Page 99 of Rogue

“Oh, he’s the Sir Arthur Sumpin’-Sumpin’ who rented the hotel room.”

“The very one. He’s the Earl of Severn.”

“Oh,Lord Severn.I get it.” Dree nodded. “Like Severn Snape.”

“Close, and I would bet that Arthur’s house would be Slytherin, were it not named Spencer House.”

Dree laughed. “I only read the slashfic anymore because,you know.Hermione and Draco forever.”

Maxence smiled more in the darkness.

She didn’t believe him.

She didn’t have to. The night was perfect because he could tell her anything.

He could tell hereverything.

He could tell her about when he had been kidnapped when he was nine and held for two weeks on a rusty freighter ship off the coast of Europe, and about how he’d finally gotten away because his family hadn’t done jack shit to get him back.

Max could tell her all the people who might kill him, if they had the chance.

The list was long.

Estebe Fournier, the mafia boss, because Max had rescued his wife, Simone. Estebe held grudges.

Max’s older brother Pierre, probably, because Max existed.

His uncle Jules, who had over a billion reasons to kill Maxence, if he could, if it even mattered.

More.

Maxence held Dree Clark more tightly in his arms.

The beds at the Four Seasons George V weresocomfortable.

“And what’s the tattoo on your back?”

Maxence tried to answer her.

Darkness settled around him.

Darkness and silence.

Maxence breathed in her scent, clutching this moment.

He breathed, “Estebe, Pierre, Jules, Pope Celestine the Sixth—”

“They’re on your back?” Dree murmured, but she was falling asleep, too.

In his mind, he told her what they were, but then he was flying over Paris’s lights and the Eiffel Tower with Pope Celestine the Sixth chasing him, and then he broke out into the moonlight.

Too soon, the sounds of the traffic outside the hotel crept through the curtains, and dawn leaked into the room.

His phone buzzed.

Your plane leaves in two hours from Orly. Be on it this time.

Chapter Nineteen