Page 41 of Unleash Hades (Ungoverned Spaces #5)

Aldon Mountbatten

“ C oucou! Aldon!”

Lucien’s normally hilarious greeting grated on my nerves. I wasn’t in the mood to laugh.

“Knock it off,” I called as he entered the library. “There’s no one else here.”

It was ten in the morning, and I was already three drinks in.

Lucien stopped at the door, looking at the bottle on my desk, and the glass in my hand. He was dressed in his favorite hue - traffic cone orange, covered in purple peacock feathers.

“Well,” he said, cryptically, lifting a perfectly arched brow as he surveyed the state of my office.

He took a seat in front of me, across my large antique desk, and leaned back casually. For a moment, I wondered where the man I had grown up with disappeared to. Or was he swallowed by the mask he now wore?

“How is Mini Mina?” he asked, reaching out to take my glass, and downing it himself.

I got up, grabbed a second glass, and poured a healthy swig into both.

It wasn’t even a good whiskey. I just didn’t fucking care.

“Not so mini,” I said, taking the drink like a shot. “Won’t come out of her room. I don’t think she’s even sleeping. When she does come out, she barely speaks. All she ever asks about is where that woman fighter is. Mina’s acting like a ghost.”

And this was where I was now.

I was a shit brother.

I had given up on finding her, and let her go, only to find her calling my name.

She was covered in blood. Far from the glorious reunion I had dreamt up in my mind.

She wouldn’t let me touch her. I couldn’t hold her, or help her.

She wouldn't eat, sleep, drink, or do much of anything, and I was within seconds of needing to commit her before she wasted away.

But that was the last thing she needed. More incarceration, and imprisonment.

At least at home, she could walk around as she pleased, though she wasn’t even doing much of that.

“The She-Bear?” Lucien tilted his head.

“Yes, the She-Bear.” I tried to reach into my brain to remember what her name was. “Malina? Olivia? I forget her name.”

Too drunk to care, too.

“Olena Savchenko?” Lucien supplied, as if reading my mind.

“That’s right.”

“Ah, yes, she’s back in the Underground, but…”

“But what?”

“Well, that is why I’m here. Have you been keeping up with the trial, along with your…” he winced, looking at my glass. “Recreation?”

That stupid fucking voice. Pretty sure he had pulled it from an old BBC - he sounded like Mr. Humphries in Are You Being Served? No one would ever figure out that he and I weren’t the comedic side characters, but the secret villains in all these tales.

“Yes, I have,” I said, putting the empty glass down, and refrained from pouring another.

I didn’t need Lucien’s judgment right now. That might just be one thing too many.

“Well, as you know, Olena’s testimony was quite detailed.” He placed the cool glass against his lips, flattening his lower lip for a moment as he tried to figure out what to say next. “And easy to corroborate, once we knew where to look. It made prosecuting Richard Davenport in Absentia a breeze!”

Convicted in Absentia was a fucking joke. His body had been so mangled that we had no way to stage it. So we chopped him up into tiny pieces, sent him through a meat grinder, and had him fertilize several of the fields on my estates.

“And Calissandra Laurent was so generous. She threw all of Richard’s private funds into compensation for the victims and all that,” he waved his glass in the air, gesticulating even further.

The guy had way too much fun with his cover.

“Drop the game show mannerisms, and get to the point,” I snapped. “I’m not in the fucking mood.”

Regardless of the distance growing between us, especially in our profession, we were still best friends. We had grown up together. Me, him… Mina.

“I’m getting to that!” He batted his hand as if telling me to calm down. “Olena didn't want any of it. She had disappeared for all we knew. No papers, no identification. She just… poof!”

I narrowed my eyes.

I had watched the She-Bear with great admiration. She was a skilled fighter. She moved like a charging rifle - fast, precise, practiced. She was less a bear, and more machine. Every bit of her body functioned with delicious efficiency.

“Anyway, this is where you come in, dear boy.” He was a normal man underneath all that paint and thread. Why the fuck couldn’t he just be himself now? “She’s been arrested, and they’re threatening to deport her.”

“What?” I narrowed my eyes.

“Yes! Sending her back to Ukraine.”

“There’s… a war happening there.” As much as I had dedicated myself to government service, I never ceased to be amazed by how idiotic nation-states tended to be. The bureaucracy was so convoluted that idiocy always reigned far more than my great uncle, the King.

“I know, I know. But with the fact that she hasn’t taken advantage of the offered asylum and…”

I came to my feet slowly, laboriously.

I pulled a cord that lay against the wall that rang the downstairs bell. It was an ancient way of summoning the servants as needed that, frankly, I rarely used. But I needed it now.

Within seconds, the door opened, and Joseph, the head of my household staff entered.

“Mr. Cramber, please send the driver ‘round front. I’m going out.”

Lucien was inspecting his nails.

Cramber bowed and walked out.

I grabbed the coat I had worn the day before and put it on as I stumbled towards the door.

“Would you maybe like to know where she’s being held?” Lucien said, coolly.

Fuck.

“Yes, of course.”

He turned to me and smirked. He rattled off an address, and I memorized it as I stepped towards the door, feeling the gravity of the alcohol holding down my feet.

“You should bring her back here, whenever you’re done,” he supplied, as I opened the door to the foyer beyond my office. “Mina will appreciate it.”

Whatever plan he had concocted before he came here had worked to a T. I was too drunk to figure out his motivations, or to fight him. Hell, that’s why they called him the Ring Master.

“Shall I call HQ and have them back your play with the precinct? Maybe work on some… asylum claim, maybe?” he asked, not turning away from his nails. He didn’t really need me to answer. He already knew I'd say yes, but I grunted in acknowledgement anyway.

I used to be my little sister’s hero. I hadn’t been that in a long time, but if I could help this Savchenko woman, then maybe…

“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do!” Lucien called as I left the room, and stomped down the grand foyer, into the waiting car.

Nothing. The list of things that Lucien Bellamy would not do was an empty page.