Blair Babylon's Blog: Blair Blathers, page 10

DAY 5 – Start reading ROYAL now at Blair’s Blog or Apple Books!

May 16 = DAY 5 = Chapter 5

You can also download the free sample from Apple Books on any iOS device. Don't forget to PRE-ORDER HERE from your favorite ebook website to get ROYAL right when it's released! https://blairbabylon.com/books/royal/

Narcotics Smell like Acid and Poisonous Plants
Dree

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The warehouse smelled like narcotic drugs.

As a nurse who worked in a hospital’s emergency room, Dree Clark had been around a lot of narcotics in her life. Considering that most pharmaceutical tablets were coated with a colored layer to differentiate one drug and dosage from another, you think they wouldn’t have much smell at all, but they did. There was a bitterness to narcotics, a smell of acid and salt, and a hint of an orange poisonous plant warning you not to eat it.

Despite the boxes stacked on shelves to the ceiling marked with innocuous logos and words like candles and souvenir keychains, the warehouse reeked of it.

Dree didn’t mention that, of course. There was no way she was going to tell the drug dealers she knew she was standing in the middle of tons of their stash.

She’d kept her hands on the laptop’s keyboard, just in case those jerks were distracted enough that she could send an email to somebody or notify the cops or something through the computer. But even though Kir continued to indulge in his tantrum about her not knowing Francis’s passwords and the driver was just standing around looking bored with his hands in his pockets, one or the other of them was always looking at what she was doing.

So she watched them out of the corner of her eye and tried to figure out who on Earth she would even contact with a computer anyway.

Maybe she should email her sister to say good-bye.

That way, Mandi could call their parents so at least they’d know something had happened to Dree, plus Mandi would know not to wait for Dree to get her any more money for her son Victor’s expensive autism therapies.

Victor’s sweet face, terrified by the world around him that he couldn’t comprehend, rose in Dree’s thoughts.

Dammit.

Plus, Maxence was out there somewhere, and he’d obviously known he was being kidnapped. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have shoved his phone in her hand with it already calling someone so she could tell them what had happened. Something had caused Max to have that sudden change of heart. One minute, he’d been insisting Dree go with them so she would be safe, and a few seconds later, something had made him shove her into the crowd, shouting at her to run.

He was in danger, too.

And she needed to find him. When Maxence’s motorcycle had broken down in Nepal, she’d promised she would always come find him.

So, she had to get away.

It was that simple. She just had to.

Dree waited, standing motionless for a few more minutes, while Kir Sokolov and his driver got into an argument in some harsh language she assumed was Russian.

Their shouting intensified. Their hand gestures widened.

Their voices bounced around the bare steel support beams and aluminum siding.

It was getting pretty chilly in the warehouse with the wind blowing in the open garage door back by the van.

Open.

Garage.

Door.

Dree tugged her white and silver cape more closely around herself, thinking hard.

A lot of joke websites had popped up during the last political election in the States, and Dree wracked her brain, trying to remember their website addresses until she finally came up with one.

She clicked the URL bar, typed in the address, and then said, “That’s weird,” just as the screen flashed red and black and a siren started blaring. She exclaimed, “Oh, my gosh! What’s it doing?”

Kir Sokolov jumped toward the computer and shoved her out of the way. “What did you do to it?”

“Nothing! The bank website must have been hacked. I was just sitting there trying some different passwords that Francis used, and all of a sudden, it wigged out!”

“You went to a porn website!” Kir Sokolov accused her.

Dree gasped, laying her hand at the base of her neck like she was clutching her pearls. “I did not! Just because you got a computer virus when you were watching porn doesn’t mean that’s the only way to get one!”

The computer screen stopped flashing and turned to a truly obscene animated graphic of a man wearing a plaid shirt and sporting a chode the size of a fireplace log, abusing a cartoon pig.

The computer blared, “Hey everybody! I’m watching porn!”

Sokolov began stabbing the keyboard frantically with his fingers. “No, no, no. Not this computer!”

These two buffoons had allowed a prisoner access to a vital computer? Oh, they deserved everything they were going to get.

Kir Sokolov and the driver kept shoving each other out of the way, trying to rescue the computer, and were thoroughly occupied with their technical problem.

Dree began backing away.

The computer screen changed to a different animated graphic of another man grabbing his butthole and yanking it until it appeared to be a foot wide. The computer yelled again for everybody to notice it was showing porn.

The two men flinched and then redoubled their efforts to regain control of the computer.

Dree made it past the van to the garage door, and she slipped around the side and into the night.

The winter night was colder than the warehouse had been inside. She began running through the parking lot toward the dark street. The frigid wind sliced through her thin ball gown.

