Page 3 of Once Upon A Time

Under her arm, the sinews woven around his torso slid under his skin as he barely breathed. His terrycloth towel snagged on the crystals covering her silk dress.

Dieter wrapped both his arms around her shoulders and whispered near her ear, “Does he know about us?”

Flicka shook her head. “I never told him.”

“Good.”

Footsteps marched down the hallway outside and paused outside the door.

Flicka held onto Dieter’s strong waist more tightly and tried not to breathe.

Time, Stand Still

Three months earlier.

A Thousand Words for Hell

Dieter Schwarz

I will betray my best friend

three times

before this story is finished,

and my name is not Dieter Schwarz.

The languages of the world hold a thousand words for Hell.

Abaddon, Gehenna, Pandemonium, Hades, Chthónios, the Inferno, the Underworld, the Netherworld, Tartarus, Tophet, the Abyss, the Pit, Sheol.

And so many more.

A soldier knows them all, the ancient words and the modern ones.

Dieter Schwarz, as he called himself, had seen many of those iterations of Hell.

Now, Dieter’s own personal Hell was unwinding itself around him.

He shouldn’t be so selfish. He had seen spilled blood and broken bones and screaming pain. He had felt the gaping emptiness of death.

But this one played out in slow motion over a whole day.

And he couldn’t make a sound.

Dieter stood at the back of the small dressing room in the rear of the Basilica Sacre-Coeur cathedral. The church topped one of Paris’s hills in the Montmartre district of the eighteenth arrondissement. He silently scanned the windows for the lens flare of a sniper or the fist of a fascist and listened through the wall behind his head for stomping boots or gunshots.

He was only a bodyguard, there for the personal protection of Her Serene Highness Friederike Marie Louise Victoria Caroline Amalie Alexandra Augusta, Prinzessin von Hannover und Cumberland, Princess of Great Britain and Ireland, Duchess of Brunswick-Lüneburg and a host of other defunct and extinct titles. However, the fact remained that she was as beautiful as pink roses and golden lilies, rich beyond belief, and the most upper of the upper-classes. In addition, her older brother was notorious for a childhood tragedy.

Someone would try to take her if Dieter relaxed his guard, just to make the papers, just to add more misery to the world.

It had happened before.

Often.

She had grown up with a target painted on her back, one that glowed brightly for terrorists and sociopaths.

Dieter looked out the window and listened through the wall, but he knew that Flicka’s hair was pale gold, her eyes were crystal green, and she had a heart-shaped face. He knew the scent of the herbal-mint shampoo she used and the sweet fragrance of her skin. He knew the taste of her mouth after she’d been drinking wine or eating vanilla ice cream, and he knew the satin of her skin under his hands and tongue.