Page 41 of The Girl Beneath the Sea

The world suddenly spins. I’m dizzy. The man’s face goes fuzzy, but even so I can see the concern there.

“Highness? Do you need medical attention?”

Reinhardt’s man’s grip tightens on my elbow. Old habits die hard. I have had a lifetime’s training of obedience.

“No,” I manage. It comes out in a whisper.

The agent nods once, and steps back, letting them take me.

The parking lot is lit up like daylight. There are cars everywhere, parked at angles with their doors open and their lights turning. Men in jackets with the yellow letters. Men in gray suits. The barge behind me, low and black, with more men on the deck than I would have believed could fit on it.

There is a car at the end of the lot, far from the streetlights. Its rear door is open. Men are searching it, shining flashlights underneath, pulling things from the glove compartment and kneeling in the backseat.

It has to be his car.

I can’t see him. He is not standing anywhere with his hands cuffed.

There is also no shape on the ground with a sheet over it. I look and look. There is no sign of him.

Three shots. I heard three.

“The man who was in the barge with me,” I say. “The one who was guarding me. I asked before. Where is he?”

“Everything is in hand, Highness.”

“Where is he?”

He has his other hand on my back now, steering. My feet are freezing and the gravel cuts into them as we walk.

I can smell everything. Diesel. The river. Gun smoke, sharp, hanging in the cold. The Monteverrans smell of nothing at all, as they always have. Our blockers are the best in the world.

The Americans are not on blockers and they smell of coffee and sweat and cigarettes and the plastic of their jackets. One of them, as I pass, smells of a wife or a husband, someone bonded, faint and warm under the rest of it.

And I can smell myself and Roan. The scent of the two of us together, sunk into my sweatshirt and into my skin.

The agent in the yellow jacket, the one who let me go, is walking a pace behind us.

He is an alpha. I can smell him too. He smells of rich forest. It’s nice. Not the deliciousness of Roan, but pleasant.

He looks at the side of my neck, where the hood does not quite cover.

He doesn’t say anything. He looks away. But his face changes.

He knows what is under the hood. He knows what has happened to me.

Then we come around the end of the scrap pile and there are more lights.

But these aren’t cars or floodlights. Beyond a line of yellow tape, there are people, many people. The flashes start when they see me.

People start shouting my name. A microphone on a pole swings out over the tape. Behind that, I see a van with a mast going up out of its roof and a woman in front of it with a light in her face, talking, turning to point at me.

Another gray suit comes up on my other side and takes the edge of the silver blanket and pulls it up and over my head, all the way, so it hangs down past my face like a shawl. “For your privacy, Highness,” he says.

It covers my neck even further too. Perhaps they already know.

Perhaps they are leading me to my execution.

Who cares? If Roan is dead, I don’t want to keep going. It’ll just take me to him faster.