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The few minutes it takes to brew a pot gives me time to take a breath and comb my fingers through my hair and press my hands to my cheeks. My heart flutters uncomfortably as butterflies take flight in my stomach. The hard-hitting reporter I used to be is nowhere in sight. I don’t feel like myself, but at the same time, I feel…how can I explain it? I feel like my anger toward the elite was a wall, and it’s starting to crumble. I feel like my image as this take-no-bullshit journalist was a defense mechanism. In a way, when I’m off-kilter and blushing, I’m more myself than I was before.
Is it possible I’ve been lying to myself all this time?
I bring out two mugs of coffee and sit down on the sofa beside the Prince—did I mention the freaking Prince of Nord is in my house?—and tuck my feet under my butt.
“You said your mother has Parkinson’s?” Silas asks after taking a sip.
“Yeah,” I reply. “She’s been in a home for the past three years, ever since my father died. He was her full-time caregiver, and when he passed, she took a real bad turn.”
“Parkinson’s is degenerative, right?”
I nod. “Unfortunately.”
The Prince’s hand slides over my leg. It’s a comforting movement. Intimate. It surprises me how right it feels to have him here. My heart beats easier with him sitting beside me, and it doesn’t feel like a member of the royal family is on my couch. There’s no pretense, no false politeness. It’s…real.
“How did your father die?” Silas’s thumb makes small circles on my thigh while he takes another sip of coffee. Every movement is comfortable. Easy.
“Stomach cancer,” I reply. It took me a full year to say those words out loud, and the ease with which they come out of my mouth almost surprises me.
That thumb keeps moving over my leg, soothing. Silas doesn’t flinch when I say the ‘c’ word. He dips his chin. “Sorry.”
“S’okay.” I shrug. “You lost your parents young, right?”
“I only have a few memories of them. Car accident. I was five.”
I put my hand over his, curling my fingers into his palm. We sit in silence for a while, understanding each other on a level I didn’t think was possible. Grief doesn’t seem so heavy when I’m next to someone who’s suffered too. It’s only when I really think about who he is—who his parents were—that I feel strange sitting here beside him.
But heartache and grief don’t care if his father was a king and mine was a simple groundskeeper. It doesn’t matter what titles our families have, or what our last names are. We’ve both suffered losses.
“You know, I never really felt like I belonged to the royal family,” Silas says after a pause. “My brothers and sister are so…regal. And I just felt like dead weight.” He chuckles softly, shaking his head. “I remember reading an article you wrote about three or four years ago. You criticized me for going on a trip around the world on the royal dime. Said I was costing the Nordish taxpayers millions with my antics. You were right. I was ashamed of myself.”
“I was angry,” I say, placing my mug down on a side table. “I was bitter about the classism in Nord and I wanted to lash out. You were an easy target, and I didn’t see you as a real person.”
“Do I seem real now?” His grin is soft, but his eyes have deep, ocean-blue sadness in them.
I nod. “Very.”
“Why were you angry?”
“I guess you want to hear about Liam Birchal, right?” I glance at Silas’s face, expecting to see something lurking beneath his expression, but all I see is openness. Acceptance.
He shrugs. “I’m curious, but you don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to.”
“I thought I loved him. I was a teenager.” I shake my head. “We dated from fifteen to seventeen, but he’d probably tell you I was obsessed with him. He dropped me as soon as our relationship became inconvenient, and I took it badly. I just resented how much power he had over my reputation in town. How easy it was for him to walk away from our relationship when I felt like I’d been completely ruined by it.”
Silas’s hand moves to my cheek, and he tucks a strand of hair behind my ear. “You don’t look ruined by it.”
“It was ten years ago.” I laugh. “I hope I’d recover from a teenage heartbreak.”
“Is that the reason you started calling for the end of the monarchy in Nord?”
“Very perceptive, Your Highness.” I grin. “That was the start of it.”
“Birchal never deserved you.”
My heart skips a beat. I force myself to meet Silas’s gaze, seeing nothing but earnestness staring back at me. He doesn’t look out of place here, on my old sofa with the worn armrests. Even in his finely tailored clothes and expensive haircut, he looks like he belongs here. More comfortable than he does in official photos in the castle.
It’s almost like he doesn’t want to be considered a royal. Like he acts out and parties so much because he wants to be looked down on. He wants to lower himself off the pedestal on which he was born.
