Broken Prince: A New Adult Romance Novel (16 page)

"That's out of date," Eliot said. The man looked up, evidently shocked to have been interrupted.

"Out of date?" another board member asked.

"If you turn to the last page, you will see the theorem that I have been working on for the past year. I have since proved it."

"Did you send this out to the board before this presentation?" the gray-haired man in the middle asked. "I did not receive anything, I think, in my email." He smiled a smile of pity at Eliot.

"I have not yet typed up the proof," Eliot said. "But it is finished. I can walk you through it."

"We will start first with our comments on the original paper," the head of the board said. He coughed.

"Wait," the man in the middle said. "You proved this?" He bent his head over the conclusion of Eliot's proof. "But you're using too many variables—"

"Yes," Eliot said. "But go back a step and see; it's twice generalized."

"In your original paper, you say that such a proof is impossible!" The head board member stood up, his fingers spread on the table and damp with perspiration. "You were working on a few base cases and had already solved the simpler ones."

"As I said, the paper is outdated."

"I move to spend two hours looking over this new proof," the man in the middle said. "I need some time to look through this."

"Of course," Eliot said, bowing.

"Seconded," another man said. "All in favor?"

"Wait," the head of the board said. "Wait," amid a chorus of "Ay!"

"Motion passed. Two hours. That's all, Alex."

The head of the board looked lost and could not look Eliot in the eye.

Eliot rushed out of the board meeting room. Digging through his pocket for his phone, he ignored the stares from people around him on the steps. Yes, a Herceg. The convicted one. Let them stare.

The words on the screen meant nothing to him until the second time he read them, squinting against the harsh sunlight. It was a message from Brynn.

I'm going home.

He called but her phone was off. Then the tone sounded, high-pitched and whining in his ear, and he could not think of what to say to her that he had  not already said. So he hung up.

Where was she?
Going home
?

He glanced at the time on his phone. He still had nearly two hours. That was plenty of time, if he could catch her. He would catch her. He had to.

Eliot pulled out of the parking lot and headed toward the airport.

CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

Brynn

“‘One day,’ you said to me, ‘I saw the sunset forty-four times!’

And a little later you added:

‘You know— one loves the sunset, when one is so sad...’

‘Were you so sad, then?,’ I asked, ‘on the day of the forty-four sunsets?’

But the little prince made no reply.”

Antoine de St Exupery

I texted Eliot from the cab to the airport. I wasn't sure if I should wait for him to tell me whether or not it was okay to take his private jet. Well, I suppose technically it was his brother's private jet, but I wasn't about to ask Otto for any favors. The voice of my Nagyi permeated my memories, filled my heart with a vibrant anger.

Angry at whom?
That was a question I was unwilling to answer.

"Please, Louis," I said. "I need to get back home."

I was standing on the tarmac of the last terminal, next to Otto's jet. It looked a lot smaller than I remembered now that it was in broad daylight. Louis, one of the co-pilots, waved his hands in the air.

"I can't!" he said, his Cockney dialect undulating the words. "I'm so sorry, Brynn. I have a full load of businessmen headed toward Paris."

"That's fine," I said quickly. "We can go to New York from there, then California."

The sky overhead had turned dark, and now a light sprinkling of rain fell. I raised one hand over my head to keep the drops from falling in my eyes.

"New York? This bird is supposed to land in Prague tomorrow."

"Then you'll still have time for New York. I'll find my own way from New York to California," I said. I'm not sure whether it was the news of my Nagyi in the hospital or my fear that Eliot might come after me that gave me such confidence. Before, I would have called it brash. Now, it was only what was necessary. I suppose that's true of any villain.

"I'll have to talk with Lori about it," Louis said. "She's going to be late. She's never late."

"And I'm—aherm!— not late now," Lori said. Louis and I turned to see the woman bundled up in a scarf. She hacked again and paused, her breathing slightly audible through her nose. "You can't be late if you've cancelled, and I'm calling in sick. But oh dear, AM I sick. Is this the girl? Is this Brynn again?"

