I picked up the bolt, my fingers closing around the obsidian tip. It was cold. Perfectly weighted. Deadly.
My reflection stared back from its dark surface, tear-streaked and furious and young. Too young.
My mother's blood mixed with rainwater at my feet, spreading outward in thin pink streams.
The night swallowed her song.
And something new was born in its place.
Something sharp.
Something patient.
Something that would learn to bite back.
1
PRINCE
SEBASTIAN
Present Day…
The clock struck midnight and I was already gone. Not physically. Not yet. In my head I was halfway across the city, bow in hand, hunting the shadows that had hunted me since I was thirteen.
I stood in my quarters, staring at the portrait of her that hung above my fireplace. Oil on canvas. Perfect and lifeless. The smile was right; everything underneath was missing. Off-key humming. Carver's calluses. The way she bled out in my arms while the crown's protectors did nothing.
Eighteen years.
It felt like yesterday. It felt like forever.
My fingers traced the scar on my palm, the one I'd gotten that night. Thin white line bisecting the lifeline. A fortune teller once said my palm meant two lives. She was right. One of them belonged to a ghost.
Apollo lifted his head from where he was sprawled on my bed, tail thumping once against the duvet. His amber eyes tracked my movement, and I saw the question there. The same one every night.
“Stay,” I told him quietly, crossing to scratch behind his ears. His fur was warm under my palm, solid and real in a way nothing else in the palace ever felt. “I'll be back before dawn. Promise.”
He whined, low in his throat, but settled back down. Good dog. Better than most people I knew. Better than me, probably.
I moved to the wardrobe. Pushed aside the formal wear and ceremonial uniforms until I reached the back panel. The hidden door was barely visible unless you knew where to look. Servants' passage from when the palace was first built, back when royalty couldn't be bothered to see the people who kept them alive.
I pressed the concealed latch. The panel swung inward with a soft click.
Old servant stairs descended into darkness, the air thick with dust and stone that had not seen sunlight in a century. Cool air rushed up from below, carrying the smell of old secrets and older stone.
I pulled the door shut behind me and started down.
Each step felt like shedding skin. The signet ring came off first, slipped into my coat pocket where it wouldn't catch light or leave marks. Then the watch my father had given me for my twenty-first birthday, platinum and engraved with words I'd stopped reading years ago. The cufflinks Élodie had picked out last Christmas, little silver lions that were supposed to be fierce but just looked sad.
Everything that marked me as Sebastian Laurent, Crown Prince of Laurentia, heir to a throne built on blood and lies and my mother's corpse.
The stairs wound down through the palace's bones. Past floors I'd never walked. Through walls thick enough to muffle screams. Into foundations laid centuries ago by men who'd understood that every castle needed its secrets, its escape routes, its places where inconvenient truths could disappear.
I counted the steps out of habit. Two hundred and forty-three. Always the same. Always ending in the same place.
By the time I reached the bottom, I was someone else.
The hidden garage smelled like oil and metal and freedom. My motorcycle sat in the center, black and sleek and illegal as hell. Noplates. No registration. Nothing that could be traced back to the palace if things went wrong.
