Page 103 of Once Upon A Time

A whisper through the air,“Durchlauchtig?”

She croaked as she tried to laugh at the nickname he had tagged her with when she had been a child. “I’m not very goddamn serene right now.”

“May I come in? I won’t pull back the shower curtain. I can’t yell over the water. Someone passing in the hallway might hear.”

A small, logical part of Flicka’s brain clicked on. “That makes sense. Yes, okay. But don’t look at me.”

Beyond the shower curtain, the door creaked and clicked, closing. Above the hiss of the shower, Dieter’s deep voice whispered, “I think I should call the police. Perhaps you shouldn’t shower. There might be evidence if there were a trial.”

“No,”she said. “No police.”

His shadow wavered on the white shower curtain, towering above her. “It’s up to you, but you might want the option later.”

“He’s the heir to a throne,” she said. “Rainier would never allow him to be charged in Monaco, and he has royal diplomatic immunity.”

“Switzerland is neutral. We would not recognize it.”

“No country isthatneutral.”

“There are other things,” Dieter said quietly. “Bruises.”

“I can’t. I just can’t.”

“I’ll be with you, every minute. I won’t let them do anything you don’t want them to.”

Panic welled up in her chest and choked her.“I can’t.”

“All right. So we won’t.” Dieter grunted, and his shadow outside the white shower curtain dropped to the same height as hers as he sat against the wall outside.

Flicka held her hands over her face as the water ran over her body and the dress. “I am drunk and stupid.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said.

“It did matter,” she said. “I should have been diplomatic, but I was angry and had been holding it in all day. I was just shocked.”

“It was shocking,” Dieter said from outside the shower curtain.

When she looked through the crack where the curtain didn’t quite touch the wall, she could see the curve of Dieter’s strong shoulder and some of his military-short, blond hair. “I shouldn’t have exploded at him. I should have just caught a plane to Paris tomorrow and signed the papers to divorce him.”

“It doesn’t matter what you said or didn’t say.”

Warm water sprayed from the showerhead far up on the white-tiled wall and battered her skin. “I told him I wanted a divorce. He said he would never agree, would never sign the papers. I told him that I was invoking the conditions in the pre-nup, and he didn’t have to agree.”

“Your brother was thorough during those negotiations,” Dieter said.

Flicka’s hands started shaking again. She grabbed them both together, holding them in one massive, angry fist. “He said that he would kill me before I could get to Paris to sign the papers. He said he would never let me go.”

Dieter cleared his throat, and his shadow shifted.

“He said that if I ran to Wulf, he would kill Wulf and Rae and the baby.”

“He couldn’t do that,” Dieter said.

“He said that he has someone close to them, someone who answers to him, and he could and would do it.”

“Did you believe him?”

“Pierre can’t bluff. That’s why he sucks at poker.”