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Chapter Twenty Five

S he simply grabbed Lottie’s hand. She didn’t even think about it.

“Take me to him.”

Sami and Romaissa erupted into immediate protest, but Zynara brushed them aside.

“At this point,” she gritted, “you are talking to the future Q’sar of Ain Zargiers. Get out of my way.”

Romaissa bowed. Sami didn’t. Lottie punched the air and sailed past the women of her security detail as if she was the queen of Sheba.

They jumped into Zynara’s flier and Lottie took the controls.

They were off the ground and streaking over the water in seconds, Sami scrambling to organise backup in their wake.

She watched Lottie pilot the flier as if she’d done it all her life.

There was an efficiency to her actions that Zynara had only caught a glimpse of once before—in that lane when she’d taken out the men firing on their vehicle with precision and a confronting ruthlessness.

The girl who primped in front of Zynara and who flirted like sass flowed through her veins was nowhere to be seen.

She flicked the flier off auto, bypassed its safeties, even negotiated a rapid flight path with Azzouan air traffic control—all from her own phone.

Zynara didn’t even want to think about how she’d managed to access that.

It was the final proof—plain and obvious for her to see beneath all the posing and posturing—that Lottie was not what she seemed to be, and never had been.

An agent of a foreign country’s intelligence bureau, sent to influence her country’s politics.

She should be furious with her. She should have thrown her in prison and rid Ain Zargiers of all outside interference. She should have—

But she didn’t.

Because she loved her.

She loved her still.

“This is madness,” Lottie muttered, raising the flier to lift them over the Atlas Mountains, somehow already knowing the best route through the peaks, unerring in her sense of direction.

“This is most certainly a trap. If he’s got your father—and you—then he has the two biggest obstacles between him and the crown.

You walk into this, you’re giving him everything. ”

Zynara didn’t want to think about that. “I’m not going to let him hold the country hostage. I won’t hide while he drenches my homeland in oil again.”

Lottie faced her. It was quiet in the cabin. The flier soared over the villages below. Everything Zynara loved was here.

“Malik will kill him.” Her voice was tight. Zynara could see her holding it all back—her cheek, her impatience, her lethalness and her love. “He will kill your father. And you too.”

“He wouldn’t.” Zynara’s breath snagged. She remembered the frog in the jar and the awful, awful glee on her brother’s face as he’d shaken it. He was mad. A sociopath. The money and power he’d enjoyed all his life had done nothing to mitigate it. Lottie was probably right.

A gentle hand landed on her leg. “He would, Niz. You know it. He already has killed to get where he is.”

The blood set like cement in Zynara’s heart. “What?”

“Your brother, Rayan. Seven years ago. It was perfectly staged, but it wasn’t an accident.”

Zynara stared.

Rayan had died in a small town in the foothills of the mountains.

There’d been rain—so much rain. Driven by climate change, of course, but what did that matter when avalanches of mud and water and debris sluiced through towns and villages and entire families were swept away in the tumult?

People were drowning. Houses were underwater to their second storey windows.

Cars and cattle bobbed down streets turned to rivers, and the mud was everywhere.

It had been horrifying. Incomprehensible. And Rayan, like the decent, noble heir to all of Ain Zargiers he was, rolled up his sleeves and got to work helping out on the ground. Helping their people.

Zynara had been in London. Dancing. She’d been clubbing with some woman she didn’t know and never saw again when the house Rayan had been sheltering in that night fell apart on its foundations.

He’d been in a village carved assunder when its gentle stream became a violent torrent of mud, and the ground was unstable.

Apparently the house simply crumbled as the earth caved in beneath it.

Everyone sleeping in it—the family, the workers, the members of her brother’s security, and wonderful, annoying, idiotic, loveable Rayan himself—had fallen into the ravine and been washed away forever.

They never found the bodies.

“Staged?” Zynara ran through every permutation, but she had to admit her mind was sluggish. “You can’t stage a climate catastrophe. It was an accident.”

“It was an irresistible opportunity.”

Zynara pulled her leg out from under Lottie’s hand. “Explain yourself.”

Lottie looked torn, but she obeyed. “I was in Libya,” she said. “Not at the time. A month or so later. I was there to catch a pair of bastards boasting about a job they’d done. The perfect crime, they were saying. Killed a prince and got away with it.”

“Libya?”

