Chapter One
Alexandra
Alexandra Gertrude Renee Rochat:
A woman on the verge of (justifiable?) homicide.
Ugh. Princes.
They really are the worst.
And Nickolas Von Bergen is a special kind of awful. Smug. Entitled. The type of royal who believes the rest of us were put on this earth for his amusement. I’ve known him since we were children and can confirm he’s been insufferable since the age of four, at least.
This isn’t the first time I’ve wanted to kill him, and I’m sure it won’t be the last.
He’s just so…murderable.
Sliding open the glass door of our Swiss hotel suite, I watch him with my lip curled.
Lounging in the hot tub on the balcony as the snow falls on his perfectly curled dark hair, bragging to my sister and his brother about how fast he zipped down the double black diamond slope this afternoon—he’s practically begging for a knife to the gut.
Or, at the very least, an elbow in the eye.
Both eyes, maybe…
He’d be a lot less pretty with his sparkly green eyes swollen shut.
And he wouldn’t be able to see.
And if he couldn’t see, the powers that be might decide it’s time to remove him from the field. Send him back to work on the Gallantian tourist website. Chain him to a computer somewhere in Baden-Bergen where I’ll never see or hear from him again—except at family gatherings, of course.
Because Nickolas Von Bergen isn’t just my work nemesis. Soon, he’ll be my double brother-in-law.
My sister Sabrina is married to his eldest brother, Andrew, the King of Gallantia, and my sister Lizzy is engaged to his next oldest brother, Jeffrey.
Andrew is an amiable goofball, and Jeffrey a brooding behemoth with a bossiness disorder, but both are far less irritating than Nick. Andrew’s clownish side makes Sabrina happy, and Jeffrey would clearly lay down his life for Lizzy in a heartbeat. He’s actually very sweet with my shy, scatterbrained sister, and probably, if I’m being honest, a decent human being.
But I don’t like being wrong.
No…that isn’t accurate. I don’t have much experience with being wrong. From the time I was a tiny girl, I’ve been able to read people. Give me ten minutes and I’ll guess where you’re from, which parent left you with a childhood wound, what you had for breakfast, and who you’re planning to cheat, swindle, or kill today.
The fact I was wrong about Jeffrey is…strange.
Uncomfortable.
And it is downright infuriating that, until our run-in this past summer, I’d been so utterly off base about Nickolas’s capacity for subterfuge.
Against my will, my thoughts go back to that cool night in May…
Seven months earlier…
I’m going to kill Nickolas Von Bergen.
Kill him dead.
Knock him out with a bat, drag him into the Romanian woods, and bury his body in a shallow grave.
It’s the least he deserves for putting my family in danger.
“That’s incredible, mate,” Nick slurs from several meters away, where he’s doing a drunken dance by a firepit next to one of the most dangerous drug dealers/human traffickers/generally evil men in Europe. “I’d love to see your helicopter. We have one for the royal family, but it’s so…blue. You know? I hate blue, don’t you?”
“Blue is all right,” the man with the eerily gorgeous profile responds.
Stefano DeLuca is objectively even more handsome than Nickolas—with his sun-kissed skin, broad shoulders, sculpted muscles, and Greek statue-esque features—but looking at him gives me chills.
And not the good kind.
Even if I didn’t know he was responsible for the deaths of three journalists and dozens of rival mafia members, or that he’d kidnapped and sold hundreds of innocent women into slavery, some of them not much more than girls, he would still make my blood run cold.
It’s his eyes.
Flat. Empty.
I’ve met snakes with more warmth than Stefano.
There’s something missing in the man; some absent quality of humanity that sets off all my “danger, predator in the vicinity” instincts.
Just standing behind him in line for beer at the festival’s refreshment tent earlier was enough to lift the hairs at the back of my neck, making me grateful for my baggy T-shirt, cutoffs, and combat boots. In grungy clothes, with my hair pulled into a ponytail and an oversized sock cap pulled low on my forehead, I couldn’t be less Stefano’s type. He goes for leggy models with wasp-thin waists, pouty lips, huge boobs, and vacant expressions—not teenaged goth girls.
Without makeup, I look closer to fifteen than twenty-five, a hazard of being barely five feet tall and cursed with a babyface. But I don’t mind either as much as I once did. In fact, my appearance is one of the most powerful weapons in my arsenal.
Go ahead, bad guys.
Underestimate me. Overlook me.
Assume that runty blonde with the scrawny wrists couldn’t possibly be here to take you into custody for Union Ten, Europe’s most elite organization of undercover law enforcement agents.
I’ve been training to be a spy since I was accepted into Union Ten’s boarding school for future agents when I was thirteen. I’m more than capable of taking down a man twice my size and outsmarting your typical criminal mastermind, but I won’t complain when the bad guys make my job easier for me.