THE NIGHT OF FALLING CROWNS
SEBASTIAN
Eighteen Years Ago…
Rain hammered the windows like bullets.
I pressed my face against the glass, watching London blur into smears of gold and gray. The city looked soft through the downpour, almost gentle. Street lamps pooled on wet pavement, haloed and distant. Protest signs wilted in doorways, their angry red letters bleeding into the concrete. Somewhere out there, people were shouting about reform and revolution, waving banners that called for the end of everything my family represented. But inside the royal motorcade, all I heard was the hum of the engine and my mother's voice.
She was humming again. Her hand rested on mine, warm and steady, anchoring me to something real while everything outside moved too fast. Her thumb traced circles over my knuckles, a rhythm I'd memorized years ago.
“You're restless tonight,” she said softly, not stopping her song.
I shrugged, fidgeting with the wooden toy in my lap. A little archer she'd carved for me last winter, bow drawn, forever aiming at nothing. The paint was chipping off his tunic where I'd rubbed it too manytimes. Green turning to bare wood. I'd carried him everywhere for months, stuck him in my pocket during state dinners and official portraits, pulled him out when the palace felt too big and too quiet.
“Just tired of sitting still.”
She laughed, quiet and knowing. The sound wrapped around me like the blankets she used to tuck me into before the tutors decided I was too old for that. “My little storm.”
I wanted to tell her I wasn't little anymore. That thirteen was practically grown. That I could handle whatever was waiting out there in the rain-soaked streets. But her fingers tightened on mine, just slightly, and I kept my mouth shut.
Up front, my father's voice cut through the calm. Sharp. Clipped. He was on the phone again, jaw tight, one hand braced against the seat like he was holding the whole car upright through sheer will. Even from the back, I could see the tension in his shoulders, the way his spine had gone rigid.
“I don't care what the advisors say,” he snapped into the phone. “Double the security on the north routes. If Marcel thinks we can just ignore the intelligence reports?—”
He stopped. Listened. His knuckles went white around the phone.
I watched his reflection in the rearview mirror, fractured by raindrops sliding down the glass. The way his eyes narrowed. The way he looked older suddenly, carved out of something harder than flesh. Like the crown had finally started to weigh on his skull the way it was supposed to.
“Routes changed,” he muttered, voice dropping low. “Threats confirmed. Multiple targets.”
My mother's humming faltered. Just for a second. A single missed note in the melody. Then she picked it back up, softer now, but her grip on my hand tightened until I could feel her pulse against my wrist. Quick. Too quick.
“Alexandre,” she said quietly. Just his name. But it carried weight.
“It's fine,” he answered without turning around. “Protocol. Nothing more.”
She didn't believe him. I could tell by the way her breathingchanged, shallow and controlled, like she was preparing for something she didn't want to name.
Thunder rolled overhead, deep and angry, vibrating through the car's frame. I counted the seconds until the lightning would follow, the way she'd taught me when I was small and afraid of storms. One. Two. Three?—
A sharp crack split the air.
Not thunder.
Too clean. Too precise. Too wrong.
The driver's head snapped forward. His hands jerked on the wheel, sudden and violent. The car lurched left, tires screaming against wet asphalt, and my mother threw her arm across my chest, pinning me back against the seat hard enough to knock the air from my lungs.
“Get down,” she hissed. Not a suggestion. A command.
Another crack. Then another. The windshield spiderwebbed, glass blooming outward in fractures that caught the streetlights like spilled diamonds. Beautiful and deadly. The driver slumped sideways, and someone in the front passenger seat lunged for the wheel, shouting something I couldn't hear over the shriek of metal and rubber.
“Ambush!” The voice came through the radio, crackling with static and panic. A guard. Maybe two. Voices overlapping, trying to stay professional while the world came apart. “We're taking fire! North and east positions compromised! Repeat, we are compromised!”
The car jolted hard, slamming into something. A barricade, maybe. Or another vehicle. The impact threw me sideways into my mother's ribs despite her arm holding me down. The wooden archer tumbled from my lap, hitting the floor with a soft crack that I felt more than heard. His little crown snapped off. Rolled under the seat into shadow.
Gone.
