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She tore it open and glanced at the royal header, prepared to skim the contents because it was unlikely to be important. Drake hadn’t read this because he respected her right to some privacy. Even if he was otherwise most disrespectful and outright dirty.
She smiled, then realized what she was reading. It was written in a shaky hand.
For your eyes only, my sister.
I am alive, if barely. Badly injured. My right hand does not work.
Do not tell Drake. Please.
I will contact you again when I am in better health.
You will not find me.
If you doubt this is me, remember when you let me into your rooms to escape from Letitia and I made you swear never to tell? It’s me.
Burn this or destroy it somehow.
Roarke Dywin.
What to do with this? She clutched it to her then shoved it into a drawer among a mess of old cards. Drake was waiting.
She hurried out and was accompanied down the stairs to the underground garage by four palace guards. Drake greeted her with a smile and a hug, and opened the door to the coach for her, brushing off the guard’s attempt to do so.
As they drove into the sunlight, she was racked by a maelstrom of conflicting thoughts.
Don’t tell Drake?
Don’t?
How could she not?
Because he might have Roarke killed.
She shut those thoughts down using a technique taught for battle, to quieten worries until a more appropriate time. Mister Fenton had been unusual. Battle was the least likely event, ever, to her mind. She was royalty, not a soldier.
At least two hundred armed men joined the coach as they left the city, heading for what she knew had been the site of a potential factory.
Her brothers had aimed to thwart the Overwatch sats by building an underground factory.
Whatever had gone wrong that day, the factory site was now a hole in the ground.
“Why so many men?” she asked Drake.
He’d dressed in his own version of funereal garb. It made him look edible. Black pants, boots, shirt, along with dark glasses, a pistol, and a long sword with a hilt embellished with writhing fanged creatures. He was dark, handsome, and brutal—a combination she’d never tire of.
“There’ve been ambushes of patrols. Small ones and not in this area but I’m not taking chances. I could have just told you about this but thought you’d like to see where your brothers died and hear how it seems to have happened.”
He wrapped his arm across her shoulders and drew her to his side.
“Yes. I do want that.” She smiled weakly up at him, then wrapped her fingers through his larger ones, eyeing their hands. How good they looked together.
And here was she with this secret.
It could wait.
Roarke was not going to spring from the underbrush.
The factory site was at the base of a green-topped hill. Trees swayed against the skyline and birds flitted about. If not for the toxins causing fertility problems and mutations this planet was close to perfect.
