Chapter 3 - The Shadow of the Booking Agent
The next morning, the palace was placed on a Code Red security lockdown. The media had already caught wind of the banquet hall drama, and paparazzi drones were buzzing around the perimeter walls like mechanical hornets.
I stood in front of a floor-to-ceiling mirror in the royal apartments, dressed in a soft, tailored lavender wool dress that had belonged to my mother, Valerie. It fit perfectly, as if my body remembered the dimensions of the woman who had carried me.
Vincent, the head of the palace intelligence detail, walked into the room. He was a tall, severe man with a scarred jaw and eyes that never stopped scanning the entrances.
"Your Highness," he said, bowing his head slightly—a gesture that still made my stomach twist with discomfort. "We have ran an audit on the catering agency that hired you for last night's event. The agency is called Apex Hospitality. The manager who assigned you to the shift was a man named Gregor Vance."
"Gregor?" I recalled the greasy, nervous man who always smelled of cheap cigarettes. "Yes, he told me if I didn't take the Moncoeur shift, he would withhold my security deposit for my apartment."
"Gregor Vance disappeared three hours ago," Vincent said, his voice flat. "We sent a extraction team to his flat in North Berlin. The apartment was scrubbed clean with industrial bleach. But we found a burner phone in the disposal chute. The last call received on that phone came from a satellite encryption line routed through a shell company in Geneva."
Eleanor, who was sitting in an armchair nearby sipping her morning broth, raised her eyes. "Who owns the shell company, Vincent?"
"It’s registered under the name Lupus Holdings," Vincent said. "The primary shareholder is an offshore trust managed by the Vance-Vane banking group in Zurich. A group that happens to be chaired by Beatrice's father, Baron Maximillian Vane."
The room went entirely cold.
I looked toward the door, realizing that the woman who had tried to have me thrown out of the banquet hall last night wasn't just an ambitious aunt. Her family was directly linked to the logistics of my return.
"Beatrice," Eleanor whispered, her knuckles turning white as she gripped the armrests of her chair. "She didn't want you thrown out because she thought you were a fraud, Anastasia. She wanted you thrown out because she knew exactly who you were, and your appearance here ruined her timeline."
"But why would her father send me here if it ruins their timeline?" I asked, my mind struggling to piece together the labyrinth of royal finance. "If I stayed a waitress forever, they would have gotten the inheritance at the end of the month."
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"Because Baron Vane didn't send you," a new voice spoke from the doorway.
Julian stepped into the room, his expression grave. He held a leather briefcase under his arm. "My father-in-law is a snake, but he’s a calculated snake. He wouldn't risk a federal kidnapping charge by placing you in front of my mother. Someone within his own organization is turning against him. Someone leaked the data to get the princess back to Moncoeur before the trust dissolved."
