesting to listen to. At school, Master Hamilton would fail her if she had spoken with such a substandard accent in his class, so she listened closely to the people ahead of her, whose accent was so Northern that they might be Scottish.