Page 22 of The Falcon and the Flame (The Birds: On Her Majesty’s Sapphic Secret Service #2)

Chapter Fourteen

Z ynara couldn’t remember the first moment she started hating her little brother.

She sometimes wondered if being able to pinpoint an argument or a squabble as kids would make it easier to explain, but they’d had a happy childhood.

Well, as happy as could be, after their mother died.

Zynara had been thirteen when it happened—and if there was a worst time for a girl to lose a mother who loved her dearly, perhaps thirteen was it.

Zynara was suddenly adrift in the world, a connection of shared blood and soul ripped away from her just as she was becoming old enough to properly cherish it.

They hadn’t even started fighting properly yet, as teenaged girls and mothers do. A part of her was gone.

But her mother had already taught her love—and that turned out to be enough.

Zynara had clung tighter to her older brother, Rayan, and to her father, who was as strong as the mountains, and even though it had hurt like hell, she figured out how to keep on going.

Maybe that was Malik’s disadvantage. He’d only been nine when their mother died.

The spoiled baby was suddenly expected to pull his weight, the hugs and worship harder to come by.

He’d missed those patient lessons on tolerance and understanding.

He seemed to prove that kindness wasn’t innate—it was taught. And he didn’t get the study.

By the time he was ready for high school, he brushed aside all suggestions of Ain Zargiers’ top schools and put a prospectus for a posh English boy’s boarding school in front of the Q’sar.

He came back a right proper snot and Zynara realised she didn’t know him anymore.

She was on an accelerated maths and physics track then, and, beyond observing her little brother was still as sluggish a thinker as ever, she decided she didn’t care.

Neither of them were going to be Q’sar. They had to make their own way in the world. Zynara already had plans.

Malik had laughed at them even then.

“Electric vehicles?” he giggled. “For fuck’s sake, be realistic, Niz. Why don’t you hug a tree and pin some flowers in your hair too?” He fixed her with a vicious smirk and a look that was decidedly cruel. “Maybe don’t, though. The hippy look wouldn’t suit you.”

“And what’s that supposed to mean?” Zynara had asked. They were all home for spring break. Zynara had been reluctant to leave Cambridge and was taking the time to study advanced theoretical physics and chemical engineering from the professors at Ain Zargiers’ finest universities.

“Ignore him,” Rayan said, flicking his little brother’s ear. “Posh English school obviously didn’t teach him any manners.”

“Fuck off,” Malik muttered.

“See?” Rayan said, cheerfully. Rayan had always been cheerful.

Zynara regarded her little brother through narrowed eyes. Malik grinned meanly back.

“You’re not the flowers type of lesbian, are you?” he jeered. “What do they even call the other kind?”

Rayan flicked him again and Zynara kicked him under the table. Rayan’s friend Sami—always wherever Rayan was—balled up a napkin and tossed it at his head.

“Fuck off ,” Malik whined, and like the junior bully he was obviously pleased to be, he sulked away from the table to tell their dad.

Rayan and Zynara looked at each other.

“Was he always like that?” mused Rayan.

“An arsehole?” Sami asked.

“A homophobe,” Zynara finished.

It only got worse over the years. Malik bought his first muscle car not long after catching Rayan and Sami kissing in the west rose garden, and he crashed it into the palace gates only days later.

Was that when Zynara first began to give up on him? She’d concentrated on her work.

Now, all these years later, she was still trying to do exactly that on the global stage, and Malik was still behaving like a spoiled child.

She strode onto his awful superyacht as soon as it docked. The guards at the gangway shrank back from her fury.

The stench of cigar smoke and stale champagne in the main lounge was overwhelming. Zynara stalked past tabletops littered with glasses, the smudges of white powder on most smooth surfaces unmistakable.

Malik lounged in a low-backed chair on the deck, a glass of whisky in his hand, his expression infuriatingly smug. His entourage—the diplomats, oil barons, and the endless parade of girls in skimpy swimwear despite the sunset—looked on with mild curiosity.

Zynara barely resisted the urge to rip the glass from his hand and hurl it overboard.

“Malik. A word?” She didn’t know why she made it a question. He didn’t deserve her respect.

He feigned laziness. “So formal,” he drawled. “We’re all friends here. Whatever you have to say, I’m sure we’d all love to hear it.”

Zynara’s jaw tightened. “It’s not a request.”

“And yet, you’re on my yacht.”

The air thickened. Most of the onlookers now clocked an uncomfortable sibling standoff. One or two of the women tittered, but the men sat back in their recliners and crossed their arms. This was the stupidest thing Zynara had done for a long time.