Gravel slid under her high-heeled shoes, which she hadn’t known were worth thousands of dollars but Kir Sokolov had been pretty sure of it. Still, slipping and sliding, she made it to the road, which seemed to be in a semi-industrial part of the French town.

The bright lights of traffic flickered in the dark street at an intersection just a hundred yards away.

Dree ran.

If she could reach that intersection, there should be more people around, and she could probably find a store or a hotel to duck into and lose her kidnappers. Maybe she could figure out how to use Max’s cell phone that she’d shoved into her bra, but it was probably locked, and she didn’t know his PIN and couldn’t figure out any other way to unlock it off the top of her head. Or maybe she could find a store clerk to call the police for her, if she could communicate with him somehow. Dree didn’t speak French.

Tall skinny trees lined the road, a dark wall on the side. If somebody was following her, she’d veer off the road and go overland.

She couldn’t hear any cars behind her, but her breath was rasping in her ears and her heart was trying to beat its way out of her chest as she pumped her legs and sprinted on the asphalt road. Dree was not a runner.

At the intersection, the fenced-in lots on the corners were dark, closed for the night. The block building with a sign that bore a car and a wrench was probably an auto mechanic.

All the way down the street, the empty road sliced between darkened businesses. The plants, leafless for the winter, swayed in the cold wind. If she’d been in New Mexico, a tumbleweed would’ve rolled across the road at that point.

Dree kept walking through the commercial area of town. Streetlights poured yellow light at the street like spilling mustard.

Her shoes’ straps dug into her feet, and her arches were beginning to cramp.

A block down the road, and a stoplight blinked on a cross street. Dree jaywalked against the red light to get to the other side of the street because if the police came out of nowhere and arrested her, that would be just fine.

But none did.

As she peered down the street, cars crossed the road a few blocks farther away.

Dree got to walking. She ignored the pain in her feet and in her shoulders where those goons had wrenched her joints when she’d been tied up. She needed to get to that street, and it was just a matter of time until she got to that street.

Graffiti scrawled on the buildings, and Dree wished she could read French. Dead grass spiked up between the panels of sidewalk and poked her ankles.

Dree finally got to the intersection with the more heavily traveled street, but there were just a few taillights off in the distance in one direction, and one set of white-blazing headlights coming from the other.

As the headlights neared, Dree jumped up and down, screaming “Hey!” and waving her dress’s jacket like a white flag.

The sedan slowed and pulled over next to her, obviously having seen her distress.

She was saved. She was saved!

Dree pounded on the car’s window as the glass slid down. “Oh, thank you! Do you speak English? I need the police. Policía? No, that’s Spanish. I don’t speak French. No parlor Frenchy. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Ustedes hablan español?”

The back doors of the car flapped open.

Inside the car’s front seat, a matronly looking woman with mahogany- and oak-colored hair smiled at her. “Dree Clark, imagine finding you here.”

Dree backpedaled, but two thugs had already emerged from the back seat. She only ran a few steps backward before they grabbed her. They forced her into the back seat.

Matryona Sokolov swiveled in her seat, shaking her finger and tutting at Dree. “You should not try to get away. You don’t want to make me angry. Next time, I would send someone much worse than my brother Kir to find you.”

DAY 4 – Start reading ROYAL now at Blair’s Blog or Apple Books!

May 15 = DAY 4 = Chapter 4

You can also download the free sample from Apple Books on any iOS device. Don't forget to PRE-ORDER HERE from your favorite ebook website to get ROYAL right when it's released! https://blairbabylon.com/books/royal/

Sunlight

Maxence

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Maxence didn’t recognize the attacker lying unconscious on the floor as he jumped over him.

Even though it was late January and the sun was barely above the eastern horizon, the Mediterranean sunlight warmed the ship’s metal deck. The metal and rivets were warm under the soles of Maxence’s feet as he sprinted toward the side of the vessel.

It was a container ship, as Max had feared. When he jumped over the side, it was going to be a long way down, like jumping off a bridge.

More shouts rang out behind him.

A gunshot cracked the air.

Maxence dodged around the side of the wheelhouse, an enormous building on the massive ship that must have been eight stories or taller, not including the mainmast that stuck out of the top and held the radar array.

The railing was too high at this part of the ship to leap over. If Maxence had taken the time to climb it, he would’ve been stationary long enough for his kidnappers to shoot him.

He kept running.

Far ahead of him, down at the other corner of the wheelhouse building that must’ve been the distance of half a city block away, more people ran around the deck shouting to each other and waving guns.