“Nationals. Incredibly well paid. They said the order had come from your golden boy of a little brother, and the flood had been a gift from heaven. They got close to Rayan while he was out of the city and under minimum security, they shot everyone in the building under cover of darkness, and with one small explosion, they toppled all the evidence into the river. It was beautiful.”

Zynara looked at her.

Lottie’s eyes flicked downwards. “I mean, as a job, of course.”

There was a silence while they flew over villages just like the one her brother had died in.

“And you met those men?” Zynara asked, tightly.

Lottie’s hand landed on her knee again. “I killed them, Niz. And I’m glad I did.

They were dirt. They were so fucking proud of themselves.

” She scrunched her nose suddenly. A rueful grimace.

“I messed it up a bit though. There may or may not have been a bit of a car chase through Tripoli. I could possibly have blown up a train, driven a bus into a government building and totaled a few other cars. One of them might have belonged to the son of a regional militia leader. I ended up in Abu Salem prison.” She chuckled.

“Good times?”

She shrugged. “Maybe. Different times. And I was a different person. But I’m not that girl anymore, Niz. I promise.”

They cleared the mountains, and the landscape below began to brown and dry, tilting and tipping toward the desert. The trees thinned. The cliffs and boulders began to tumble into sand.

Lottie was still looking at her with eyes that begged her to see her.

“Zynara?” she whispered. And then—bleakly— “Qasira?”

“I believe you,” Zynara whispered back. “I don’t know why. Nothing has made sense since I first laid eyes on you. All the evidence points to me loving you being the stupidest thing I’ve ever done, but—”

“You love me?”

It sounded so surprised, so eager, and so desperate.

Zynara lifted her chin and summoned the shreds of her lofty attitude. She could tell Lottie wasn’t fooled. “I love you. And I am certain I’ve already informed you of this—”

“I can stand to hear it again, you know. Often, actually. That would be nice. I think you should tell me hourly at least. It would be good practice for you. Break down that ice queen shit you seem to think is attractiv—”

“Lottie—”

“Hmm?”

“I love you. Concentrate on flying the damn drone.”

Lottie kissed her—just leaned over and kissed her hard, and Zynara could taste the relief on her lips. It was tinged with hope too, and potential. She tasted divine.

She could also taste excitement. Lottie was as dangerous and chaotic as her younger brother had proven to be, and Zynara couldn’t help loving her.

She wiped her thumb across Lottie’s lips when she pulled back, and adored the way her own gorgeous little psychopath fluttered her eyelashes and turned into a complete pussy cat under her fingers.

If they survived the next few moments, they could play with that forever.

“Libyan prisons are notorious,” she said. “How did you get out?”

There was an eye roll that was half embarrassment, half pride. “Evelyn had to come bail me out. The guv herself. Very nice private jet on the way back to London. You should have seen my style.”

“Evelyn?” Zynara’s stomach fell through the floor of the flier and smashed on the rocks.

“The Nightingale,” Lottie said. “Your friend. Evelyn Knight.”

Zynara pressed a hand to her forehead. The Nightingale.

She’d heard it the other night when Lottie had confessed everything to the Q’sar.

Her father hadn’t even blinked at the word.

Her mind leapt forward and figured it out.

Evelyn Knight—the agent her father and her aunt, the Queen of England, had positioned to befriend her back when she’d first started studying at Cambridge.

She wasn’t just any agent—she was the head of the Queen’s private intelligence service, just as Sami was the head of hers.

She was the one who’d sent Lottie to her, to manipulate her, to position her on the throne, all to ensure Ain Zargiers continued to benefit the United Kingdom.

Evelyn Knight and Lottie Finch. Which, of course, meant Sami was in on it too.

“My whole life —” she began. She’d stepped onto sand and it turned to water beneath her.

“—has been filled with secrets,” Lottie finished. “Tell me about it, princess. I know. But I’m here now. And I’m with you, and I will never lie to you again. I swear it.”

Zynara blinked hard, trying to hold back the sudden burn in her throat. She hadn’t known Lottie could look like that—serious, raw, and loyal to the edge of recklessness.

And then her brother’s oil refinery came into view, a brutal sprawl of pipes and towers belching smoke into the endless sky. The Ain Zargieri flag snapped against the breeze beside another golden one emblazoned with Malik’s name.

Zynara sat straighter. She held out her hand and felt the earth pause on its axis when Lottie took it.

“Then let’s end this,” she whispered.

Lottie’s answering grin was unholy.