The Man Behind the Mask

Then Brit tried again. “Dulce.” She spoke softly, with great care. “Dulcie, honey…”

My fingers stopped working. The gun slid from my hands. Suddenly I was freezing cold. I drew my legs up, wrapped my arms around my knees and hunched into myself, shivering convulsively.

“Dulce…” I felt the bed shift and looked up with a startled cry. “Hey.” Brit was on the bed beside me. “It’s just me.” She set her gun and her lantern on the nightstand and gave me a questioning smile. When I didn’t object to her nearness, she took the gun I’d dropped, flipped a little notch on the handle, and set it on the nightstand, too. Then she held out her arms. “Come on, come here…”

With a small, strangled cry, I grabbed for her. Her arms went around me. I buried my head against her neck, breathing in deeply, instantly reassured by the warm, healthy scent of her skin, by the perfumy smell of the styling gel I’d used on her hair.

“It’s okay,” she whispered, “you’re all right, you’re not hurt…”

Slowly I grew calmer. Brit patted my back and made more soothing noises. Meanwhile, Eric ordered the guys in uniforms to guard the men on the floor. He walked around the room, checking things out, dropping to a crouch now and then to peer under the furniture.

When he dropped low near a certain bureau, I pointed a shaking hand. “Gun,” I said. “There’s a gun under there.…” He reached way in back and found it. Holding it by the trigger guard, he carried it over and set it on the dais at the foot of the bed.

Near the entrance to the passageway, he bent and picked up something else. He sniffed at it—and jerked back at whatever he smelled. Then he mounted the dais and stood beside Brit and me. He held out what he’d found: a folded square of white cloth.

Brit frowned at it. “Chloroform?”

He nodded. They shared a bleak look.

“What?” I demanded. “Someone tell me. What does it mean?”

Brit said, “It looks like an attempted kidnapping.”

“A kidnapping…” I turned the ugly word over in my mind—and knew it couldn’t have been me they were after. It was Brit’s room. Given that she’d brought me here through the secret passageways, how many people could have known I was here—let alone that Brit wasn’t? I met her eyes. “Those men came for you.”

She pressed her lips together and nodded. “That’s how it looks.”

“But then…what about the other guy?” I glanced from Brit to Eric and back to Brit. When I got no reaction from either of them, I realized I’d yet to mention the man in the black mask. “There was another guy. He wore a black leather mask. He was the one who fought those two and tied them up. Didn’t you see him? In the passageway?”

Brit started to speak, but Eric caught her eye and shook his head. She pressed her lips together and kept silent.

“Okay,” I said. “What’s going on?”

Nobody answered me. One of the men on the floor let out a low groan. Eric turned to the guards. “Remove these two from Her Highness’s rooms. Wait in the main hallway, by the doors to the suite. Hauk Wyborn has been notified. Guard the prisoners well until Hauk relieves you or gives you further instructions.”

Elli’s husband, Hauk, was some kind of high-level soldier. I wasn’t really clear on it. They called him the king’s warrior—and wait a minute. Who’d had time to notify Hauk? Come to think of it, how had Brit and Eric known I needed help?

The guards saluted, fists to chests. “As Your Highness commands.” They rolled the intruders onto their backs, grabbed them beneath the arms and hauled them out.

When they were gone, Eric turned to me again. “Dulcie, we need you to tell us exactly what happened here.”

I pushed my hair out of my eyes. Why wasn’t I getting through? “Did you guys see the man in black, or not?”

Eric said, “Just tell us what you know.”

Brit stroked my hair, smoothing it over my shoulder. “Please, Dulce. Just…tell it like it happened. Everything you can remember.”

“But it seems to me that you two should have seen the—”

“Shh. Listen.” She took my face between her hands and made me look at her. “Start from the beginning. Were you asleep when they entered?”

I jerked my chin from her grip. “What is up with you two?”

They shared another speaking look. Then Brit said, so gently, “We’re just trying to find out what happened, that’s all.”

It wasn’t all. I might have been traumatized, but I was not yet brain-dead. There was something up with them.

But would they tell me what? Looking at their grim mouths and set jaws, I seriously doubted it.

I gave in and did it their way. “Okay. I was sleeping. I didn’t see them come in. It was the noise of the fight that woke me up. I thought at first I was having some kind of nightmare.…”

I told the rest as I remembered it. It was pretty disjointed. Really, what did I know? I woke up to find three men fighting at the foot of the bed. One of them beat up the other two, tied them up and ripped off their masks. I added, “I was so freaked at first, I forgot there were guards I could call. But then the guy in the leather mask finished with the other two. I figured I had to be next on his to-do list and I knew I wasn’t up for that. About then, I remembered the guards. I threw back my head and screamed. A lot. When I looked again, he was gone. Maybe five seconds later, you and the guards rushed in.”

Brit asked, “Did the intruders say anything—to you or to each other?”

“Well, the guy in the leather mask asked me if I was injured. When I shook my head, he told me to give him the gun. That was after he’d won the fight, but before he tied up the other two.”

“Concentrate on the other two,” Eric said patiently. “Did they say anything?”

By then I was wondering if they even believed me about the guy in the leather mask—but they had to know there was someone else. It was pretty obvious I hadn’t handled the two thugs in ski masks all by my lonesome.

I frowned at Brit and then at Eric. “So okay. You don’t care what the guy in the leather mask said?”

Eric let out a long breath. “Certainly we do.”

“We care very much,” Brit chimed in. “But the truth is…” She shot a pleading glance at Eric. He frowned, but said nothing. So she went on. “The man in the mask is…known to us. He’s an ally, you might say.”

“So…he was trying to protect me?” They nodded in unison. “But how did he know to—”

Brit cut me off. “Dulce. Can we get back to what happened please? What did the man in the leather mask say?”

“I told you. He asked if I was hurt and said to give him the gun. Which I didn’t.” I was way proud of that. Hey. My performance had not been stellar, you know? I was clutching at straws.

And I might be useless in a fight, but that didn’t mean I was stupid. Slowly I was putting two and two together. The two in the ski masks had to be the bad guys and the other one had come to my rescue. So it was a good thing I hadn’t been able to make myself shoot him…right?

Good a guess as any, I thought.

“And the others?” Brit prompted. “Did they speak?”

I tried to remember. “Someone said something when I first woke up, before I sat up and saw what was going on. The voice was…different. Rougher than the voice of the one in leather.”

“Not the one in leather, then?” asked Eric.

“I don’t think so.”

“What did the other man say? What were his words?”

I thought about it a minute, trying to get it right. “‘I’ll…cut off your balls, fitz-something,’ I think.”