With that avenue of escape cut off, Maxence had no choice but to try to scale the railing and jump.

He leaped and caught the top of the wall with his hands, stupidly glad that Casimir had insisted they play all those games of basketball where Max learned to dunk. The rusting metal was sharp and sliced into his palms and the pads of his fingers, but he grabbed harder and hoisted himself up.

Hands grabbed his legs.

Maxence kicked, trying to dislodge the attackers, but more hands clawed his bare skin and dragged him down.

His arms slipped off the rusty railing, then his fingers.

He landed in a heap on the deck, relieved neither of his legs had snapped, and covered his head to protect himself from their impending attack.

One hard blow slammed into Max’s side, crashing into his ribs, but a man’s voice started shouting in the Monegasque language for the others to stop.

No other kicks landed on him.

Maxence parted his arms and looked up.

Michael Rossi, the human bulldog who had assassinated Max’s cousin Nico, stood spread-armed like he was holding the others back. The sun shone on Rossi’s bald white scalp, making it look like a skull. “Stop!”

One of the other guys demanded what the hell Rossi thought he was doing.

“He is a prince of Monaco,” Rossi said. “It is a sin to spill royal blood.”

That argument hadn’t been used for several centuries and certainly hadn’t held up during the French Revolution, but Max was willing to go with it. He wasn’t going to push his luck by agreeing, though.

Some of the other guys laughed, but a few of them looked confused enough that no one else moved forward.

Maxence took his arms away from his head and tried to put a stern but regal expression on his face. He just hoped he didn’t end up looking constipated. He settled for the blandly serene look that Flicka cultivated for times when the paparazzi might be lurking even though it wasn’t an official photo opportunity.

Rossi turned and offered Maxence a hand up.

Max accepted his assistance without allowing his utter shock to register on his face. “Thank you.”

Rossi said, “You landed a respectable punch back at your holding cell. Lopez is still staggering around like he went five rounds with Mike Tyson.”

Maxence nodded. “I did what I had to. I hope he’s okay.”

Rossi clapped his hand on Maxence’s shoulder. “He’ll be fine. You just rang his bell a bit.”

Quentin Sault rushed up and pushed his way through the crowd to stand before Maxence. “What’s he doing out of the storage room?”

Rossi laughed. “He knocked Lopez out with one punch when Lopez was bringing him a sandwich and a bottle of water.”

Quentin Sault said, “Shoot him.”

Rossi’s jaw dropped. “Just because the prisoner got a jump on Lopez doesn’t mean we should shoot him. He’s a crew member!”

Sault glared at Rossi. “I didn’t mean Lopez. I meant Grimaldi. Shoot Maxence Grimaldi in the head and throw his body over the side.”

More info about Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine and vax in general, and other drugs.

A guy I know on Facebook posted some stupid stuff about the vaccine, so I replied. Thus, there will be some odd statements in this blog post that are in response to what he wrote. He’s thoroughly entrenched in conspiracy theories that are just . . . dumb. They’re inaccurate. He’s just wrong. And I was pissed off. But I wrote a whole bunch, so I’m cross-posting it to my blog because I wrote a thing.

I'm dictating this, so expect some typos, and it’s too long, so the second part is a reply to this comment. As you may remember, I am a microbiologist. I am an actual virologist. I hold a PhD in molecular biology/microbiology, and I did my postdoctoral research at the University of Pennsylvania in neuroscience. (Yes, so I am actually Dr. Blair Babylon, PhD.) I published six scientific papers, I think, in peer-reviewed journals. I did a rotation in the lab of Dr. Stanley Perlman, who is one of the world's leading coronavirus researchers.

In addition, my husband works for Pfizer, and I have actually seen the original research and data for this vaccine. I even worked as an unpaid consultant in the early days of the pandemic and commented on the vaccine research and drug therapies that Pfizer was considering buying or investing in. I was one of the voices who told them dear God, start working with BioNtech right now (the people who originally designed the vaccine.) I spent the first three months of the pandemic sitting in on Zoom meetings with my husband, talking to vice presidents of Pfizer and up. That's why I didn't write for the first three months of the pandemic.

However, I must also note that I'm a PhD, which means I profess, not an MD, so I do not prescribe. If you have any pre-existing conditions, you should call your own doctor.

I taught in the medical school, though, at the University of Iowa. When a doctor I'm seeing starts to get uppity with me, I make them call me professor.

Okay, now that we've established my bona fides, everything you wrote about the mRNA vaccines is scientific gobbledygook. So is your post on ivermectin. There's just nothing in there that is correct. I'm sorry to say this, (I wrote to the dumb guy in response, not you who are reading this blog), but you're not a scientist, and everything you wrote betrays a deep misunderstanding of how the mRNA vaccines, basic microbiology, cellular biology, and science work.

