FOUR

      Jason turned and left Ava alone to pack her bag. He needed to breathe—preferably in a room that didn’t smell floral and feminine. Still unsure how badly he’d been injured, he pulled his arms back and flexed his muscles again. Sore. Very, very sore. But nothing froze up or refused to move. Nothing felt broken.

      He examined what he could of the sparse apartment, searching for clues that might explain why someone would want to kill the wedding coordinator. An event gone bad, perhaps? Surely any offended party would sue before resorting to murder. Jason scoured the room and noticed a desktop with a smattering of documents littering the surface.

      Postcards of the kingdom of Lydia—unaddressed, unsent. Ava must have bought them to share with friends back home in the United States. Brochures of various florists, musicians...nothing he wouldn’t have expected a wedding planner to have on her desk. But perhaps she’d offended one of the vendors represented on the brochures. Would an angry dressmaker resort to murder? Jason scooped up the brochures. They were worth looking into.

      As he shuffled the glossy pages into his hands, Jason found something different—a photograph, fairly large but unframed, a close-up of a woman’s face. It was by far the most personal item Jason had seen on the desk. He stopped shuffling pages long enough to look at the woman. She was pretty, her brown hair in loose curls tumbling around her face, her eyes twinkling, her full lips spread in a broad, happy smile.

      “I need everything from that desk, too.”

      Jason turned to see Ava standing in the doorway, her duffel slung over her shoulder. He realized the woman in the picture looked a lot like Ava. A sister, perhaps? Ava stepped toward him, a second bag gaping wide. She held it out, and he dropped the brochures with the picture on top of the other items into the bag.

      Ava gave a little yelp, reached for the picture, then shook her head quickly and closed the bag instead.

      At the same moment Jason heard a vehicle outside. He turned to see an bulletproof royal-guard sedan come to a stop double-parked beside the car he’d driven earlier. “Let’s go.” Jason grabbed his body armor and uniform shirt, but Ava’s reaction to the picture didn’t sit well with him. “Who’s in the picture?”

      A horrified expression flashed across the wedding planner’s face, followed by reddening cheeks. “Where did you find that?”

      “It was on your desk with the brochures.” Intrigued by her response and wondering if he was onto something, he prodded further. “Is it your sister?”

      “I’m an only child.” She pulled the door open and waited for him to step into the foyer.

      “It’s got to be a relative of some sort.” Jason hovered next to her as they opened the outer door. Two guards stepped from the car—Titus and Adrian, two of the recent transfers from the Lydian army. They looked ready for war in their helmets, with automatic rifles—not the usual image he liked his royal guards to project, but given the circumstances, he almost felt relieved by their rough-and-ready approach.

      “Why does it matter?” Ava asked as they stepped down the stairs to the sidewalk, where she peered anxiously in both directions.

      Jason tried to shrug, but his back protested, so he said simply, “She’s pretty.” Nodding to his men, he led Ava quickly across the street and into the bulletproof car.

      “Well, thank you,” Ava said as he opened her door first and took her bag from her shoulder.

      Jason raised a questioning eyebrow.

      “The picture?” Ava pointed. “It’s me.” She sat inside the car and pulled the door shut after herself as Jason shook off his surprise and hurried back around to the driver’s side. With no sign of the Jetta anywhere, his men got back into their car, ready to follow him back to the palace.

      Jason shot Ava a quick, assessing glance as he started the car and pulled carefully away from the curb. Maybe the lovely girl in the picture really was Ava, but that raised even more questions in his mind—such as why any woman who could look so pretty would choose instead to make herself appear so severe. “I’ve never seen you smile,” he realized aloud as he drove back toward the palace, watching his mirrors carefully for any sign of the attack Jetta, grateful for the presence of his men in the car behind them.

      “I make it a policy not to,” Ava told him bluntly.

      “Why not?”

      She sighed and settled back against her seat. “It’s a long story.”

      “Is it?” He stepped on the accelerator as he pulled away from a stoplight. “Well, get ready to tell it. I want to hear all your stories.”

      “What? You can’t be serious.”

      “Somebody wants to kill you. You’re going to help me figure out who it is.”

      * * *

      Ava stared at the street ahead and bit her lip. She would not cry. No way was she going to let the maddening captain of the Lydian Royal Guard see her cry.

      But at the same time, she felt terrified at the thought of sharing anything about her past. Couldn’t the bomb squad analyze the residue they’d found on the street and track down the killer that way? Wasn’t that how crimes were solved on television? Why should she have to spill all her painful secrets?

      She should have thrown away the engagement photo instead of cutting Dan out of the picture and saving the rest. Why hadn’t she? It was a flattering picture of her, true, but it wasn’t as though she was going to use the head shot for promotional purposes. She didn’t even look like that anymore.

      With a guilty swirl in her stomach, Ava realized she hadn’t tossed the picture because she’d wanted a reminder of what it had felt like to be happy—not simply because she doubted she’d ever be that happy again, but as a caution should she ever allow herself to trust anyone as much as she’d trusted Dan. Happiness was stupid, a fool’s fancy.

      That was why she’d kept the picture.

      Too soon, they arrived at the palace. Jason parked the car inside the garage. His men who’d followed them parked their car and met him in the expansive cobbled driveway.

      “Accompany Ms. Wright to apartment 8-B in the palace-wall apartments. Theresa Covington was going to send over a housekeeping team to check her in—they should be there by now.”

      Offended that he was dumping her so abruptly, Ava glared at the captain. “You’re not coming with me?”

      “I