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What was really bothering her now, as she stared at her weather app, was the high possibility that it would be too unsafe to drive out to her parents’ tomorrow.

She reminded herself that Faith wasn’t even two years old. She wouldn’t remember what day they had Christmas or if they had Christmas at all. Aeryn told herself that it would be fine. The snow would melt and they would have Christmas when they could, and it didn’t really matter when it happened.

But she still didn’t like it.

Then again, this was Chicago. They were used to weather, usually bad weather. And it often changed despite the best predictions, because the lake effect did what it wanted. That was life on the shores of Lake Michigan.

Aeryn rubbed her face, told herself to pull it together, and then she went and deliberately did the thing she’d weaned herself off of at last.

She googled King Vesuvius of Liandero.

And gasped out loud.

She realized instantaneously that what she’d expected to see were his wedding photos. That on some level, she had been braced for that even before he’d turned up on her doorstep tonight. That it had been a low-level buzz inside her all month.

Because she could pretend all she liked—and she had tried—but she knew exactly what day he’d been meant to marry the dreadful Sintia.

Some part of her that she hadn’t even known was there must have been holding out hope that he wouldn’t. After all this time, some part of her must have wondered if when it came right down to it, he wouldn’t go through with it.

Even though he’d never given her any reason to believe he wouldn’t do his duty, as had always been expected of him. He had, in fact, explicitly told her that he would marry Sintia because his heart had nothing to do with what was expected of him as a king.

If she couldn’t convince him otherwise, she knew full well that no one else could.

She scrolled, faster and faster, clicking on articles and not believing what she was reading.

Because he had not, in fact, married Sintia.

By all accounts—and Aeryn made certain to look at actual, real, official news sources, not tabloids or social media—what Vesuvius had done was not only call off his wedding but abdicate the throne entirely, throwing it over to his younger sister Francesca. Then he had commandeered a private plane and flown it away from the kingdom.

To say that Liandero was in disarray was putting it mildly.

Aeryn didn’t know how many versions of that article she read, with sources saying that the king’s whereabouts were currently undisclosed, which she suspected meant no one knew that he was in Chicago.

Then it occurred to her that he’d said there was a crash.

She sat up straighter and started madly googling Chicago plane crashes in the storm, and soon enough found information on that, too. A private plane had crashed on the ice of Lake Michigan while a pilot had been attempting to land—after having been told to turn back by air traffic control at O’Hare. No bodies have been recovered, the article stated flatly.

And no more information was available.

Aeryn lowered her phone and stared across the living room, the flickering of the fire making the light dance between them. He slept, and hard, and all she could think was that he had abdicated and then flown some nine hours, crashed down, and had then staggered to her door.

This man that she would have said wouldn’t cross the street for her if he’d thought someone might see.

She couldn’t breathe. She found herself standing, and then she was pacing around the room like her body couldn’t sit still.

Because it felt like she was on fire. Like she’d crashed from a great height. She didn’t know what to do with this. She didn’t know what to think. She must have walked around the first floor of the brownstone for a good thirty minutes—in a kind of slow-motion panic—before she seemed to gain access to her critical thinking skills again.

He had come here with no security, no royal guard. That answered the questions she’d had. But now she had to wonder if that meant that they didn’t actually know where he was. She also had to wonder whether or not the authorities in Chicago had notified the owners of the plane—because they would be able to track that information, she was sure, though she was no aviation expert—about the crash.

That meant there was a very high probability that the royal family, at the very least, thought Vesuvius was dead.

Aeryn couldn’t have that. She knew how she would feel if she thought he was dead, and she just couldn’t let that go on.

She went into her phone, and into her blocked numbers, and pulled up one that she had vowed she would delete entirely. That she had been meaning to delete, which she imagined she might have done if she’d looked at the news tomorrow morning and found out that he really had married Sintia.

It wasn’t Vesuvius’s number. It belonged to Saviero Cimarosa, his minister and right-hand man, who she’d had to call or take calls from on very rare occasions. All having to do with the gallery and her curation efforts.

But she knew that Saviero was also Vesuvius’s best friend.