You say that the data isn't out there, but it is. I saw it earlier than everybody else because I was again looking over my husband's shoulder, but all the data has been published. If you say it's not, you either haven't looked or you don't understand it. Quite honestly, of course you don't understand it, you don't have a doctorate in virology or pharmaceutical science, which is what you would need to understand these scientific papers.

One major thing that you got wrong is the idea that we don't know how long mRNA persists in the body. Yes, we do. Because the mRNAs that are produced by the vaccine are beautifully stable, still exist for about thirty-six hours, maybe less if you're particularly robustly healthy. That's one of the reasons why it the mRNA vaccines require two vaccines, because the mRNA degrades like all mRNA does. The difference between mRNA and DNA is one oxygen on the bottom of the sugar in the nucleoside base, and that one -OH group instead of just a hydrogen destabilizes RNA tremendously, making it far more reactive. That's why DNA can persist in your cells your whole life, but most RNA degrades within hours.

Your whole comment about the spike protein is incorrect. First of all, the mRNA vaccines only encode a tiny, tiny epitope of the spike protein. Imagine that the spike protein is a mile, as a metaphor. The part encoded by the mRNA vaccines is a few steps of that mile. All of the parts of the spike glycoprotein that interact with other cells to fuse them to the viral membranes are not encoded in the vaccine. It's just not. Just everything that you wrote doesn't make sense and doesn't equate.

Early in the pandemic, there was a theory that ivermectin and other drugs that acidify endosomes, such as chloroquinine, might be able to change the trajectory of the disease, but this was shown not to be true. It just doesn't work. These drugs just make you sick. Really, these drugs are only good against parasites, not viruses. They've never been shown to be effective against viruses, especially RNA viruses. There's been a meta-study with three thousand people, and it didn't change the course of the disease in the population. Do not eat cat dewormer or pool chemicals.

There's nothing wrong with taking zinc and vitamin D. That's generally healthy stuff. That may actually help you in the course of the disease, though I think it's pretty obvious from the horrendous outbreak in India that warm weather, humidity, and vitamin D from sunlight cannot protect anyone from Covid-19.

Blah blah blah, big Pharma and big government. I agree with you about big government. But more on that below. The pharmaceutical industry, Pfizer changed a few years ago, and it took me a while to really understand the change. A new CEO came in, Dr. Albert Bourla, who is a scientist rather than an accountant or MBA. He made a change within Pfizer that I didn't catch until recently. He came in with the strategy of, “Patients first.” He completely changed the internal structure of Pfizer. Most scientists I knew were pretty demoralized a few years ago. When this pandemic started he went to the board and to the scientific bodies within Pfizer and said, “We have two billion dollars sitting around. I am willing to dump two billion dollars of our money into saving the world.” And he did.

Pfizer did not take money from the US government. They didn't take all that Trump “Operation Warp Speed” money because Bourla did not want to be accountable to politicians when Pfizer was making their decisions. This was done as pure science. In addition, Pfizer is selling it to governments for very little profit. They pretty much just rounded up to the next dollar after production costs. This is not a moneymaker for Pfizer. It's practically charity.

Here's my recommendation which is in line with the CDC: unless you have a pre-existing condition, you should go get the vaccine. Yes, you really should if you don't want to die. If you do have a pre-existing condition that is quite serious, talk to your doctor before you get the vaccine. And you should get Pfizer's. If you can't get Pfizer's, then get Moderna. J&J is really a last resort, and it's kind of for people who aren't smart enough to go to the mRNA ones.

If you don't get the vaccine, however, there are quite a few Covid therapies coming down the pike. If you don't get sick for a couple of months, you probably have several different options. Most of them are about a hundred thousand dollars or more, and few of them will be covered by insurance. So you can get the free vaccine, or you can pay a hundred thousand bucks out-of-pocket to save your life. It's up to you.

Quite honestly, if you want the real conspiracy theory stuff, I have suspicions about where this virus came from. Every microbiologist in the world went, wait, Wuhan Province? If the outbreak had started at Fort Dietrich, Maryland, I would have the same suspicions.

Was it on purpose? That's an entirely different question, and I do believe in the ineptitude of humanity such that this was probably an accidental release.

So, if this virus was released from a weaponizing lab, what you think it's gonna do?

