I didn’t understand how they could summon me to the Palace while I was taking care of such an important mission, but Emily had called and I had to go there and take care of another of her tantrums. I knew that I couldn’t disobey them again, not after taking off without permission, I couldn’t afford to make them angry. I was too close to getting what I needed to stop them, I couldn’t let something like that stop me.
Nysa’s death had affected Faakhir, but he had just taken a couple of days to celebrate her sister’s life and take care of her remains, and after that, he had gone back to Capital City where he had locked himself in his room, not letting anyone get close to him. It was clear that he was depressed, but I was hoping that Emily wasn’t calling me to take care of him, I had better things to do than to try and console a sad Faakhir.
I arrived at the Palace and went to the room where Emily usually received me, but I didn’t find her. Knowing her, I thought it was best to go looking for her, instead of making her wait. It just took me a moment to find her mind, and I used it to guide me to her, she was in her room, and for a moment I rethought my idea of going to her, but then I realized that I had to go and stop wasting time. While I approached her, I started feeling as if something wasn’t right, and I knew that I needed to go fast and deal with whatever was happening. When I was near her room, I could hear her yelling and I knew that I was in the right place.
“How dare you do this to me!?” Emily was crying out.
“It wasn’t my fault,” Faakhir was defending himself, “she is the one that came on to me, and I was feeling sad and in need of comfort.”
I went into the room, and in the living room next to her bedroom, I found a couple of soldiers guarding a woman badly beaten, while in the other room Emily was still yelling at her husband. There was something about the woman that I didn’t like, and as I brushed her mind, I could see that she had very strong defenses around it. That made me curious, and I pushed more to see what she was trying to hide.
I finally broke her defenses and my effort was rewarded when I realized that she was part of the group I was after. She was there to infect Faakhir, something she would have already done if Emily hadn’t found she was trying to have sex with Faakhir, and had gone crazy with jealousy, stopping her from even reaching Faakhir.
“This better be the last time you do something like this,” Emily threatened, “next time I won’t be so understanding.” Emily got out of the room where Faakhir was and headed directly to the woman.
“If you allow me,” I interrupted Emily, “I would like to take the woman away for interrogation. She is one of the agents that has been infecting and killing people, she was here to infect Faakhir, and she could help us find more of the people working with her.”
“What?” Emily asked, I wasn’t sure if she was surprised by my words or my presence.
“Did you say she was here to infect me with that deadly virus? Did she have something to do with my sister’s death?” Faakhir asked, and I could feel his anger and pain at the memory of his sister.
“Not directly, but she is part of the same group. We have been able to locate some of the her colleagues, but we haven’t been able to find their leader, if you allow me, I will take her to a place where I can interrogate her, and hopefully find the information we need to stop them.”
“Go ahead, do whatever you need to do to stop them,” Emily said, “but as soon as you finish with her, I want you to make her pay for trying to seduce and kill my husband. I won’t allow anyone to fool me or take my husband from me.”
“I told you, nothing happened, she was the one coming at me, I did nothing to encourage her advances,” Faakhir defended himself, and even if the situation made him look like the victim, but I knew that it had been him who had called the woman, it was lucky that he had been interrupted before she had the chance to infect him.
“I’m so sorry I doubted you,” Emily apologized, forgetting her anger and the accusations she had been throwing at him just a few minutes before.
“Bring the woman,” I asked the soldiers, “I will handle the interrogatory in a more appropriate place.”
I left Emily and Faakhir still discussing, or maybe making up, and took our prisoner to one of the cells in the lower level, then I locked myself in with the woman.
“I won’t tell you anything,” she said.
“I don’t need you to tell me anything, I will find everything I need to know in your mind. Maybe you think you can hide information from me, but I will find what I need, the same way I found what I needed from the agent in Mzansi.”
“Her mind was weak, but mine isn’t.”
“You shouldn’t be so sure about that, I could see what you had planned with Faakhir, and I didn’t even have to search hard, if I push a little, I will be able to find all your secrets.”
I extended my senses and sent my mind to invade hers, without mercy. I heard her crying out in pain before she went into trance, incapable of moving or defending herself.
Her thoughts were well hidden, but I knew how to find what I needed, and since she was my enemy, I didn’t even have to be careful about the damage I could cause. She was part of the group that had attacked my son, that hurt my husband’s father, after something like that, mercy was the last thing in my mind, and if I needed to destroy her mind to find the information I needed, then it was her fault for attacking me and my family and then being stupid enough to try and fight me.
