Page 74 of Royal

He should have known better.He should have knownwhat Marie-Therese might do.

When the prize was over a billion dollars of tangible assets and untold amounts of intangible wealth, plus control of a sovereign government and land, there were no rules.

Marie-Therese was playing to win, and she was playingonlyfor herself.

And thus, nothing was beyond her. No crime was inconceivable. No atrocity was beyond her grasp. She would burn Monaco to the ground if she couldn’t have it.

Because if she won, no one could touch her for anything she’d done to win. For her, it was absolutely all or nothing.

She would be the sovereign head of a country, a dictator for life. Even the International Criminal Court in The Hague, where war criminals and authoritarian dictators were put on trial for crimes against humanity, would have no jurisdiction because Monaco had signed but never officially ratified the treaty.

If Marie-Therese won the throne, she could literally shoot every Monegasque citizen in the head, and no one could prosecute her for it.

But why would she kill the people of Monaco when she could reduce their living standard to the bare minimum? She would have forty thousand serfs to do her bidding, whether it was to wash her feet or to transport street drugs through her harbor so she could take a cut of the profit.

Maxence had been playing on Monaco’s side, trying to win for the people of Monaco, not for himself. He couldn’t scorch the earth.

Maxence covered Dree, who was wiggling underneath him.

He thumbed the key fob from Rogue Security in his pocket, pressing it to alert Magnus Jensen and the other Rogues.

The doors they were behind rattled, but a chain bound the handles together.

On the other side of the throne room, Marie-Therese strode in and surveyed the nobles cringing on the floor.

Behind her, her mercenaries locked that door and threaded another rattling chain through those handles, too.

Underneath him, Dree whispered, “It’s like the massacre of the Nepali royal family you told me about.”

And the Russian Tsar Nicholas and his family, and Alexander I of Serbia and his wife, and that was just in the last century.

Royal families knew how royal families die.

But Maxence wasn’t going to let that happen to Dree.