Here's the real conspiracy theory, and I am dead serious about this. The government, the CDC, and every government out there has been underselling the long-term damage of this disease, even if you get a “light” or even asymptomatic case of it. I seriously think that in the next twenty years, there's going to be in huge increase in people dying of heart attacks, heart disease, and lung disease due to scarring and inflammation from the long-term effects of this virus.

In addition, there's an excellent chance that the disease will cause male sterility. Cells important for male fertility express the ACE2 Receptor, and forty percent of men who have Covid-19 report “severe scrotal pain.” That's why I wrapped my teenage son in cotton and didn't let him outside the house for the last fifteen months. I think there's going to be an enormous problem with male infertility in the next few decades in men who had the disease.

So, to sum up, the real conspiracy is the people who don't get the vaccine are going to be selected against in a very Darwin way. If they don't die, the men will be infertile, and they won't be passing those anti-science genes on to the next generation.

But, it's up to you (I said to the guy on Facebook, not you my dear blog reader). I will not be answering questions. I have written all about this on my blog and in my newsletter during the whole pandemic. Most of blog posts that I wrote are on my profile if you search my profile. I have books to write, so I really cannot be bothered explaining basic science. All the information is out there. You just have to look for it.

DAY 3 – Start reading ROYAL now at Blair’s Blog or Apple Books!

May 14 = DAY 3 = Chapter 3

You can also download the free sample from Apple Books on any iOS device. Don't forget to PRE-ORDER HERE from your favorite ebook website to get ROYAL right when it's released! https://blairbabylon.com/books/royal/

The Goddamn Easter Bunny

Dree

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Dree Clark was pissed off.

Not only had these jerks torn her Cinderella ball gown, which wasn’t even hers because her friends on the palace staff had borrowed it from some rich lady’s closet, but they’d also tied her hands behind her back. She was rolling around in the back of a stupid delivery van that was driving her God-knew-where, and to top it all off, that dang Russian drug dealer, Kir Sokolov, was taunting her.

Nobody should taunt a country girl who grew up castrating calves on her cousins’ cattle ranch.

Kir Sokolov was a tall, cadaverous man with a sickly, sallow cast to his white skin and epidermal lesions that made Dree consider a hepatorenal syndrome diagnosis. If he had walked into Dree’s ER, she would’ve immediately run a liver panel to screen for cirrhosis, acute hepatitis virus infection, and liver cancer, and then a renal panel to see if he needed to begin kidney dialysis immediately. In addition, with his height and gangly posture, she would’ve run a genetic test for Marfan’s syndrome and an echocardiogram of his heart in case his aorta was ready to rupture.

Yeah, this guy was a mess of diagnoses waiting to happen. She hoped he had good health insurance.

From her position on her stomach on the cold floor of the van, she yelled at Sokolov and the driver, “Just drop me off anywhere, okay? We don’t need to tell anybody about this. I’ll make my own way back to Monaco. But just drop me off here, ‘kay?”

Kir Sokolov said, “Give me your phone.”

“I don’t have one,” she said.

“Everyone has a phone.”

“I don’t, and I can’t ‘hand you’ anything anyway, buddy. You zip-tied my hands. Cut the plastic off, and I’ll show you I don’t have one.”

“Give me your phone,” he repeated like a dolt.

“I don’t have one and I can’t! And where would I hide a phone in this dress?”

“Give me your phone, or I’ll come back there and take it.”

“Are you even listening to me? I said I don’t have a phone!”

Kir Sokolov made good on his promise and crawled to the back of the van to frisk her.

He found her phone in the pocket of the white, cape-like jacket that matched her dress.

He asked her in a really snotty tone of voice, “If you don’t have a phone, then what is this?”

Dree cussed him out while he retreated, laughing, to the passenger seat of the van, where he stripped the SIM card out of the phone, crushed it, and then threw the phone on the floor of the van and stomped on it.

The sharp crack of shattering glass filled the van, inspiring Dree to cuss him out again. She wasn’t made out of money. She didn’t have the cash to go around buying new phones all the time because some jerkface drug dealer broke hers.

It was a good thing the guy hadn’t continued pawing her after he found her ratty old cell phone, though, and it was another good thing that Dree had an ‘ample bosom for feeding babies,’ as her grandmother had noted on every possible occasion.

Sharp corners poked her boobs inside her bra.

That jerk Kir Sokolov said, “We know Francis Senft gave you the money he stole from us. Not only did he tell us you have it—”

Dree shouted over him, “He only told you that because you were torturing him. I have no idea what he did with it. He probably snorted it all. I don’t have it.”

“—we also have bank records from his phone showing he transferred money to banking accounts in your name.”

“Well, then he must’ve opened up those bank accounts under my name and without my knowledge because I never saw any money.”