"It is," I said.

"I wish to God I could give you a proper hello, but you'll get this cough sure as shingles if you get too close to me." The rain fell harder, and Lori and I moved closer to the plane for shelter.

"I'll keep my distance," I said. "Lori, I need to get back home to my grandmother." I could not keep the desperate hoarseness from my words.

She turned to Louis.

"Pilot, you have a load of fewer than eight persons, is that correct?"

"Right now, yes," Louis said. "But with Brynn—"

"Which means you have room for one attendant or copilot filling the crew seat, is that correct?"

"Yes," Louis said, insight dawning on his face. "So she's...?"

"Congratulations, Ms. Tomlin," Lori said, nodding heartily at me. "You've just joined the crew."

Thunder cracked overhead and the skies opened up. I was surprised at how quickly the storm had moved in, but Lori seemed to take it all in stride.

"You don't know how lucky you are," Louis said. I winced internally—I didn't feel lucky at all. Not one solitary atom of luckiness. "We haven't been back in Budapest for days, now have we?"

"Not for days," Lori agreed. "Now get on with you. I've been meaning to have a lunch date with that assemblyman's wife anyway. Even in this darned weather. Reminds me of England, it does. Louis, I'll see you in a few days. Brynn, you take care."

"I will."

I marched up the steps and into the small jet plane, my head held high even though my smile felt plastered on with cheap concrete. I stuffed my backpack into the co-pilot's storage, avoiding the looks of the businessmen. I felt as though all eyes were on me. My jeans stuck awkwardly to all the wrong parts of my hips and legs, and the old hoodie I had on reminded me of my college years before I had studied abroad. It reminded me of how young I was.

Bending down, I immediately cracked my skull against the hard plastic ceiling of the cockpit.

"Careful the step in," Louis said.

"Thanks for the warning," I said, leaning myself into the seat. I buckled the seatbelts across my chest. "This is all very
Top Gun
."

"I've never seen that."

"No?" I said, incredulous. "The one with Tom Cruise as the pilot?"

"Uh-uh," Louis said. He flicked a switch on the plane's dashboard. Was it called a dashboard in a plane? A control panel? That sounded very space-age.

The engine roared to life with the last switch, and my body rocked back against the seat as the plane's wheels began to roll down the jetway. Rain streaked across the windows of the cockpit.

"I suppose that's lucky for all of us," I said.

Louis smiled and flipped the switch.

I had never been in the cockpit of a plane before, and seeing the ground drop away from the plane made my stomach flip. It almost took my mind off of why I was there, flying back home to see my Nagyi before...

Tears sprung to my eyes and I turned my head away, looking out of the window.

The plane was still creeping higher through the air, and wisps of gray trailed from the edges of the plastic windshield panel against the rainy sky. Back on earth, the smooth gray curves of the Danube ran through the city peppered with buildings of black and white granite, the people on the sidewalks crawling like ants on a random walk through the grid of streets, umbrellas opened over their heads. Cars glinted sunlight and a long line of cypress trees stretched out, growing smaller, more toylike. The plane dipped and rolled slightly on the air, and  my stomach rose into my throat with the turbulence. The physicality of the sensations made me aware of being emotionally numb. It was strange to think that I even had a body, but there it was, poking my brain for attention.

I imagined taking off my body like a dress, hanging it up somewhere and wandering across the universe as a soul. Was that what death would be? Or nothingness? Or something else?

Thunder rumbled in the clouds, and the sound vibrated the windows. The rainclouds obscured the view, and I was terrified. Louis seemed calm as anything, using his instruments to fly. Then the plane pulled up farther and we were out of the clouds. The sun was bright above the cloud layer, the sky blue. It didn't seem possible that we had left the storm and the rain all below, but looking down I saw the flash of lighting in the gray storm clouds. It blocked out my vision of the city almost completely. No more streets. No more cars. No more people with their black umbrellas on the sidewalk.

