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I SAT UP front in the car because there wasn’t really room for all three of us in the backseat of the car.
The driver looked at me sidelong. I didn’t know him, but I’d seen him around on the grounds.
I shrugged at him, indicating that I was just doing what I was told.
He nodded slowly. He looked over his shoulder at the princes. “Where to?”
“Uh, Maguire, tell him where to go,” said Devlin.
“Take us to Neltingham Palace,” I said. “To the back entrance where the staff offices are.”
He raised his eyebrows. “All right, then.”
It was a strange request, I supposed. Princes always entered through the front of the building. If they needed staff members, they asked someone to fetch them. But we weren’t going to waste time with that. It would be too formal anyway.
The ride over was silent and slightly embarrassing, because the scent of the co-mingled princes was giving me a knot. There was something positively delicious about the way they smelled together. They complimented each other in a way that made me distracted.
I shifted uncomfortably in the seat more than once.
Prince Rohan was sitting behind me. Maybe he was doing the same thing, because his knee hit the back of my seat a few times.
When we arrived, I turned around and said, “Maybe it’ll be better if you let me talk to them on my own.” Because I thought having their scents in there while I was asking questions might make it tough for me to think. Also, it would mean that the staff might be stiff and formal.
“No way,” said Devlin, who was already getting out of the car.
I got out of the car and followed them, because they were leading the way, even though they didn’t know where they were going.
Eventually, I had to veer off and tell them to come with me this way.
Chagrined, they both did. It was pretty easy to see they weren’t used to letting anyone else take the lead.
I never spent much time in the security office myself, because the Queen insisted on speaking directly to the men who worked with her and her harem. Technically, I had an immediate superior, but I never reported to him. We communicated via email, mostly.
When I stepped inside, though, the staff recognized me, because I sometimes came down here to deliver messages for the Queen.
“What’s she need today, Bennion?” said the guy who worked the desk inside the front door.
The offices here were in outbuildings that had once been an outdoor kitchen and icehouse, back in the days before electricity. The palace was very old. It had been built onto and retrofitted numerous times. Anyway, the rooms were crooked in that way of very old buildings. There was a crack in one of the walls, which had been spackled over and then had cracked through the spackle, determined.
Then he saw the princes and he sat up straight.
“Who’s in charge of Prince Sinclair’s security detail?” I said.
“Oh, um… Starks, I guess,” said the guy. “Actually, all the princes are under one department, and people rotate in and out of it.”
“Is Starks here?” I said.
“Yeah, in his office, but let me call back there, and—”
“No,” said Devlin. “We need to see him.”
I was already moving into the corridor. This building had once been one large, open room, but walls and rooms had been built into it, probably sometime around the turn of the twentieth century.
Starks’s door was open.
I peered in.
He squinted up over his computer screen. “If the Queen is wanting to pull from me today, I’ve got everyone on Sinclair, who’s pulled another invisibility act. We have him on CCTV going out of the city, but we can’t see if he took the M20 motorway or went up into the mountains.”