“We believe you can access it.”

“And I believe in the goddamn Easter Bunny, but I don’t see any eggs!”

He stopped talking to her after that.

The van didn’t drive far through the nighttime French countryside. Within an hour, the driver turned into a gravel parking lot, and then he drove the van into a warehouse.

Kir and the other goon hauled her out of the rear doors of the van, squeezing her upper arms and crushing her flesh against her bones until she knew they’d left bruises.

She wasn’t going to whimper, though. Farm girls didn’t whine.

Large boxes stacked to the rafters towered over the small, white delivery vehicle that they’d shoved her into.

Florescent lights striped the ceiling far above.

“Where are we?” Dree demanded, thinking she should collect evidence for when she escaped so these guys would go to jail.

The driver guy laughed at her. “Nowhere you need to know about,” he said in Russian-accented English.

Kir said, “We have a computer here that you can use to transfer the money from your accounts to ours.”

“I told you, I didn’t open those accounts. How would I know what the account numbers are?”

“We know account and routing numbers. We retrieved them from Francis Senft’s phone.”

“Well, I don’t know what the login information is,” she retorted.

“Try your usual banking username and password.”

“I don’t have a ‘usual’ banking username and password. For banks, I use one of those randomly generated ones that are a thousand characters long and half of them are punctuation.”

“How do you log in with a big password you don’t even know?” he asked.

Dree smiled. “It’s stored in my password manager.”

“Where is your password manager?”

“On my phone,” Dree said.

It was Kir Sokolov’s turn to swear, and Dree laughed and laughed at him.

Finally, Kir said, “Francis Senft was not so smart. Try his usual username and password.”

The drug-dealing kidnapper had a point, so Dree typed in Francis’s usual username and the three passwords he normally used, all of which were based on his parents’ pets and his own birthday.

The computer blinked incorrect password warnings at her and threatened to lock her out. “Nope. None of them worked.”

Kir started swearing in earnest and in Russian now, his voice rising as he first combed his fingers through his sparse hair and then grasped it in both of his fists. His eyes widened as he snarled his obscenities.

He looked as frightened as he did angry, and that worried Dree.

DAY 2 – Start reading ROYAL now at Blair’s Blog or Apple Books!

May 13 = DAY 2 = Chapter 2

You can also download the free sample from Apple Books on any iOS device. Don't forget to PRE-ORDER HERE from your favorite ebook website to get ROYAL right when it's released! https://blairbabylon.com/books/royal/

Dark

Maxence

Darkness.

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Cold air chilled Maxence’s bare skin. His back rested against the ship’s frigid steel wall.

He maintained a steady rate in his breathing: five seconds inhale, hold for five seconds, five seconds exhale, and hold for five seconds.

Repeat.

The steel of the ship groaned around him as the vessel crested a small wave, the floor rising and sinking under Max’s butt and legs in the dark. He was naked except for his torn tuxedo trousers, which he’d ripped the legs off at his mid-thigh.

Maxence shivered in the wintry, damp air.

Fetid garbage stink filled the sea air so strongly that Maxence could taste spoiled meat on the back of his tongue. The faint taste of rusted iron was his own dried blood that had flowed from his nostrils, and he’d spat from his mouth where his teeth had cut the insides of his lips during the fight.

After he’d stripped off his shirt and tuxedo jacket he’d been wearing, he’d tried to wipe the blood off of his face with it, but the metallic taste still pooled around his gums.

One molar wiggled when he probed it with his tongue where he’d taken a hard punch to the side of his face. The puffy flesh around his eye was tender, too.

The backs of his hands rested lightly on his lap, his raw knuckles touching the bare flesh of his knees below the torn fabric of his pants.

His Patek Philippe watch, a Christmas gift from his friend Arthur years ago, encircled his wrist, and the crucifix he always wore weighed on the back of his neck.

His bare toes explored rivets on the steel floor as he waited, resting.

Darkness.

His clothes and shoes were heaped beside him, touching his thigh. Maybe someone would find them someday, analyze his blood on them, and discover what had happened to the prince who’d been kidnapped from a gala during a mass murder. He doubted it. After his kidnappers killed him, they would doubtlessly throw anything of his into the Mediterranean Sea, where it would sink to the bottom, perhaps to settle near his body.

In the stinking darkness of the sealed room on the ship, Maxence couldn’t rule out that he had already been murdered and was confined to his own personal definition of Hell.

The floor of the small dark room on the ship fell, and Maxence slid with it in the dense black air.

His body stank of sweat, adrenaline, and terror. He hurt all over, from the constant strain of his wrenched shoulder and where the plastic zip-ties had flayed his wrists, to the soreness of bruises deep in his muscles and ribs where his kidnappers’ punches had landed.