The sky seemed darker overhead, as though the rest of the universe outside of the atmosphere was pressing its way into the cockpit. I pulled my knees up to my body and bit my lip, willing myself not to cry. I was leaving Budapest.

"Beautiful, isn't it?" Louis asked. I could only nod and whisper a quiet 'yes.'

Yes, it was beautiful. An hour later we were in Paris, the Eiffel Tower spiking the famous skyline of the city of lights. Louis had already made the schedule change, and we took off after just a few minutes of refueling.

The sun pulled west along with us.  As we flew on, Louis pulled down a blind to shade our eyes, but after a couple of hours had passed the sun began to drop slowly beneath the horizon. The color of the sky changed to periwinkle and the clouds caught orange and red, burning brightly against the sky. It was like hovering inside of a glass prism that was slowly turning. The Atlantic beneath us was as dark as ink, with only a few flecks of white where the wind whipped the waves into frothy crests.

We followed the sun to New York. I only had eight minutes to make it from one airport terminal to another on the opposite side of the airport. It would be close.

Louis escorted me inside and through customs to speed things along, and he shook my hand at the gate.

"Goodbye, Brynn," he said. "Good luck with everything."

"Thanks," I said, swallowing hard.

I raced through the terminal, bypassing the moving walkways overstuffed with people. Nearly slamming into a businessman texting on his phone, I turned the corner and ran to the other terminal's entrance. Sweat tickled my neck and my leg muscles burned, reminding me that I needed to work out more. Giant screens with arrival and departure times rotated through the flight numbers, but I had no time to stop and look.

From the overhead speakers came a last call for boarding just as I skipped forward into the gate. I showed the airline worker my ticket and glanced up at the television screen in the terminal waiting area while she checked my passport. Then I looked again. The screen showed the Budapest skyline.

"This is an American news station, right?" I asked. The airline worker looked up from my ticket.

"Yes," she said, confusedly.

The news reporter came on screen and began to speak.

"In Budapest, Hungary, a suspected serial killer has been caught."

I moved closer to the screen, riveted.

"Miss? Miss, this is the last boarding call." The airline worker was talking to me, but my attention was elsewhere.

"The suspect allegedly killed eleven women over the past two decades, but Budapest officials say that the details of the murders were never revealed to the public due to the ongoing investigation."

The footage was of a man in handcuffs being escorted out of a worn-down apartment complex. I stepped closer to see his face. He was older than I had imagined, his short hair specked with gray, his face wrinkled. His dark eyes turned toward the camera, and for a moment it seemed as though he was staring straight at me, through the screen, across the world. There was no emotion in those eyes, only a stark coldness that chilled me to the heart. I looked down at his hands handcuffed in front of him. Something was wrong with them. They were dark, too dark.

I strained to hear the Hungarian words underneath the English of the reporter who was translating, but they were speaking too quickly for me to understand.

"Miss? The plane is leaving. You have to board now."

I squinted. There was something wrong with the screen, maybe. The light, or—

"Under pressure from the Assembly after a recent killing, Budapest police redoubled their efforts to find the suspect—"

"Miss!"

"I'm coming," I said, my eyes still glued to the screen. The man was being put into the police car. As he held onto the car door for support, I realized what was wrong, why his hands seemed so dark. His fingers left streaks on the car door that were unmistakable. I was hypnotized by the red.

His hands were covered in blood.

On the television, the policeman put his hand on the suspect's head and guided him into the car. From inside the car window, the murderer looked out toward the news camera. His eyes were still looking at me, or at someone else, perhaps at all of the survivors left behind, the families he had left in ruins. His face was pressed to the window and he was still looking out as the police car drove away from the apartment. The screen switched back to the news reporter.

"Miss!"

I wrenched my attention away from the television and took the boarding pass back from the airline worker. The jetway loomed in front of me, the tunnel bending down and to the left. I wanted to watch the man who was responsible for so much of my life's pain, but no wolf would keep me from going home to see my grandmother. I stepped forward into the maw, leaving my mother's killer behind me for good.