Lucia's private office was smaller than her corporate one, hidden in a nondescript building in Koreatown. No windows, three deadbolt locks, and computer equipment that would make NSA analysts jealous. This was where she did real work.
Four monitors glowed in the darkness. On the first: Prince Khalid bin Rashid Al-Saud's public profile. Fifth in line to the Saudi throne. Cambridge educated, with degrees in economics and international relations. Served two years in Saudi intelligence before transitioning to "diplomatic affairs." Thirty-six, unmarried, and frequently photographed at international summits looking thoughtful and progressive.
The Western media loved him. "The Reformer Prince." "Saudi Arabia's Moderate Voice." Complete fiction, Lucia suspected.
She typed rapidly, pulling up financial records through back channels. Shell companies in the Caymans, Luxembourg, and Singapore. Money moving in patterns she recognized—arms deals disguised as infrastructure investments, oil revenues laundered through legitimate businesses. Khalid handled the family's Western operations personally.
Smart. Dangerous.
On the second monitor, she opened an encrypted connection. Director Chen had provided access codes to Saudi intelligence servers—a reciprocal arrangement; everyone spied on everyone, and there was professional courtesy among professionals.
The files loaded slowly. Khalid's operational history appeared in careful Arabic. She read quickly, translating mentally. Yemen operations. Syrian contacts. A weapons shipment to Libyan factions. He wasn't just diplomatic window dressing. He was actively running regional destabilization campaigns.
Well, Lucia thought. At least we'll have something to talk about at dinner.
She kept digging. Financial transfers, communication logs, and travel records. Then she found the Paris file.
Last year, in March. A Syrian opposition leader had been assassinated outside a café in the 6th arrondissement. French intelligence suspected Saudi involvement but couldn't prove it. The file in front of Lucia showed internal Saudi communications. Khalid's digital signature authorizing the operation. Target eliminated. Clean extraction.
He'd ordered a kill in the middle of Paris and walked away untouched.
Lucia sat back, reassessing. The charming prince who gave speeches about regional cooperation and women's rights had personally authorized an assassination on foreign soil. The dissonance should have bothered her.
It didn't. It made him more interesting.
The door locks clicked. Three separate mechanisms disengaging in sequence. Only two people had keys to this office.
"Lucia Her mother's voice, accented and elegant. "I know you're here. Your car is downstairs."
Elena Marchetti entered like she owned every room she walked into—sixty-three, silver hair, Chanel suit, the kind of beauty that age refined rather than diminished. She surveyed the monitors with one arched eyebrow.
"Researching your future husband?"
"Researching a business proposition," Lucia corrected, closing the Paris file. "There's a difference."
"Is there?" Elena sat in the room's only other chair, crossing her legs. "Your father told me about the Saudi proposal."
"And you came to offer maternal advice?"
"I came to tell you what no one else will." Elena's expression hardened. "You think you're the first brilliant woman who had to hide it to survive? I taught you everything I know, mia figlia. Including how to smile while you're cutting throats."
Lucia turned to face her mother fully. They rarely had direct conversations. Elena preferred operating through implication and carefully crafted silences.
"Why are you really here, Mama?"
"Because I was in your position once." Elena's voice went distant. "Twenty-five, brilliant, trapped. A Russian oligarch wanted to marry me—Dimitri Volkov—before he died in that convenient plane crash. He had connections my father needed. I was the price."
Lucia had never heard this story. "What happened?"
"Victor intervened. Made a counteroffer, convinced my father I was worth more in his organization." Elena smiled without humor. "So I married him instead. Different cage, same bars."
"Do you love him?"
The question hung in the air. Elena looked at her daughter with eyes that had seen too much and survived too much.
The silence was answer enough.
"Marriage in our world isn't about love, Lucia," Elena finally said. "It's about finding someone who won't break you completely."
"That's bleak, even for you."
"That's realistic." Elena stood, smoothing her skirt. "This prince—Khalid. He's educated, powerful, and probably dangerous. But he's also fifth in line. He'll never be king, which means less scrutiny and more freedom. And he's spent his life being underestimated by his own family. Just like you."
Lucia frowned. "How do you know that?"
"Because I pay attention. Because I've been watching you build an empire your father thinks he controls, and I recognize the game when I see someone else playing it." Elena moved to the door and paused. "The question isn't whether you should marry him. Your father has already decided that. The question is whether you're smart enough to make it work for you instead of them."
"And if I can't?"
Elena's hand rested on the doorknob. "Then you do what I did. You survive. You adapt. You find small victories where you can." She opened the door. "But you're smarter than I was, Lucia. You might actually win."
After her mother left, Lucia sat in the darkness, processing. Elena knew. Had always known. And had let Lucia believe her secret was safe because... why? Maternal protection? Strategic advantage?
I'll never understand her, Lucia thought.
She turned back to the monitors, pulling up more files on Khalid. His mother had died when he was twelve—a car bombing in Riyadh, officially attributed to Al-Qaeda, though Saudi intelligence suspected internal palace politics. Khalid had found her body.
Lucia found a photograph from the funeral. Twelve-year-old Khalid in traditional dress, standing between older relatives, his face carefully blank. But his eyes weren't. They held a grief too large for a child's understanding and something else. Determination. Rage carefully controlled.
She knew that expression. She'd seen it in her own mirror the day she decided to stop being underestimated and start being underestimated strategically.
He's built himself into exactly who he needed to become, she realized. Just like me.
She pulled up the Paris assassination file again. Studied the authorization, the operational details, and the clean efficiency of it. Khalid had ordered a man dead and slept fine afterward.
She'd done the same. Multiple times.
Most people would call them monsters. Psychopaths. Broken.
Lucia called it survival in a world that demanded you become the thing you feared most or be destroyed by it.
Her phone buzzed. Text from her father: Meeting tomorrow at 9 AM. We discuss the Saudi situation. Be ready to brief me on the prince.
She typed back: Understood.
Then she returned to Khalid's photograph—the adult version, from a recent summit. He was smiling at someone off-camera, the expression practiced and empty. Public performance, private calculations.
"I've built an empire in the shadows," Lucia thought, studying his face. Manipulated men twice my age, ordered deaths I'll never admit to—and the thought of meeting this prince terrifies me more than any of it. Because he's the first person who might actually see me.
She stared at the Paris kill order again. Evidence of violence, proof of darkness, confirmation that Khalid bin Rashid Al-Saud was exactly as dangerous as his public persona suggested he wasn't.
"He's not what he pretends to be," Lucia whispered to the empty room.
She closed the file, shut down the monitors one by one, and let darkness reclaim the office.
"Good," she said to the silence. "Neither am I."