Chapter 27

The promontory of Miranos was more impressive than Lauren expected it would be. Because the ridge line had obscured the view from Dimitri’s villa, she’d prepared herself for a shallow half-moon of water, broken by reefs beneath the shimmering blue-green Aegean, the place almost desolate in its beauty.

Since Dimitri had spoken so much about the ocean trash that he’d seen washed up there, she also expected it to be somewhat littered with driftwood and debris, or maybe a twisted airplane propeller or the shattered bow of some long-ago ship.

Not so.

The promontory looked more like a quaint little port, with boats lined up along one side of the long narrow strip of rock that stretched out into the ocean, and a network of tiny floating ramps connecting the various slips. There were a few small buildings there as well, to process the fish and carry it by truck to the main commercial port of Miranos, and also a seaside bar that she suspected only managed to stay in business because it doubled as the owner’s home.

It was the bar where she and Dimitri started, and the moment she stepped inside, she understood why. The walls were covered with items pulled from the sea—from large strips of metal to exotic scraps of what might have been considered buried treasure anywhere else but the middle of the Aegean Sea, where such finds were commonplace: plateware too degraded to fix a date on, broken cutlery, shattered lamps, bent and broken decking—even an anchor, which Dimitri explained had been raised with much excitement until it’d been verified as less than two hundred years old. When you lived in the waters of the ancients, an anchor two centuries old barely counted as driftwood.

She could see Dimitri’s section straight off. A small and unassuming stretch of wall space, its pieces carefully lined the shelves, and a small crown had been carved into the corner shelving, now slightly worn away.

Dimitri touched his hand to that crown now, the action so unconscious that Lauren suspected that he was the one who’d worn the design down over this past year. Could this man truly be a demigod, whatever that meant? He seemed so...human.

“It doesn’t look like much,” he said, with a grim, self-deprecating smile. “Certainly not enough to justify a year’s worth of searching.”

“But you launched quite a big campaign when Ari was first lost, didn’t you?” Lauren drifted from relic to relic. Most of it was scrap metal with some additional markings that Dimitri had identified as part of the plane, later verified by Crown experts. “I would imagine Queen Catherine moved heaven and earth to find her son.”

“She did, but the first pieces were found all the way over in Thassos. This —and these,” he said, indicating fairly intact bits of wreckage. The largest piece was an eight-inch section of a door panel, which appeared to have been sheared off from the plane.

She frowned as she examined them. “I can’t believe they let you keep these pieces here. They should be in a museum on the mainland, shouldn’t they? Or at least under study somewhere.”

“They were under study for several months, but the idea of putting them in a museum was rejected by the royal family. Despite accepting the public’s need to grieve, they didn’t want to create a memorial to Ari’s final hours that surpassed what he was as a person in real life. They didn’t want him to be remembered only as bits of twisted metal.”

“That’s fair.” Still, she shook her head, looking over the assemblage. “And they never found a body, or anything remotely like a body?”

“No. The storm that blew up the night he left O?ros was fierce. He was testing equipment, and I knew he was excited about seeing what the airplane could do. He had equipment in the cockpit not attached to the controls that he was testing—a watch, specialized phones. All that would’ve been washed away, and his body wouldn’t have survived long in the open water. I never expected to find his body, his clothes...but the electronics should have resurfaced eventually. That was my hope.”

“Electronics like the black box or whatever.”

“Any sort of recording devices, yes.” Dimitri nodded. “Something that could give us some insights into what he was doing, why he was where he was, what went wrong.”

Lauren watched him as he spoke, the bleakness of his expression making her heart hurt. All the platitudes that crowded into her mind seemed pointless, ineffectual. She had never loved any of her friends with the deep force of will that Dimitri seemed to have for Ari. She had never been loved so much.

She reached out her hand and touched his arm. “He was lucky to have you as a friend,” she murmured.

