“Shame. I could use the entertainment.”
She paused in the doorway, looking back at me with an expression I couldn't quite read. “Be careful with this one. He's not like the others.”
Then she was gone, leaving me alone with my reflection and a growing sense of unease.
I looked at myself in the mirror. Golden hair combed back, green eyes bright despite the exhaustion I could feel creeping through my bones. The cut on my jaw from last night's warehouse fight was covered with makeup, invisible unless you knew to look for it. I looked every inch the prince they wanted me to be.
Perfect.
Empty.
I turned away before the feeling could settle too deep.
The reception hallwas already filling when I arrived. Press photographers setting up their equipment like vultures arranging their perches. Palace staff moving with that practiced efficiency that came from years of pretending everything was fine while the world burned outside the gates. My father stood near the windows, talking quietly with someone I couldn't see yet, his posture carrying that particular tension he'd worn since Mother died.
Apollo padded up to me, tail wagging, and I knelt to scratchbehind his ears. His warmth was grounding. Real. The only uncomplicated thing in my life that didn't demand performance or perfection or blood.
“You ready for this?” I whispered to him.
He licked my face, wet nose pressing against my cheek.
I took that as a yes. At least one of us was optimistic.
The door at the far end of the hall opened, and I felt the shift before I saw him. The way the air seemed to change. Thicken. Like a storm rolling in off the Thames, all pressure and electricity and the promise of violence.
He walked in, and everything else faded to background noise.
Tall. Broader than I'd expected from the surveillance photo I'd hacked from the security files last night. Dressed in black that somehow made him look more dangerous instead of formal, like he'd taken a funeral suit and turned it into armor. His movements were deliberate, measured, the way predators moved when they were deciding whether you were threat or prey.
I watched him cross the hall toward my father, and something in my chest tightened in a way that had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with the kind of recognition that felt dangerous.
This was different.
Élodie had been right when she'd warned me this morning. Said the new guard wasn't like the others.
She hadn't mentioned he'd look like sin carved from ice. He looked like winter personified.
He stopped in front of my father, and they spoke quietly. I was too far away to hear the words, but I saw the way my father's shoulders relaxed slightly. Saw the trust there, immediate and instinctive, the kind my father only gave to men who'd proven themselves in blood.
Which meant this man was very good at his job.
Or very good at lying.
Probably both.
My father gestured toward me, and the man turned.
He looked at me and I forgot how to breathe.
I'd seen death before. Had caused it, more times than I could countwith arrows that flew silent through the dark. But this man wore it differently. Not like a weapon he picked up when needed. Like a second skin he'd never learned to take off. Like it had seeped into his bones and made a home there.
I straightened, forcing a smile that felt wrong on my face. Too practiced. Too false. The same one I wore for cameras and diplomats and people who wanted pieces of me I'd never agreed to give.
He crossed toward me, and I counted his steps without meaning to. Twelve. Each one perfectly controlled. Not too fast, which would signal aggression. Not too slow, which would signal hesitation. Like he'd calculated exactly how much time he needed to assess the room, the exits, the threats.
Me.
Apollo's tail stopped wagging. He pressed closer to my leg, suddenly alert in that way he got when something felt off. When danger walked on two legs instead of four.
