Six hundred euros a week?
I look up and around the perimeter of the darkened room, lit only by one set of flickering LED candles in an elaborate sconce on the wall. “How have you not been caught?” The Sonoman government does not, of course, work on the honor system. There are scanners in several areas of the palace that can detect all manner of drugs better than any trained dog.
“I never leave this room,” he says simply.
But there’s M.A.R.I.E. The balance between privacy and technology is a concern going back nearly a hundred years to our founding in the twenty-first century, but the convenience M.A.R.I.E. affords us is made possible through constant audiovisual surveillance. Everything that happens in the palace is at least potentially recorded.
“I’m a voting member,” he says, as though that were an answer.
“I don’t understand.”
“Voters’ offices aren’t monitored. It’s a conflict of…of…”
“Conflict of interest,” I finish for him. With the King also being the CEO, early administrators would have demanded a place to discuss business matters off the record. So all high nobility have one unmonitored office. Most are in the corporate wing of the palace. I hadn’t considered the fact that my father’s is in our home. Their home.
He waves a hand. “Your mother made the arrangements.”
Of course she did.
His eyes roll over to mine. “I failed you.”
The good daughter in me wants to protest—to comfort him—but it would be an untruth. He failed me in so many ways. Especially the night Sierra Jamison was killed. My mother plotted, schemed, informed both of us what our roles were to be. He never demanded justice, nor came to my defense. Looking back now, I understand that she couldn’t have come up with such a tight plan in that moment. I’ve finally realized that she must have spent months looking for an opportunity to trap the King.
Justin, what have you done? she said that night. It sounded so off-the-cuff. I wonder now how long she’d been waiting to say it. What kind of disaster she might have otherwise pushed him—pushed both of us—into to make it happen. My mind jumps back to that night.
“I—I—” the King stammered in the face of my mother’s question. “It was an accident.”
“It wasn’t!” I burst out from just behind my mother. “I saw you. You had your hands around her neck while you—you—” My face was hot and red and I could hardly comprehend, much less explain, what I’d seen.
My mother raised both eyebrows, her expression full of judgment.
He seemed to cower beneath her gaze for a moment, and I was reminded sharply that he was less than two years older than me. Young enough to be my mother’s son. Youngest King in Sonoman-Versailles’s admittedly brief history. But with visible effort he reclaimed his composure and set about dismissively straightening the cuffs of his light linen shirt, even though the front hung completely open, revealing his bare chest.
“Please,” he scoffed. “We’re both consenting and of age, and tonight was hardly the first time.” He raised one eyebrow. “Haven’t you ever sampled this variety of bedsport? You ought to, might loosen you up a bit.”
My mother made a startled sound in her throat, but the King spoke over her before she could form actual words.
“If this situation is anyone’s fault, it’s hers,” he added, pointing a finger right at my face. “She dropped that godforsaken plate and made me jerk and squeeze too hard. That’s the moment it all went wrong.”
Rage boiled off my fear and set me quivering. I wanted to speak up; I wanted to tell my mother about that awful sound. But my tongue was dry and I couldn’t move past my fiery indignation at having been accused of being responsible for the dead woman at our feet.
“Do you truly think anyone will believe that when it’s your fingerprints bruised into her skin?” my mother asked, and I saw a smile hover at the corner of her mouth when the King’s face went pale. “Extenuating circumstances notwithstanding, you’ve done something unforgivable here, Justin. You have to make this right.”
“Of course,” he said, with all the meekness of a mouse trapped beneath a lion’s paw.
“You’ll marry Danica.”
“What?” Our voices burst forth in perfect unison.
“I will not,” His Highness said, sounding insultingly horrified.
“You will,” my mother said calmly. “Or you’ll lose your kingdom.”
At that the King stood back, scoffing openly, hands on his hips, a wide expanse of sleek skin showing above his perilously slouching breeches. I remember how my eyes fastened onto that skin and I couldn’t tear them away. We see so little bare skin at court, and this was the most desired boy in the kingdom. And a murderer. It was incredibly jarring. “You think the accidental death of a strumpet who forgot to use her safe word could take my kingdom from me?”