Max and the Prince (2 page)

“I’m sorry,” he murmured.

Lucien sat quietly for a moment and didn’t look up to
acknowledge the comment or make eye contact with Max. “There is a reason why
I’m telling you this. You see, there are particular ways of reacting to things
in my family. We stay quiet and we grieve privately. We don’t rant and rave at
the world, we accept sympathy with grace and courage. But when Seb died, I
didn’t… I went… I lost control of my life for a long time, drinking, partying, and
having—” He coughed. “—an inappropriate liaison. Of which there are photos.”

“Photos of the drinking, or the liaison itself?”

“Both. The drinking my family could handle, but the, uhm…
sex side of it was a bitter pill as it doesn’t look good.” Lucien air quoted
the last words with resignation in his voice.

“Have you seen the photos?” Max prompted.

Lucien reached for an envelope on Kyle’s desk and passed it
to Max. “In there,” he said.

Max opened the envelope and pulled out one photo just far enough
to see a grainy shot captured with a long-distance lens of a man that could
potentially be Lucien with what looked like another man. Very quickly he pushed
the photo back into the envelope. “I don’t need to see any more. So this whole
situation is about you being blackmailed for what? Being gay? Being caught on
camera?”

“Kind of.” The way Lucien spoke told Max there was more to
this than was obvious at first.

“Whoever’s threatening to expose you does realize this is
the twenty-first century, right?”

Lucien colored, but at least he was looking at Max directly now.
“In my family, my country… Look, the man I’m with in the photos is a government
official, a married official. I promise you I didn’t know he was married… but I
was… drunk… really drunk. I don’t expect you to understand, but my family is held
to a higher moral standing.”

So Lucien believed that any family in the public eye should
have higher moral standards than the rest of the populace. Useful to know.

Max was puzzled. “Do they have problems with you being gay?”
Max couldn’t recall anyone in the British monarchy who was openly gay, but to
be honest, he didn’t pay that much attention.

“They know that I am. They don’t—” He searched for the word.
“—
approve
as such. But as long as I keep it all behind closed doors,
it’s fine. After all, I have three older siblings who can take care of the
family firm and the appropriate number of heirs.”

Bitter much?

“So, this government official, you think he is the one
blackmailing you?”

“No, God no. The authorities went down that road and Edward
denied everything and they couldn’t find any link or evidence.”

Max pulled his lower lip between his teeth and considered the
information. Princely meltdown, photos, gay sex—none of it added up to Prince
Lucien needing an actual bodyguard.

“There’s more, then,” Max said.
There has to be.

Lucien shifted uncomfortably. “The first few notes arrived
just after I was photographed with the man and they were sent to my parents.
Imagine that? Your parents being sent incriminating photos of their quiet son.
They were shocked, horrified, but they refused to negotiate with the
blackmailer. They ignored them, and there weren’t any more threats, no more
photos, and everything appeared to end. I just wanted to hand over any money
they wanted, but my family wouldn’t let me, and it seemed they were proved
right. Right then it seemed that whoever took the photos and threatened me had
given up.”

“What do you mean, it seemed?”

“Because then they found the body.”

Lucien was growing agitated, twisting his fingers together,
and he was no longer flushed with embarrassment but spiky with the beginnings
of anger. A change of subject was probably a good idea.

“What body?” Max said.

“Wait, I have to get this straight in my head. I should
start with university.” Lucien closed his eyes and looked to be getting his
thoughts in order and Max had to hold back his instant state of alert at the
mention of a body. “I decided I wanted to study in the UK, anything to get away
from… everything. I’d already missed years by losing the plot, gap year from uni
after gap year, always an excuse not to go. Then suddenly, that is all I wanted
to do. My old tutor recommended Cardiff a long time ago when I was only twelve
or so, something about the UK Universities having the best research facilities
and Cardiff being a beautiful city. When I was applying I remembered what he
said.”

“Not to mention it’s in a different country.” Max pointed
out.

