Page 28 of Heartbreak Prince

“The baths. They’re in the old catacombs.” She shakes her apron, emptying the last bits of dried corn. “Have fun!” And she skips away.

The prince and I stare at each other.

“The historic baths… are in a tomb.” He enunciates each word with dreadful precision. “The minerals come from the dead bodies, Syth. From the bones. You want me, the prince of Belavrin, to bathe among corpses.”

“Hush!” I drag him farther from the inn, toward the archway in the hill. “Maybe it’s only a few skeletons, tucked away neatly in the walls. Let’s at least go and see, shall we?”

“I don’t like ghosts, Syth.”

“I don’t know of anyone who actually likes ghosts.”

“Necromancers. Fortune tellers. Mediums. They like ghosts. They like them too much.”

“Stop being such a delicate flower.” I step behind him and place a hand between his broad shoulders, propelling him toward the bath-house entrance—or rather the bath tomb entrance.

He complains the whole way. Maybe he’s scared because he had his whole family assassinated and he’s afraid their ghosts will come to taunt and condemn him. Whatever the reason, it’s all I can do to get him through the arch and down the clammy stone steps.

Daylight filters weakly into the subterranean passage. We open the door and enter a small room beyond it, which contains a cabinet full of musty-smelling towels, a bottle of soft homemade soap, and a tray holding a cluster of partly melted pillar candles. Wax has pooled and hardened on the tray, around the candles, cementing them together in an amorphous clump.

“Lighter.” I hold out my hand to Vawn.

He slaps the silver lighter into my palm. “You should say, ‘Please, Your Highness, would you lend me your lighter?’”

“Aren’t we past that now?” I flick the lighter and hold its flame to each candle wick in turn.

“Once you get me to safety, I expect you to resume using all appropriate honorifics,” he says.

I snap the lighter shut and hand it back to him. “But that would be ‘Your Majesty’ instead of ‘Your Highness,’ wouldn’t it? The King is dead. Long live the King.” I throw him a cutting look as I pick up the tray of candles. “Bring the towels and the soap.”

“You delight in ordering me around like a servant,” he mumbles. “And now I must bathe in a haunted tomb, after everything I’ve endured…”

I turn sharply, holding the streaming flames of the candles between us. “And what exactly have you endured? I’ve been wondering if this crisis was really such a surprise to you. Maybe you orchestrated the coup to secure your place on the throne. You had access to wealth and allies. You know everyone’s schedules. You could have been laying plans for years.”

He stares at me as if I’ve grown three heads. “You believe I’m absolutely heartless? You doubt that my grief is real?”

When I don’t answer, his jaw tightens briefly before he continues. “I see. Setting aside the question of my emotional state, do you really think I have the mental capacity to design and execute a scheme like that?”

I tilt my head, reconsidering my theory. “I suppose not. Unless you play the fuckboy fool to conceal your vast strategic intelligence…” but I start laughing before I even finish the sentence, and he joins in with a bitter chuckle at his own expense.

Once I’ve started laughing, I can’t stop. I can barely hold onto the candles, and the bursts of breath from my mouth make the flames gutter. It’s more hysteria than humor, and I feel tears gathering at the corners of my eyes.

“By the fates… I heard that come out of my mouth,” I gasp through the laughter, “and it sounded so ridiculous… I’m sorry I accused you of such devious brilliance. I’m exhausted. That’s my only excuse.”

“No harm done.” But his lips barely move, and his eyes flicker with dark heat.

In the brief span of hours that I’ve known him, I’ve seen him peeved and petty, coquettish and playful, charming and derisive, but I’ve never witnessed his genuine anger. The dead silence of it scares me.

We follow the tunnel to a cave with a ceiling so oppressively low that Vawn has to bend just to enter it. A tiny mountain hot spring bubbles from a crack in the stone, feeding a pool barely large enough for three people. The water looks deep enough to stand upright, but I can’t tell if the objects at the bottom are white stones or something worse.

Along the far wall of the cave are more than a dozen misshapen holes in the rock, like a terrible honeycomb with openings large enough for human faces to pop out. Each hole is pitch dark, a black void. There’s a narrow passage at the end of the room that seems to continue on into the bowels of the earth, or into the rest of the catacombs.

I have never seen a place less conducive to bathing.

Instinctively I turn to the prince, for commiseration or comfort, I guess, since he’s the only living thing here. His face is streaked with dirt, his eyes rimmed with smudged black kohl, and his full mouth compressed into a grim line. He looks rather like a nightmare himself.

“Shall I bathe first, or would you like to?” I venture. “I could test the water. Make sure it’s safe. I am your bodyguard, after all.”

“By all means.” His words are a cold hiss in the gloom of the cave. “I’ll turn my back.”