“My boy! My strapping Viking heir of a boy,” she exclaims, taking his chin in her hand and rubbing his face before pushing up on tiptoes to plant a kiss on his cheek. “You need to come visit your Granny more often, you hear?” She pats the same cheek she kissed with a loud smack then turns to me.
“So the Mad King is back to grace us with his presence is he? I have no doubt the streets of Copenhagen, or my dear daughter’s heart for that matter, are ready for such a grand occasion.” Though her voice may sound uninviting, a twinkle in her watery blue-green eyes conveys a different message and she leans in to embrace me.
I hug her, softly patting her back. “No, not a chance,” I breathe out during the hug.
“Alright boys, come in and have some coffee and a light brunch. Come along.” She turns and waves us toward the cottage.
I start to tell her thanks but no, but she stops me with one of her knowing looks and I am wiser for keeping my mouth sealed. Larz and I follow her teetering form back to the cottage. She’s small, barely clearing five-feet, and stout. Where Mykaella is long and lithe like her father, her mother always had to work a bit harder to show how fierce she could really be—and she can be terrifying if in the right mood.
Once we are inside and sitting around the hand carved from oak table, Granny brings us both steaming mugs of coffee and scones, she baked herself, no less. Her white hair is tied up in a tight bun on her head and I imagine for a moment what Mykaella will look like when she reaches her mother’s age. Mykaella’s resemblance to her mother started and ended with a brass mind that cannot hardly be changed and an easy to flare temper. The rest she genetically inherited from her late father.
“Are the family’s troubles behind us now, Mads?” Granny asks. She sits down and picks up her own scone with clotted cream and bites into it.
“Not quite, but they will be,” Larz chimes in, saving me from having to respond.
“And what of Fara, my boy? You mentioned her over the phone but I wasn’t entirely sure what you were trying to say,” Granny asks.
Larz swallows some scone down with piping hot coffee and has to clear his throat before answering. Through watery eyes, he explains how Fara jumped into action with Branch and wound up between the hired help and a Warsaw thug. “Of course, you know Fara. Neither of those twats stood a chance with her and Branch is used to handling some of the most vicious criminals too. Maybe I should hire Fara to watch the palace next time instead of outsourcing, sheesh.”
Granny chuckles and her eyes pinch up with her wrinkles. “I did train my grandbabies well,” she adds. “First,” she points to her head, “I trained them to always be three steps ahead with their minds. Then we moved into other important training models, such as the art of blades and marksmanship.” She reaches across the table and pats Larz’s hand. “You were always such a good shot, my boy. If any of them knows their way around a blade though, it’s Fara. I’d say she gave your man Branch a run for his coin.”
We sipped on our coffee and ate our scones as we went around catching up with each other’s lives. Finally, Granny stands and motions toward our empty plates and mugs.
“I’ll go pack up some leftover scones and pour you a thermos of coffee. Be sure you get it back to Mykaella now.”
I nod in agreement and watch as she toddles off to the kitchen. Pots, pans, and plastic containers can be heard as Granny collects our food to go. I decide to go ahead and ask a question that has been pressing on my mind as she fusses and frets about in the kitchen.
“Can we trust this guy Branch?”
Larz shrugs. “He’s the same guy who took care of our little issue in the Canary Islands.”
I trust my son’s judgement. He did after all hire a hitman when we discovered my driver was a planted spy by the Warsaw jerkoffs. For two years, Jacoby had driven me to and from places, met every one of my kids, and shared my food and wine. And for those two years, Jacoby had reported everything he could on my family back to Poland. That was when I discovered the ransom plot. They had skimmed from my family’s charitable donations for years, but greed had finally caught up with them and they planned to extort us for more. Despite Larz’s promise that removing the problem—Jacoby—would solve all of our problems, it only catapulted us into a firestorm of events that inevitably led to my incarceration. Not that I blame my son. Never. I just wish things had gone down differently.