Chapter 251

Iris had been feeling quite proud of her to plan to sneak into Alexander and Fiona’s rooms through the secret passageway. She was feeling very pleased with herself. Smug, even.

But there was something that she did not know.

She did not know that Alexander had rigged this passageway entrance with a rather elaborate security feature months ago, after his stepmother sent a spy in through it.Yes, he had considered simply sealing this passageway shut after that incident. The doorway could easily have been walled over with brick or concrete and made impenetrable.

But after some consideration, he had decided to do something a little different. Because if he ever again had an enemy in his own home attempting to spy on or harm him or his family, he wanted to know about it and he wanted that would-be invader caught.

So he had rigged this secret door with an alarm and a trap, instead of sealing it closed.

A trap that only he knew existed, and only he knew how to release after it’d been triggered.

WHOOP! WHOOP! WHOOP! WHOOP!

The deafening alarm blared louder than loud. Everything that happened after it started going off, after Iris pushed the secret door open just a crack, seemed to all happen at once in the blink of an eye.

Iris stepped back, letting the cracked door fall closed.

No, no, no, she repeated internally. This wasn’t supposed to happen…

A tremendous clatter and clash sounded on either side of her in the next instant as steel grates dropped hard and fast down from the ceiling.

Iris looked frantically from side to side, lifting her lantern up to see in the pitch dark of the tunnel.

She was trapped in a big metal cage. How had that even happened? It all happened so fast—

Stunned and scared senseless, Iris forgot herself completely for a second—fear overtook her, total panic—and she dropped her lantern.

It fell sideways, throwing a big splash of blazing kerosene out the top as it went tumbling down to the stone floor.

The gas, alight with fire, ran a fast streak across the floor, all the way to the threshold of the secret door.

Seconds later Iris heard a huge, surreal WHOOSH sound from the other side of the door, accompanied by a blast of intense heat.

Fiona

Nina and I had been sitting together in silence, sipping coffee. I was bouncing a strangely quiet and docile Lexi on my knee.

Both our cell phones were face up on the table. It was dark now, almost an hour past sunset, and we still hadn’t heard from the guys.

It was late for caffeine, but I didn’t think I would be able to sleep tonight anyway. I was wired, more wired than I’d ever been in my life, and my wolf was telling me not to let my guard down.

But even so, I nearly jumped out of my skin when a blaring alarm began to sound out of nowhere. From the nursery.

Nina and I both leapt to our feet. Lexi wailed, curling into my chest. I clutched her tight and pressed my hands over her ears.

It was perhaps one second later that I smelled it. Gas.

I ran for the bedroom door just as the soldiers out in the hall started pounding on it from the other side.

“MISS FIONA! OPEN UP! OPEN—”

Just as I threw the door open and rushed forward into the soldier that’d been standing on the other side, a tremendous whooshing sounded from behind me, an explosive sound like fire catching; and the heat—suddenly a blanket of heat fell upon me from all sides.

I flew through the bedroom door into the waiting arms of the soldier, and he caught me and whisked me away down the hall.

The alarm was still blaring, whooping at a screeching decibel.

Lexi was screaming in my arms. I held my hands over her ears as tightly as I could.

The soldier stopped running when we reached the end of the hall but he didn’t let go of us. He just used one hand to hold some kind of radio up over my head and shouted into it, “FIRE! FIRE IN THE WEST WING! CALL FOR FIRE SERVICE AND ALL EMERGENCY UNITS!”

Where was Nina?!

I squirmed in the soldier’s embrace—he was holding onto us tightly while he tried to get his bearings and figure out what the hell was going on—and looked around for my friend.

She was running out the room now, running in my direction, with the second soldier on her heel.

That soldier was signaling with his hand like he wanted me and my soldier to turn around and run.

So we ran.

My escort held onto my shoulders now and all but carried me onward. He was about to turn toward the front of the palace, but I shouted at him to go forward instead—toward the East Wing.

I wanted to get myself and my baby and my friend into a safe, enclosed space. These guards were about to usher us outside, if I would have let them. But they listened to me and let me lead them over to the forest room instead.

It was all noise and commotion for a time.

Back in the West Wing, while we were running away… there’d been another explosion behind us. And then… it was so strange, so very strange… I’d heard a very faint but absolutely terrifying, absolutely blood-curdling scream that – even more terrifyingly – seemed to seep out from the walls.

There was no time for reflection though, or any sort of thought, as we made our way to the other end of the palace. It was pure instinct that got keys out of my pocket and opened the door to our safe haven the instant we reached it.

One of the two soldiers stayed in the room with us and the other went back outside, pulling the bedroom door closed behind him. He’d stated he was going back to the West Wing to investigate and wait for emergency response.

Lexi had been screaming so hard she was coughing and almost gagging now.

I collapsed into a green velvet armchair and tried to soothe the baby in my arms while blinking away my own tears of shock.

Nina came over and knelt in front of the chair. She joined my cause in trying to reassure Alexis that we were safe now. She put her hand on the baby’s back and rubbed in a slow circle, whispering nearly inaudibly, “Shh…”

I could still hear the alarm in my ears. But it was only an echo of the sound, I realized. It had been so loud it’d made me mostly deaf and now my hearing was all distorted and I was hearing a sort of auditory ghost of the blaring alarm, even though we were far away now…

The guard was walking around the room, talking to someone on his handheld radio while checking the locks on the windows.I finally caught my breath. And the baby finally started to quiet down.

I touched Lexi’s cheek. She was still scared, and so confused. Still reeling, but feeling a little better.

“What just happened, Nina?”

Nina looked up at me with wide, serious eyes. She shook her head side to side slowly.

“Fucking arson,” she whispered. “Fi… I stopped and looked into the nursery before I followed you guys out the room.”

“You shouldn’t have done that.”

She waved a hand like that didn’t matter. “Babe, it was that secret passageway. The one you told me Alex had locked closed after that whole thing with Scarlet and the stupid necklace. Fi, that whole wall was fucking on fire. Someone was there in that passageway, babe. And fuck, they set the nursery on fire.”