Chain of Kisses by Angela Knight

across my face. He reeled back from my attack, clutching his throat as he stared at me in betrayal. His knees gave under him, and he toppled, eyes going empty and fixed.
    “Where’s the fourth guard?” I growled, spinning to stand back to back with Arles.
    “That’s a very good question.” Together, we scanned the darkness.
    Voices rose in shouts, and we tensed, staring toward the rustling bushes and listening to the click of running boots on the silicaslate path.
    “Arles!” Ragnar shouted, emerging from the bushes with a crowd of agents. One of them was the missing bodyguard, who’d evidently gone for help.
    “We seem to have traitors in our midst,” Arles growled, not lowering his weapon as he glared at the agents. “Evidently Isa has bought at least some of them off.”
    “Again?” Ragnar swore so viciously, I knew he was thinking of his dead wife, who’d also been attacked by her own bodyguards. She, however, had died. “I thought our security practices were supposed to catch traitors!”
    “Yes, well, apparently they didn’t work.” Arles swayed, going ghost-pale. “Oh.”
    I hooked one arm around his waist, bracing him against my side. “Your Excellency, the prince is hurt. One of the guards ran him through.”
    The emperor’s eyes widened before he rapped out an order. “Doctor Cavo, get your ass up here!”
    The guards parted to allow a man in court garb to step through, towing a trauma unit. “I’m here, Sire.”
    Arles lowered his weapon and sat down on the bench to let the doctor treat his wound, though he kept a wary eye on the agents. They appeared not to notice as two of them slapped forcecuffs on Isa, who still lay unconscious in the grass. The others fanned out to search the gardens.
    Ragnar and I watched as the doctor coaxed Arles to lie down on the bench so the trauma unit could treat him. The device moved to hover a centimeter from his wounded ribs, humming and chirping as it coaxed the bleeding to stop so he could be transported to surgery.
    I was vaguely aware that cambots circled us like gnats, but they were the least of my worries. I was terrified I was about to lose Arles.
    The prince ignored both the doctor and the cameras in favor of briefing his father on the attack. “Gisel saved my life,” he told the emperor. “They’d have finished me if she hadn’t helped fight them off.” Arles’s vivid gaze flicked to me. “Wearing manacles and armed with nothing more than a knife. She killed the one who stabbed me before he could take my head.”
    Ragnar glanced at me, brows lifted. “My spies were right. You can fight, can’t you?”
    “That’s not all she can do,” Arles said, reaching past the doctor to grab one of my manacles. He pressed his thumb to a gemstone, and the collar and chains fell away with a musical rattle. I stared at him, startled. “To hell with the politics, my enemies, and my pride. Marry me, Gisel.”
    “What?” I gaped at him helplessly. “But…”
    “When Isa went for you with that knife, I felt my heart stop.” He ran his thumb over the thin flesh of my wrist, tracing the fine blue vein there. I felt the hair rise on the back of my neck. “You are everything I have ever wanted, everything I love. Life without you wouldn’t be living at all.” Staring into my eyes, he breathed, “Please, Gisel, please. Marry me.”
    And I said the only thing I could say. “Yes.”

 
     
     
    Chapter Eight
     
    The wedding took six months to plan, largely because Arles insisted on an affair grand enough to make clear how much he valued me. In the meantime, Ragnar and my mother waged a ferocious media campaign to transform me from the butt of sexual jokes into the royal heroine who’d saved the prince from assassins.
    For once, the media cooperated, interviewing damn near every member of the Valkyrie ’s crew, along with the grateful residents of various planets we’d helped protect from would-be invaders. Never mind that we’d been well paid to