His lips twisted. “Not lucky enough, in the end. If I’d had any idea that he would fly that night, I would have broken ranks to stop him—or at least warned Cyril of his plans.”

She nodded as she turned back to the bits of sea wreckage, but she didn’t believe him. No, she suspected Dimitri wouldn’t have stopped Ari. Not that night. Not if his friend had truly wanted to go exploring. He would simply have entered the plane with Ari, and then the two of them would have been lost: the crown prince and his faithful friend and bodyguard. Double the tragedy, double the pain. Two families bereft instead of one.

And Dimitri clearly felt everything deeply—his duty to the crown, his love for his friend. Even his intensity in making love to a woman he barely knew. Lauren kept her gaze glued on the scraps of metal as her cheeks heated. Something had been seriously different about sex the night before with Dimitri.

Setting aside the fact that he was a wild, virile hunk of man who had muscles for days, every time he touched her, every time either one of them slammed into another climax, it was like the entire world around them reacted. The sea danced, the stars spun, and there—I mean, she would swear that there had been music?—

“Enough of looking at what we know is of no use,” Dimitri said abruptly, cutting off her thoughts as she glanced back at him. “The men will start returning with their nets in a few hours. In the meantime, we should go see what the ocean has brought us.

They didn’t go down to the port, however, but along a rocky trail that skirted the wide crescent bay and dove into the forest, heading to where a smaller point jutted out into the ocean. “The reefs aren’t so bad leading into the cove,” Dimitri explained as at length they left the higher ground, weaving down through a tight jungle of trees and rocks as they made their way to sea level. “More wreckage washes ashore here.”

“How did you find this trail to begin with?” Lauren asked. “It’s barely visible.”

“Those who comb the beaches have always known where it was. They were kind enough to show me when I came to them for help.” Dimitri said this as if it were commonplace, the giving up of secrets to help someone in pain. She shook her head at his back, now lined with sweat at the collar as he pushed through branches and tested the rock-strewn pathway.

In her experience, no one gave up an advantage unless they needed to gain greater status or safety. But what status or safety was there to be gained on this desolate island? Only a hundred or so families lived here. There was no status in being the top of a few hundred people, not when you all had to pull together in times of crisis or need.

“Ah, here we are.” Dimitri held back a final branch and Lauren saw open sky, heard the crash of water. She moved forward gladly but paused beyond the break in the trees, her jaw dropping open.

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“Quite the place, isn’t it?”

The grotto was a trash monger’s paradise. Metal, tubing, lights, even strings of coins hung from the trees in swaying glory, mute testimony to the rich treasure that lay beyond the water’s edge. Lauren half expected to find a crazed old man muttering among the sheets of metal, looking for treasures amid all the junk. “Who put all this up?”

“The scavengers and beachcombers. Anything that was too big or too common to fetch any sort of decent price, they simply started to hang. Over the years and decades, it’s become a tradition. You’d think the junk would make the place too crowded, chaotic, but there’s a sort of peace that comes from seeing it all together like this. As if the sea will one day give up all her mysteries, if we only wait long enough.”

“Any of this from Ari’s plane?” she asked, touching one of the relics.

“Not a scrap. Which was Cyril’s number-one reason for the wreck to have obviously been near Thassos to the west of us, versus out to the east. But the storm wasn’t in Thassos. It was blowing up the coast of Turkey. That’s where Ari would have gone.”

Lauren frowned. “Turkey? That seems unwise, doesn’t it? A small, single-manned plane soaring into a storm over the border of an unfriendly neighbor?”

“As I said, Ari was a master of leaping first, thinking second. He’d never found a situation that he couldn’t get himself out of.” Dimitri smiled ruefully. “I suspect that’s why I’ve had such a difficult time accepting his death.”

He looked so forlorn there, staring out at the sea junk suspended from the trees that Lauren reached out and grasped his hand with both of hers, tugging him forward. “Show me,” she said. “Show me where all this stuff washes up.”