He’d managed to slither out of the zip-ties within an hour of being thrown in the locked room, his blood acting as a lubricant as he slid them off.

Pain had ceased to have meaning for him years before. Most of the time, it felt—cold.

Only that morning, Maxence had awakened in Dree’s arms, and the day had offered him two mutually exclusive dreams that were both all he’d ever wanted in his life.

Father Booker had been dispatched from Rome to offer Maxence the chance to be ordained as a priest, which he’d been working toward for a decade.

And yet, the possibility of a life married to Dree Clark had tempted him so much that he had retrieved his grandmother’s engagement ring from the vaults of Monaco and proposed marriage to her in the middle of the Sea Change Gala.

And now—

His stomach roiled, and he vomited seasick bile on the other side of his clothes in the darkness.

Yes, he must be in Hell.

Time ceased to have meaning as minutes or hours crawled over his skin with the same weight.

His stomach clenched with hunger and nausea, though he knew it was nothing compared to what was going to come if he didn’t get off the ship.

Maxence breathed, completing what must’ve been hundreds or thousands of practiced respiration cycles meant to keep himself calm.

Something scratched at the door.

Maxence’s eyes turned toward the sound, the muscles around his eyes and in his temples straining to see in the absolute blackness.

His heart tapped faster.

Rusty gears in the door ground against each other.

Maxence rolled, lightly bracing himself on his toes and fingertips and crouching. He grabbed his discarded clothes beside him.

Metal squealed.

A slice of sunlight blasted into the room.

A man’s silhouette blocked the brightness, the barrel of a semiautomatic handgun visible in his black shape.

Maxence stayed low as he threw his clothes at the man, standing well to the side of the beam of sunlight. The dark fabric fluttered in the air in front of the guy like attacking birds.

The silhouette recoiled, and sparks and a gunshot slammed through the air in the tiny room. Acrid sulfur stung the inside of Max’s nose.

Maxence leaped and drove the man’s hand holding the gun against the wall beside the door. Steel clanged.

The gun discharged again, a blast that barreled pressure into Maxence’s ears. The bullet ricocheted off the metal with a sharp ping.

Maxence slammed the man’s hand into the wall again, forcing him to drop the gun. The heavy steel landed on Max’s bare foot. A spike of pain shot through the thin bones there.

The man bent, reaching for the gun skittering across the floor. Maxence drove upward with his knee, catching his assailant in the face. The man’s head whipped backward.

As the kidnapper was toppling out of the room, Maxence kicked the gun, and it skittered away into the darkness.

The man had another gun and was bringing it around to aim at Maxence.

Maxence punched him hard on the side of his head.

The guy crumpled at Max’s feet.

Shouts rang out on the deck of the ship beyond Maxence’s prison cell.

Maxence sprinted out of the darkness and into the fire of the morning sunlight.

Start reading ROYAL now at Blair’s Blog or Apple Books!

May 12 = DAY 1 = Chapter 1

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Another Night in Monaco

Casimir van Amsberg

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Casimir answered his ringing phone, fumbling in the dark for the glowing, buzzing contraption. “What?”

“Turn on the television.” The man’s deep, British voice on the line belonged to his friend Arthur Finch-Hatton.

Casimir fumbled for the remote in the dark hotel room. “What’s going on? Was there an earthquake in Los Angeles?” Caz’s wife, Rox, was still in LA, overseeing the day-to-day operations of their law firm.

“Just look.”

“Tell me if it’s Los Angeles!”

“It’s not LA. It’s Monaco.”

Oh.

Casimir found the power button on the remote and flipped through the channels, looking for news as he asked Arthur, “Did Quentin Sault call you again because Maxence ditched his security?”

“Just find a news channel. Where are you?” Arthur asked.

“Copenhagen.”

The last time Max had gone missing in Monaco just a few months before, Casimir and Arthur had undertaken a desperate sleuthing mission to find him. Their efforts had culminated in a quick dodge and a yacht ride through the Mediterranean. Because anything that involved Monaco might have dire implications for Maxence, Casimir and Arthur had erred on the side of caution.

They’d run to Monaco to find Max four times total over the last decade, so twice within a few months would be weird.

But with Max’s older brother dead and Monaco’s throne up for grabs, Prince Maxence of Monaco might be in trouble.

Finally, among the shopping shows and reruns on the hotel’s TV, Casimir found a news channel.

Blood and gunfire filled the television screen.

The crawl across the bottom read, Mass shooting in Monaco. Five known dead, more unaccounted for.

