Page 69 of The Girl Beneath the Sea

“He thinks I’m dead.”

“Yes.”

“Then he thinks he’s alone in there and he thinks he doesn’t have a choice. You said it yourself. He’s been locked in one room or another his whole life.”

“I said he was used to it. I did not say he would lie down.” Havel folds his arms. “My man in that hotel has never spoken to the Prince. He has never been in a room with him. He is always accompanied by another guard. If he even attempts to look at His Highness without permission, he is dead by morning.”

“Then he doesn’t speak. We try to get him a note. Or something only he’d—”

“Kessler.” He doesn’t raise his voice. “I am not risking his life. And if that doesn’t matter to you, he is more valuable to you alive. He dies and we lose our sole source of information on His Highness.”

I shut my mouth.

The younger man snorts. I let it go.

It is close to midnight when the laptop chimes.

Havel opens it. The palace has put out a second video. The younger man comes off the door and stands behind us, and Havel turns the screen and hits play.

It’s sunset. I see Aurelio standing on a stone terrace, the river behind it reflected red from the sky.

He is dressed completely in black all the way to the collar. The black is laced with gold. He looks like something out of a painting. He is still the most beautiful thing that I have ever seen.

The collar stands up four fingers high, almost to his jaw. I know what it is covering.

“People of Monteverra,” he says. “Friends in America and across the world.”

I know this voice now. This is the cue-card voice.

“I have my dear father’s blessing,” he says, “and now I beg you for yours. I—”

He stops.

It isn’t a pause. He is halfway into the next word and the word doesn’t come. His eyes go off the lens and down and to the left. His face doesn’t move at all. Only the eyes.

Then they come back to the camera. “—I will marry him,” he says. “Here, in this country that stood beside us, before the month is out. I ask you to be glad for me, as I am glad. Thank you.”

The clip ends on the palace crest.

I reach forward onto the screen, drag it back with two fingers and freeze it when Aurelio pauses.

His eyes have flashed downward to the left. Sun was going. It was just before Havel put me into that tree. The realization hits me hard. “He smelled me.” It comes out stupid. I don’t care. “He knows I’m alive.”

“Maybe.” Havel presses play again, and we listen to Aurelio tell the world he will marry Prime Minister Reinhardt before the month is out.

No, he will not. I will die before I let that happen.

When the video is done, Havel turns and says to me, “In the morning, we find this Sully. Tonight you can sleep on the sofa.”

The sofa turns out to be a lot less comfortable than my camping bed back at my hidey-hole. It’s too small for one thing, and it doesn’t help that both Havel and the younger Monteverran, whose name turns out to be Gerhard, snore very loudly.

Still, I have slept in far worse places. It’s not either of those things that keeps me awake.

I want Aurelio back. The thought is mad. Who am I that I deserve a prince? I am no one. I always have been. Half of me wonders if I have gone completely insane. There’s a kidnapping theory out there that I was working alone, just a stalker obsessed with a prince.

It’s not wrong. I am obsessed with him. I did stalk his hotel.

Still, in my heart I know who he is and who I am. The truth is that I would prefer it if he weren’t royalty. Then we could have an ordinary life.