“Yes. I mean, at first my family didn’t like the idea of me
moving so far away without a security team. Or without the pomp and ceremony of
a visiting dignitary.” Lucien rolled his eyes. “But after everything I went
through when Seb died, I think my parents finally came to the decision that any
move to get my head out of my arse was a good one.”

Max couldn’t help the small snort of amusement. The word
arse
coming out of Lucien’s mouth was just all wrong. Lucien frowned momentarily at
the snort but continued.

“So some years later than the other students I should have
been with, I started my degree. I was registered as just Luke Magrello, the
normal guy with the funny accent.” He pointed at himself and offered a wry
smile. “Luke Magrello doesn’t need a bodyguard or any special treatment. The
threats had stopped. Everything was quiet, and I wanted to blend in and be
normal. I’m ashamed to say that I did my own bit of blackmailing by promising
my parents to never drink again if they’d only let me study at Cardiff and live
on campus and just be normal.”

“Okay, let me understand this. You’re a prince, royalty, but
you imagined you could hide away and no one in the age of Twitter and Facebook
would put two and two together?”

“Prince is a title, that’s all. My family doesn’t have the money
one would think was attached to it. I’m maybe eightieth in line to the throne
in the UK through my father’s side, but we’re not rich—in fact you could say
we’re property rich but cash poor.”

Max couldn’t get any of that to make sense. Why was someone
blackmailing a family with no money, and—wait, none of that answered his
original question. “So why do you need a bodyguard?”

Lucien bit his lip. “I don’t think I do.” He held up a hand
to stop Max from responding. “The letters,” he said. He passed over another
envelope, and this time Max pulled out everything. Nine separate letters in
individual plastic wrappers with the stamp of Cardiff police on three of them
and a familiar country name on the other six.
So that’s where Prince Lucien
comes from
. Envelopes were attached to each, but none had gone through a
postal service as such.
All hand delivered, then.

“They’re in order,” he said. “The first six were sent to my
home before I moved here and when the police looked at them the first five were
all linked by tone. Crude and sexual, whoever wrote these was after one thing,
and they signed off
OS
. The sixth one is different. The first five had
my parents demanding I had a 24/7 bodyguard, and there was no way they would have
let me leave the country on my own. Look… you’ll see.”

Max read the first one, a letter of admiration and respect,
albeit a short one. Nothing much that would ping his radar, apart from the fact
the letter had been signed off with
mine forever
before the simple
initials
OS
. It appeared all five of the letters ended the same way.

The second was a little more insistent, suggesting Lucien
maybe hadn’t received the first, then apologizing for being a nuisance.
Although there was no return address on the first, so how the hell Lucien could
have replied even if he’d wanted to wasn’t clear.

“That’s just irrational,” Max murmured, more to himself than
Lucien.

“It’s like he wanted a reply,” Lucien said. “I don’t get it
either.”

The third was angry and said in no uncertain terms that
Lucien should know better and where were his manners. Still irrational. The
fourth was where it got interesting. Abruptly the writer was saying that Lucien
wasn’t the man he thought he was, the man that OS, whoever OS was, had fallen
in love with. The letter writer said there were photos and he would hate to see
them released to the press if Lucien didn’t respond to the letters admitting he
was in love with OS.

“That’s where I am thinking, respond to what? Is there
something in those letters I should be seeing to know who to respond to?”

Max shook his head. “I don’t see anything. But somehow the
writer thinks you should know him. Did OS seem familiar to you? Oliver, Oscar,
something?”

“Nothing at the time, I promise you.”

“And the blackmail photos, I assume he means the ones I just
saw.” He turned to the next letter and confirmed his own statement. Crudely
stapled to the fifth missive was a black and white print of the blurred image
Max had just looked at with the words
You think I couldn’t give you this?
All you needed to do was ask.
written in block capitals.
I will have
you.

