Page 71 of The Girl Beneath the Sea

He looks at me and raises his eyebrows. “We’ve got you an invite to the wedding. Well, not you. Someone with the name of Brian Poder.”

“Security’s going to be insane. They’re not going to let me just walk in.”

Havel shrugs. “Yes, but we are also security. I know what their protocol is from my man on the inside. We can get you in the back entrance. This is our single chance.”

He looks me up and down. “You keep growing that beard. It does God’s work.”

I want to laugh. He sounds deadly serious.

“They think that you are dead. You are simply one more guest among the thousands with an official invite.”

I wait for him to explain, because I am still only one man. I can’t take on Reinhardt, the full Monteverran security detail and a few thousand wedding guests on my own.

“You are where he can see you.”

I don’t understand, and then I do.

“He will react. We know he will. He cannot do otherwise,” Havel says. “When that happens, Reinhardt’s men will move. They will not hurt him. They will take him by the elbow and say he is unwell, he is overcome with emotion, then they will walk him through the nearest door, and the door will close. We know the route they will take to get him out of there. I know because I am the person who trained them. I know what they will choose. Then we do exactly what they did to us. They put him in a car. We take the car.”

I know now why he didn’t want to tell me. Havel’s plan is risky but it gets Aurelio away.

It gets me arrested. If I’m lucky. It is possible that it gets me shot. That’s fine. Anything for my prince.

19. Aurelio

I was so preoccupied with making sure that Reinhardt believed me when I said I did not want to be in front of the crowds, that it did not occur to me that it really would bother me.

I have never been around this many people in my life. At least not this close up.

The closest I have come is waving at crowds from the balcony at the palace, but that is different. Then I was so far up, I could not even make out individual faces and there was an entire courtyard and a high iron fence between us.

Here there is only the aisle and that is not very wide.

The cathedral is the largest space I have ever been in. The roof goes up and up until the stone turns gray with distance and then into a dark the lights do not reach. There are flowers everywhere, white ones, banked in tiers along the pillars and standing in towers at the ends of every pew. Lilies. The smell of them is thick as syrup and it sits at the back of my throat and my stomach turns over slowly, once, and settles.

Somewhere music started from an organ the moment that the doors were opened for me. I barely hear it.

I breathe through my mouth. I keep my pace.

I know this pace. I was taught it when I was five, on the long gallery at home, with a tutor tapping a cane on the parquet. One step to a count of two. Hands loose at the sides. Eyes forward and slightly down. Never look at the crowd. The crowd is looking at you. Eyes straight ahead.

I have thrown up twice this morning. Once before the dresser came, in the bathroom, with the door shut. Once after she had finished, into the wastebasket by the desk, with her holding the basket and her eyes on the wall. She took the basket away with her when she left and said nothing about it to anyone, or if she did, nobody has come to ask me.

I cannot do it a third time. Not here. Not in white, with the whole world watching.

My suit is pure white, the color of the snow and I am wearing the traditional gold sash. I saw myself in the mirror before I left and I looked like the top of a wedding cake. The dresser let the waist out a fraction while I stood there. She did it without asking and without looking up.

I breathe in through my nose. Another slow step, then another.

They are looking. The Americans are on my left. I know some of the faces from the television in my suite: senators, the host of a TV show called Point of Contention who called me “a sales pitch.” The Vice President is sitting in the front pew with his wife.

My own people are on my right: the great houses of Monteverra in their dress coats, the alphas who were supposed to be my choices, their omegas beside them with their eyes down and their collars high. Nobody kneels. Nobody bows as I pass.

There is no one behind me. That is the strangest part of it. I have always had a security detail behind and front, and today there is only the music and the sound of my own shoes on the stone.

I walk alone because there is nobody to give me. My father is “resting.” Reinhardt cannot both give me away and marry me. So the hothouse prince walks down the longest aisle in America by himself.

I have already thrown up twice this morning. My coming child objects to today as much as I do.