Casimir sat straight up in the bed. “Jesus Christ!”

More footage followed of people running and screaming from the Grimaldi Forum, the convention center in Monaco. Some of it was shaky cell phone video. Other shots were grainy security footage.

Casimir choked, asking, “Have you heard from him?”

“His secretary called me from his phone and said they were at the Grimaldi Forum in Monaco when this went down. She said his security had double-crossed him, and they’d kidnapped him and taken him out in a helicopter from the roof.”

God, they were never going to find Max. There was little chance they’d find his body. “It was the Sea Change Gala. He was listed as the host on the invitation. We almost went to that.” Meaning Casimir and his wife.

“Us, too,” Arthur said. “There’s a close-up of him being hustled out of the convention center by security, including Quentin Sault.”

“I never trusted that guy. Jesus, Arthur.”

“I’m calling in favors now. Have your sister put you on a military plane to Nice. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

“Where are you?”

“I’ll see you in France.”

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It all started with the wrong Help Wanted ad. Of course it did.

I’m a professional fluffer. It’s NOT what you think. I stage homes for a living. Real estate agents love me, and my work stands on its own merits.

Sigh. Get your mind out of the gutter. Go ahead. Laugh. I’ll wait.

See? That’s the problem. My career has used the term “fluffer” for decades. I didn’t even know there was a more… lascivious definition of the term.

Until it was too late.

The ad for a “professional fluffer” on Craigslist seemed like divine intervention. My last unemployment check was in the bank. I was desperate. Rent was due. The ad said cash paid at the end of the day. The perfect job!

Staging homes means showing your best angle. The same principle applies in making a certain kind of movie. Turns out a “fluffer” doesn’t arrange decorative pillows on a couch.

They arrange other soft, round-ish objects.

The job isn’t hard. Er, I mean, it is — it’s about being hard. Or, well… helping other people to be hard.

Oh, man…

And that’s the other problem. A man. No, not one of the stars on the movie set. Will Lotham – my high school crush. The owner of the house where we’re filming. Illegally. In a vacation rental.

By the time the cops show up, what I thought was just a great house staging gig turned into a nightmare involving pictures of me with an undressed star, Will rescuing me from an arrest, and a humiliating lesson in my own naivete.

My job turned out to be so much harder than I expected. But you know what’s easier than I ever imagined?

Having all my dreams come true.

A Single Glance by: Willow Winters

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(Wall Street Journal and USA Today Bestselling author)
I saw her from across the bar.

My bar. My city. Everything in that world belonged to me.
She stood out from the crowd like she was looking for someone to blame for her pain.

That night, I felt the depths of my mistakes. I felt my scars. With a single glance, I knew her touch would take it all away. I craved it more than anything.

I knew she would be a tempting, beautiful mistake.
One I would make again and again… even if it cost me everything.

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ONCE UPON A TIME, there was a beautiful princess. Flicka von Hannover lived an enchanted life. She jetted around Europe staging charity events with friends, had married a handsome prince in the most spectacular royal wedding of the 21st century, and should have lived happily ever after.

But then she found the handsome prince in bed with a duchess. And then a coffee shop barista. And then her own goddamn secretary.

Finally, the prince did the unthinkable, and the beautiful princess ran away.

The prince didn’t want to let her go. He couldn’t take his throne without her and sent henchmen to take her back to the castle. Her worried royal brother sent people to look for her, too.

The prince threatened her. He said that if the princess contacted her brother or any of her friends for help, he would kill her brother and her brother’s new, pregnant wife.

So the princess ran to the only person she could trust, a man who was frankly not a handsome prince.

Dieter Schwarz had been Flicka’s bodyguard for years. He had protected her from assassins, kidnappers, and high school dates who got too handsy after a few drinks. He was a sharp-witted, sharp-jawed, hard-muscled former Swiss Special Forces operator who had started his own private security firm, Rogue Security, and had no past that he spoke of.

No one knew that he had been her first lover and broken her heart, but he's the only one she can trust now.

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When a modern princess falls in love with her bodyguard, a royal fairy tale turns dangerous.

Once upon a time, there was a beautiful princess. Flicka von Hannover lived an enchanted life. She jetted around Europe staging charity events with friends, had married a handsome prince in the most spectacular royal wedding of the 21st century, and should have lived happily ever after.

But then she found the handsome prince in bed with a duchess. And then a coffee shop barista. And then her own goddamn secretary.

Finally, the prince did the unthinkable, and the beautiful princess ran away.

So the princess ran to the only person she could trust, a man who was frankly not a handsome prince.

Blair's other Audiobooks Here.