Page 51 of The Girl Beneath the Sea

Perhaps the journalists think it no longer matters. He was a criminal and now he is a dead criminal. Who is going to tell them no?

I watched an old man, standing in a doorway saying that Roan had been a quiet kid and that’s all the information that he had. Still, it was treated like a gold nugget.

I watched them build him out of what they could find, piece by piece.

Kidnapper. Drifter. Loner. Known to police. They found a photograph of him at nineteen, thin and furious and staring straight into the camera.

They put it beside the driver’s license photograph, and the anchor looked into her camera and said that a picture was beginning to emerge.

That is how they have always known me, too. From the outside, from a file and photographs.

The third week there was even less information. The time on the story reduced, little by little until I had to go looking for it, sitting up in the dark after the doctors had done the evening stick and gone.

This week I have found nothing about him. Nothing at all. Mostly the stories mention me.

Sources close to the delegation say the prince is recovering.

The prince has withdrawn from public engagements.

There are photographs of the hotel from the street, with a red circle around a window that is not mine.

They haven’t found a body.

I hold on to that. I think that if they had but were not sharing it, Reinhardt would have told me.

He has not told me. He has not come in here since the morning he put the cards for the pre-recorded interview on the table. I have not seen his face in over a month except on the television.

So Roan could still be alive somewhere. And he’ll be hiding. That’s only sensible with his face on every screen in the country.

I keep telling myself that. There is no proof that he is dead. He is hiding. He has to be. He has to be.

The mark on my neck has healed. It’s now a ridge under my fingers, two curved lines of it. I can feel it through a shirt collar when I press, but there’s no pain or soreness, just a lingering misery and a desperate need to know what happened to him.

Pressing my scar is becoming a habit, a form of self-soothing. I try not to do it when others are in the room, but I do it without thinking.

The dresser has not been back since the morning after, but all of my shirts have been swapped out for ones with high necks.

I don’t know why a prince who sees barely anyone needs to be buttoned to the jaw.

I’ve missed a lot or supposedly I have. There was a state dinner in Washington last night. I watched Reinhardt stand beside the Vice President and say that the ties between our two nations had never been stronger. There was a chair at the end of the table, with a card with my name on it. He left it empty so that they would look at it.

But I would never have been allowed to attend in the first place. Too many people and too many unbonded, unblocked alphas.

I don’t know what excuse they would have made for me before I was taken, but they have an easy one now.

I don’t mind.

The doctor lifts his wrist and looks at his watch again. It hasn’t been three minutes so he just sits back in his chair and waits, shaking his head at the other one.

I think about what I want.

I have never done that before. Not like this. I wanted my coffee and I wanted the blinds open. Those were the things I was permitted to want, small things, things that hurt nobody. It’s hard to imagine a life of real choices when you have never had them and there has never been any real possibility of them.

I want this pregnancy so badly that it scares me. I have never wanted anything this much, except Roan.

If it is yes, then there is a child, and the child is his.

If it is yes, Reinhardt will have to do something about it. It could be anything. It could be the end of both of us.