Lucien pointed at the writing. “We had checks done on printing
and the tone of the words. All of the letters are a supposed match but because
there is no part of it that is handwritten in cursive or script, we can’t get
any more from them. The authorities couldn’t find anyone with the initials OS
who had a direct link to me, but do you know how many people in my country have
those letters in their name?”

Max glanced at Lucien, who was gesturing wildly to
underscore the question.

“I can imagine,” he said.

The sixth letter was different. The paper quality better,
and the words used less raw and more controlled. If Max didn’t know better,
he’d say they were from a completely different person.

All it said was
You don’t need to worry any more. I’ve
dealt with him
.

“The suspicion was that this was a different person,” Lucien
said. “Then—” He squirmed a little in his seat. “—the police found a body in a burned-out
car, a man named Oscar Sheiver.”

“You think that was OS?”

“His apartment wall was covered in photos of me, my family,
and he had these printed wedding invites between me and him. All they could
determine was the dead man, Oscar, had been murdered before being placed in the
car, killed by several blows to the head. There was no evidence to link to who
killed him, and for the longest time I thought my parents had cleared up the issue.”
Lucien lowered his head. “I didn’t know what to think.”

“Okay, so letter six is someone admitting what they did,” Max
summarized. “That they ‘dealt’ with OS.”

“That is what the police thought, but with no more leads, it
was done. I sobered up, became more of who I should be, and applied for a university
place here.”

Max turned to letter seven, the first of the ones with the
Cardiff police station tag.
I’ve seen what people are like around you. Be
careful.
The paper was again different, which ruled out a connection that
way, but still, the tone of it was a warning and wasn’t threatening in any way.

“That was pushed through the door,” Lucien said.

“And you think it’s by the same person who might have
removed OS from the picture?”

Max shook his head. “I don’t know. No one knows. It
certainly looks like it, but it’s been so long since the first six letters,
it’s anyone’s guess.”

If the author of the last letter six had followed the prince
to his school in a completely different country, then it didn’t matter the tone
wasn’t threatening.
Not good.

Letter eight rambled on for two pages, all in capitals,
talking of the kind of people that Lucien should watch out for: the teammates
in the swim team who were lying to him and the housemates who wanted nothing
from him but money.

“This seems pretty specific. Do you have a feeling that
someone is lying to you on the team?”

“No.”

“And is someone in your house taking money from you?”

“No, nothing more than lending a fiver here and there,”
Lucien said. “No one knows who I am apart from the uni authorities.”

Letter nine was on different paper, a pale yellow cheap
stock from the weight of it. This was both somewhat of a threat couched in a
demand for Lucien to ‘see’.

It ended with a strange sentence.
I can’t always keep you
safe, why don’t you see that? I need you to see or you’ll end up getting killed.

Just that. A simple collection of words that were stone cold
in their finality and intent.

Max considered the last part:
or you’ll end up getting killed
.
That wasn’t the same as ‘I’ll kill you’? The words were subtle in difference
and it didn’t sit well with Max. “He or she didn’t say they would kill you,
just that you’ll end up being killed. That suggests a dissociation from hurting
you directly.”

“I can’t see the difference,” Lucien said. “At the end of it
I’m dead, according to whoever wrote these.”

“You want my advice?” Max asked. He pushed forward before
Lucien could say a thing. “Go home to the castle or palace or whatever with
Teddy, and get as far from here as possible until the authorities track the letter
writer down. If it’s the same person who dealt with OS and that person is here
in the UK now, then you should be keeping your head down.”

“We don’t have a palace or a castle,” Lucien snapped. “And
I’m not going home. That is exactly what my parents want. I’m in my last year, and
I want to stay. The deal so I get to stay is that I have security. They sent
Teddy over—he’s the head of security at home. But you’ve seen him with his best
impression of a hairless Hagrid, and if he’s with me, nothing will be the same.
I need someone who will just
be
with me. If I stay here, if I don’t want
to go home, can you help me?
Will
you?”