Prince Incognito. Rachelle McCalla
“Did he say anything else?”
She looked her father full in the face. “Don’t let them find me.”
“Who’s he hiding from?” Michael Bardici sputtered. “Did he have something to do with those explosions? He could be a criminal!”
Before Lily could respond, her mother returned. “Let’s do hurry and get out of here,” Sandra Bardici requested. “There are soldiers with guns everywhere. Whatever those explosions were about, I don’t like it. What if they try to lock down the marina?”
Lily felt grateful her mother had so quickly sized up the situation. “She’s right, Dad. We should get moving. Do you need me to help you get under sail, or can I bandage his face?”
“You should do nothing of the sort,” her father protested. “Surely there’s somewhere in the city.” He looked at Sardis beyond the bay, black smoke rising above the limestone buildings, and his protest lost a little power.
“We should get out of the marina while we still can.” Sandra sounded almost frantic.
“Of course we should go.” Michael Bardici faced his wife. “But we can’t take this man with us! We don’t know anything about him. What if he’s dangerous?”
“He looks to be out cold right now. She’s brought him this far. It’s chaos up there—I suppose the local hospital will be overwhelmed. She’s a trained medical professional.”
“She just graduated from veterinary school.”
Sandra took a step closer to her husband and lowered her voice. “She wants to help. This is the first time she’s wanted to do anything medical since…”
Lily heard her mother’s sentence hang in the air, and knew exactly what words she hadn’t spoken. Since she’d failed to save the horses. The painful memory taunted her, but she pushed it away. Thinking about the tragedy in her past wasn’t going to help her now.
Michael Bardici huffed. “Fine. We’ll set sail. But I’ll warn you both—I intend to get rid of this fellow at the first opportunity.” He stomped over and untied the boat.
“Thank you, Dad.” Lily sprinted into the top-level pilothouse and pulled out the first-aid kit, which she had personally assembled in a small suitcase years before, and kept stocked for emergencies.
The unconscious soldier didn’t flinch as she cleaned the wound on his face. To her relief, the abrasions didn’t appear to be deep, though they stretched from his nose to his ear, covering much of his forehead, down to his chin. Still, if she bandaged his face quickly and kept the injuries clean, he’d likely heal with minimal scarring.
Once she had the blood cleaned off and a fresh white bandage wrapped around his head to hold the gauze and batting in place, she pulled out her otoscope and checked his ears, sighing with relief when she saw no sign of blood.
Excellent. Ears were particularly susceptible to primary-blast injuries. The fact that they’d sustained no damage reduced the likelihood that he’d been hit with enough concussive force to injure his lungs or his brain. She’d heard horror stories of those with blast-force injuries to the brain who’d lost their memories, and developed short tempers as well as ongoing headaches. Only time would tell the extent of the soldier’s injuries, but for the time being, Lillian’s hopes were buoyed by her discovery.
With her attention focused on the soldier, she hardly noticed the progress of their 52-foot vessel as they left the marina and reached the open sea.
“Did you want something to eat, Lily?” Her mother climbed up from the below-deck cabins and handed her a bottle of water.
Surprised, Lily realized the sun had already sunk low on the horizon. “No, thank you. Water’s fine.”
Her mother sat on the bench near the man’s feet. “Your father’s very upset.”
Lily gestured to the soldier as she placed her otoscope back in its case. “He asked me to help.”
“I know. And I’m glad you want to help again. But he’s not an injured animal. He’s a person.”
“Doesn’t that make him even more worthy of my help?”
Her mother sighed.
Lily changed the subject. “Can you help me try to get him out of his suit jacket? There’s blood on his shirt. I just want to make sure it came from his face. I don’t want to miss an injury.”
Her mother agreed, propping up the soldier’s torso while Lily tugged the suit jacket off his arms. She wasn’t sure if it was the humidity or a sizing issue, but the jacket didn’t want to come off. The soldier had been wearing a dark olive dress uniform—maybe he’d been en route to the state dinner. His choice of apparel certainly seemed too formal for an ambush attack. A cluster of medals decorated the garment at the chest, topped by a badge bearing one name. “Lydia.”
When Lillian finally pulled the man’s arms free, Sandra ran her fingers over the name as she folded the jacket neatly. “What do you suppose this means?” She held out the badge for Lily to see.
Lily was already working on the soldier’s shirt buttons, praying silently that he’d be okay. If a shrapnel wound snuck past her, the soldier could bleed out overnight. “Lydia is the name of the country.”
“But the other soldiers we saw in Lydia didn’t have the name of the country on their badge. They had their last names.”
Lily tried to think. If she was honest with herself, she felt uncomfortable checking the soldier’s chest for injuries because he was attractive—wounded or not. “Maybe Lydia is his last name, then.”
“Why would his last name be the same as the name of his country?”
“I don’t know.” Lily focused her attention on inspecting the man in the dying evening light. One thing was for certain—he’d been in fine physical shape before the attack. Lily felt herself blush as she checked his torso for any sign that shrapnel might have penetrated his uniform. Cleaning off the residual blood on his chest, she determined it had soaked through from the outside, no doubt originating from the injuries to his face.
“Did he tell you his name?”
“There wasn’t time to ask.” Lillian reached for the man’s side pants pocket, where a squarish bulge indicated something was stowed. “Maybe he has some ID on him.” She pulled out the contents of his pocket—a wad of unfamiliar bills, secured with a pewter money clip.
“Those aren’t euros,” her mom observed.
“I don’t know what they are.” Lillian flipped through the banknotes, looking for anything that would indicate which country they originated from.
“Why would a Lydian soldier be carrying foreign currency?” Sandra Bardici mused aloud.
Lillian wondered the same thing. Lydia, a small Christian kingdom squeezed along the shoreline between Albania and Greece, traded in euros, the official currency of most of Europe. “It does seem a little odd.” She shook off a shiver.
“Do you suppose he’s working for a foreign nation? He might have been part of the group that staged that attack.”
“I don’t know. We’ll have to wait for him to wake up so we can ask him.” Lily stuffed the money back into the soldier’s pocket. Satisfied that she’d done all she could for him, she watched his chest rise and fall. He seemed to be breathing easier without the restrictive suit. From what she’d observed, she guessed he wasn’t terribly old, maybe mid- to late-twenties, hardly any older than she was. And in spite of the bandage covering half his face, he was handsome, with sandy brown hair in a military cut, and a strong, square jaw.
Her mother had given up her inquiries. “Don’t put his bloody shirt back on him. I’ll get him one of your father’s old T-shirts.” She retreated back into the