Finding what I needed wasn’t as easy as I expected, but after a couple of hours I had the information I needed, the location of the lab and the identity of the person responsible for the virus, for recruiting the people and planning the attacks.
The group that I had gathered to investigate the attacks was all over the Dominion, but with a few calls I was able to direct all of them to where their lab was located. It didn’t take long to organize the attack and it took even less to find and storm the place. I wasn’t sure what I was expecting once I arrived, maybe a fight, at least some resistance, but certainly not the dead body of our enemy and a trashed lab. Our enemy, must have realized we were on to him, and decided to destroy all his files and computers before killing himself to avoid capture. Kimball, who had come with me, was checking the place, but our enemy had done a good job to protect his work and investigation, and there was nothing we could recover, he had done a great job making sure that his investigation and even his knowledge couldn’t be used to replicate the virus and use it against the people in the Dominion. I also considered that he had done it to protect the rest of his agents, but if he did, it was a waste, since we already had most of them, at least the ones that had been targeting powerful people in the Dominion. I knew that with time and a quick travel to the fog of the future, I could make sure we were safe, and if not, I couldn’t find anyone who had escaped our attention so far.
I felt a little let down by the scientist’s suicide, I was expecting a confrontation after all the work he had made me do, but on the other side, I felt better knowing that we were safe from a biological weapon. I also had to be grateful to him because his actions had helped my own mission, removing some very powerful pieces off the board, and allowing me to glimpse at the power structure underneath the Dominion. The better I could understand the power structure, the better prepared I would be to stop those that would try to take over once I removed the current rulers of the Dominion. The idea was to take completely over the Dominion and try to fix some of the damage done by Faakhir and Emily, and once everything was under control, I would give the power back to their rightful owners, Sofia and William.
It took us just a little time to check the place and make sure there was nothing useful there, finding and capturing the remaining agents was an easy task that we could finish quickly. After finishing the detentions and making sure we were all out of danger, I went back to Capital City to meet again with Emily and Faakhir and discuss new assignments.
“You did a great job Kaiserin,” Faakhir complimented me. “If it wasn’t for your help, we would have been clueless about our enemies plans and we wouldn’t have been able to stop them.”
“Are you sure we are out of danger?” Emily asked. “I don’t want to be worried about getting sick.”
“I can assure you that if you get sick, it will have nothing to do with this virus, this group haven’t even manufactured the virus they needed to infect you, they just had the version they tried to use with the King.”
“That’s ok, if you say we are safe, then I believe you,” Faakhir said.
“Now that you took care of that, I need you to do something for me,” Emily said. “I found out a few days ago that there’s a group of people hiding the some jewels that could be part of the Crown Treasure. I thought it was lost, but now I know that it’s another thing my mother took from me, it seems that in another of her selfish acts, she told some of her people to hide the treasure from me. I want you to find if it’s true that she hid it and then bring it to me, its rightful owner.”
“If you want me to look for something like that, then you need to give me a better idea of what I’m looking for.”
“There is an old soldier, one of my mother’s men, currently locked in one of the cells. Faakhir said that he has the information you will need to find the treasure.”
“I just confirmed that he knew about the treasure and the orders to take it away, you will have to find the rest of the people involved and find it,” Faakhir said. “It shouldn’t be hard for you to find it. As always, you can choose whomever you want to take with you, but we have a few suggestions as to who you should take with you,” Faakhir made a signal and one of his men gave me a folder with information of some of his trusted men. “As this is a relatively easy task, I’m confident you will be able to finish quickly. In a couple of weeks we will be celebrating the anniversary of our coronation with a great party, and Emily would like to be able to wear some of the jewels in the treasure.”
“For a long time my mother denied me my inheritance, and I won’t accept that anymore. Our anniversary is going to be one of the biggest events the Dominion has ever seen, and the only thing that can make it better is if I’m wearing the jewels that have been in my family for centuries. It will be one more proof that this is my destiny and my right,” Emily said, excited about the idea, even if I couldn’t understand how a few jewels could mean so much for her. Again, Emily was only proving that her mother had made the right decision by not giving her the crown in the first place.
“I will do my best, but I’m not sure if I can do it in the time you are giving me.”
“Blame those rebels for the time problem, you could have been taking care of this for a while if it hadn’t been for your father in law getting sick and they you going after those people,” Emily said, as if going after a guy that could probably start an epidemic and kill thousands of people and saving her husband from being infected wasn’t as important of a few jewels.
“I will go immediately to deal with this mission, but after that I will need some time off, I need some vacation time,” I got out of the room before they could say anything to me.
Kaiserin Novel 