AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Pushing back my chair, I rise.
“You didn’t finish your tea.” Victoriana sips from her dainty cup.
If Andela is the easygoing party girl, I’m the textbook elder brother—the mature, responsible one. Victoriana is the eldest among us cousins, but she seems more like the daydreaming middle child. She could have texted me as soon as she saw Andela’s post, but instead she wasted time playing tea party. Sometimes she takes the distant royal thing way too far. “Sorry to eat and run, but I have to go to Vienna.”
Hans meets me at the train station. If I’m going to spend three hours on a train to crash my sister’s road trip, I want company. Not to mention a buffer when I have to rein them in. We board the high-speed Austrian Railjet train and find our seats. I paid the extra fee for business class, which, unlike air travel, is nicer than first class.
Railjet uses one of their older trains on the Freiberg to Vienna run, which suits me fine. I prefer these three- and four-seat semi-compartments to the open-plan single seats in their newer cars. We stash our bags in the overhead rack and settle into the plush armchairs by the window.
Hans plays with the adjustable light, then rolls the window shade down and back up. When we slide out of the station, the third seat in our little compartment is still empty, and I sit back with a sigh. I probably should have brought Lukas, but I want to keep this retrieval more of a sibling thing than a national security thing.
Hans drops into his seat. “They got a snack bar on this thing? I’m hungry.”
“You’re always hungry. There’s a restaurant and a bar. But we can order dinner on the app.” I nod at a QR code on the table. “They probably serve snacks, too.”
Hans already has the app open. “You can see where we are!” He flips his phone around just long enough for me to see a map, then swings it back. “That’s cool. Did the girls ride this train, too?”
“I don’t know.” I pull up the Feltz Instagram page, but Andela has apparently blocked me because I can’t find her account. “You friends with Andi?” Maybe I need to make a private account so I can follow my siblings. Of course, she would have blocked that, too. I find Eva’s account, but she hasn’t posted anything since a distant snapshot of Eduard and the Grand Duchess in the parade this morning.
“Hang on, I’m getting us beer.” He taps a few more icons, then swipes with a flourish. “Done. Lemme check Insta.”
Our beer arrives before Hans finds the account because he keeps getting distracted by videos of puppies. I put our beverages in our cup holders, set the plate of fries on Hans’s table, and thank the server. Then I watch the outskirts of Freiberg give way to mountain meadows and sip my beer while I wait for Hans to find something.
“Ha!” Hans raises his beer in a toast, then downs a gulp. “Got ’em. They took a train at one. Doesn’t look anything like this fancy car.” He hands me the phone and grabs his fork.
In the photo, the girls lean over a table from facing seats. “I think that’s economy class. Eva and Lina probably didn’t want to spring for business.” I wonder how Andela feels about that. She looks happy in the selfie, but she’s used to the perks of being royal and having a trust fund—expensive apartment, high-end transportation, excellent food. Of course, if she cared that much, she could have upgraded the girls’ seats.
“Did you get us tickets for this concert they’re going to?” Hans swipes his forkful of fries through a glob of mayonnaise and shoves it into his mouth with a blissful sigh. He chews, swallows, and gulps more beer. “Two things I’ll never get tired of: European beer and fries.”
“The concert was sold out.” I’m not super social-media savvy, but even I was able to use the hashtag to identify the K-pop group the girls are seeing. “The venue is an old house near the Stadtpark. It’s more like a wedding venue than a concert hall. According to the band’s website, they were filming a video this week and decided at the last minute to offer a concert. It sold out in minutes.”
“How’d the girls get tickets?” Hans offers me his plate, which holds three fries. “You want some?”
“Thanks. Go ahead.”
He ignores my dry tone and spears the remaining fries. “Your loss. I can’t believe train fries are this good.”
While he polishes off his beer, I reach out to a friend on the palace staff. “I suspect Andela pulled some strings to get access to the event. Being royal comes in handy sometimes.” I wave my phone at him. “Got Herbert working on tickets for us.”
“Herbert? Is that your old classmate in the PR office?” At my nod, Hans purses his lips. “Is he the one Andi would’ve called? Wouldn’t he have mentioned it to you?”
“That’s why we call him—because he’s good about not ratting us out. But I’ve never tried to sneak out of the country. And Andela—” I don’t want to out my sister, but… “There was an incident years ago—when she was still in high school. She snuck off to Monaco and got into some trouble. If she’d been the average seventeen-year-old girl, no one would have cared. But someone figured out who she was, and the press had a field day. Since then, the palace staff has really cracked down on her. No one’s going to risk their job to get her K-pop tickets.”
“You sure?”
“Oh, yeah. It was a whole thing. That’s why I never got to travel solo until last year.”
“And when did your boy Herbert get hired?” Hans slouches down in his chair.
“Last year—” I close my eyes as his point hits home. “He wasn’t here when Andela went AWOL. You’re right, he might have helped her sneak out.”
I text Herbert the question.
We wait, my fingers drumming relentlessly on my armrest while the little dots dance on my phone. They stop and start several times, then the message finally comes through.
I frown at my phone, then turn it to show Hans. “He got her two tickets and three backstage passes.” I flip it back. “And no tickets for us, at any price. He tried.”
Hans gets to his feet. “In that case, we need dinner.”