She changed tactics.

“Ladies,” she murmured, refusing to meet Lottie Finch’s eyes and instead directing her words to the pretty Genevieve she’d played with last week.

She drew herself tall and injected as much ice into her tone as she could.

“I’m sure you’d prefer to spend the evening elsewhere.

And gentlemen, if you have any remaining dignity, you’ll see yourselves out. ”

Genevieve’s eyes darted sideways to Malik’s, but she stood.

Antonin Petrov huffed out a heavy sigh and rose to his feet.

Once he was clear of Malik’s gaze, he met Zynara’s eyes and gave a tiny nod.

He actually looked relieved, poor man, and like a gentleman, he held a hand down to Lottie. Zynara lifted her chin even higher.

But Malik, still lounging like a sultan, spread his hands wide. “Sit.”

Petrov and Lottie froze.

“You forget, sister dearest,” Malik said, “I am heir to the throne. You answer to me, not the other way around.”

Smug fucking bastard. Zynara remembered when he’d caught a frog in a jar once when they were kids.

He’d looked her dead in the eye and then shaken it until it was pulp.

She’d pummelled him into the ground, only leaving off when her father pulled them apart and held her fists until she stopped sobbing.

Malik was doing exactly the same thing to her now—and he was enjoying it just as much.

There was another factor. Lottie Finch stood a few feet away, watching, and there was a concern in her gaze that was shaking Zynara up just as bad. She did not need that cheeky, sumptuous, luscious, confusing woman seeing her lose control.

She took a breath and smoothed the edges of her anger.

“This is your game, then?” she asked her brother. “Hiding behind business dealings and” —she flicked her gaze to the women, all of them visibly uncomfortable— “the people you pay to keep you entertained?”

Malik’s shit-eating grin flickered.

“We either talk now, in private, or we take it up to the palace—”

She didn’t have a chance to finish that sentence. The atmosphere was split by a horrifying scream.

The party stood stock still—

—and then—

“He’s dead! He’s dead. Oh my god, he’s—”

The voice came from one of the rear bedroom suites. The woman Zynara knew as Beauty came running from the suite, not a shred of clothing on her body, her face panicked.

“He just— I don’t know— He just— stopped —” She wailed as another woman chased her down from the same room and tried to wrap a robe around her.

“Murder!” a man’s voice called in Arabic. “Those bitches—” One of the Saudi contingent hopped and stumbled as he attempted to get his legs in his pants and point an accusing finger at the same time. “My cousin is dead!”

The scene erupted into chaos.

The women huddled around Beauty. The men surged for the exits. Zynara was on her phone in a second.

“Sami! Get down here now!” Then she hollered over the side at the guards on the gangway. “No one leaves!” She ignored the shouting Saudi and strode toward the bedroom suite. Out the corner of her eye she noticed Lottie Finch looked the least surprised of everyone.

In the bedroom suite, the dead man was sprawled on the bed.

He was naked, and it wasn’t too hard to guess what he’d been doing when he died.

He was on his back, but someone had rolled him over.

His skin was bloodless and his eyes were bulging.

There was a look of terror on his face, and his fists were curled tight, clawing at the sheets as if he’d fought for breath until the very end.

There was a distinct smell of sex and a wreckage of alcohol and other recreationals on the cocaine-streaked glass table.

Zynara’s brain filed the whole scene away in a second, categorised it, and declared it useless.

Because the only thing that mattered was that the man was dead. And he’d died on royal property in the middle of an international summit hosted by the royal family.

Malik was a fucking idiot.

She closed the door.

Back in the main lounge, she was impressed to see Lottie had taken control.

“Everyone else outside,” Lottie said, but she’d already sat Malik down and had poured him another drink.

She’d placed Beauty and the woman Zynara didn’t know on one lounge, and the panicking Saudi on another.

The women appeared to be taking it better than the men.

Zynara shot Lottie a nod of approval, and despite everything, the woman flushed.

“No police,” snapped Malik.

“Obviously,” Zynara murmured, with a small bow to the Saudi. The man was some kind of junior prince. He was probably shitting himself. The Saudi royal family had a staunch set of etiquette guidelines even stricter than Ain Zargiers’. “Sami will be here soon. He will handle it.”

“Who is Sami?” the man blurted.

Zynara noticed Lottie appeared just as interested in the question.

“Head of my own personal intelligence team. I assure you this will be dealt with with the utmost discretion.”