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“As if I would ever be related to you or anything to do with your filthy dad,” he sneers.
“Angel, please…”
His name is Angel.
His official title is Prince Angel of Greece, Norway and Russia. But he is nothing even remotely resembling an angel. A fallen angel, maybe. Made of marble both inside and out. He is dark, brooding and cold. And an absolute ass.
“Let me be absolutely clear,” Angel says, and his handsome features twist into an expression of such pure hatred, I take a step back. “I loathe you and everything you stand for.”
Right.
“Who is behind the Rotten Royals?” I persist, and he quickly grabs my sleeve, pushing me to the wall. His eyes dart around frantically, in case we’re being overheard, but the hall is empty. “Will you help me, please?” I go on, desperate. “I have been in the dark this whole time and it’s killing me. I know nothing, Angel, and you… You always know everything.”
“Not this time,” he hisses. “And will you keep your voice down? Did you actually stalk me all the way to my class from Oregon?”
“Vermont,” I correct him, although of course he knows. Angel knows everything about every royal—but not because he gives a damn. He has a photographic memory. He reads it once, he can never forget it. “And yes, I did. I have to know, Angel, please. I know you hate me, but do you have any idea what it’s like for me? Everything is falling apart and I know nothing. I don’t know… I don’t know who I am.”
Tears are threatening and I grit my teeth against the sudden, overwhelming emotion. I won’t show fear in front of him; he’s like a wolf. If he smells weakness, I’m a goner.
Except that I stink of desperation already. I came here, after all, to throw myself on his mercy, as the saying goes. ‘Throw’ being the key word here.
“I hate you,” Angel murmurs. “Did you think I was just saying that? I mean it. No matter what I know or don’t know, I’ll never tell you. I am nothing to you, but if I am anything to you, I am your enemy. You came all this way for nothing. You came all this way for someone who hates you.”
I know he does. He has told me a million times. Angel is a few months older than me, and we practically grew up together. Well, he lives in Paris, mostly, being a part of the exiled Greek royal family, but he and I spent all our summers together in the South of France. He and I were pretty inseparable, and his stupid face is on every single photo of my childhood summers. On every Christmas holiday.
On every single memory.
Then, suddenly, when we were eight, he stopped talking to me. Just completely froze me off. It hurt like dying: he had been my best friend, pretty much my only friend, almost my brother. Our summers and Christmases ended abruptly. From that point on, I only ever saw him on the news, on gossip sites (not that I was allowed much access to those anyway), and at formal functions, where he would just scowl at me from across a room, dressed in his immaculate suits and growing taller and taller every year. With a different girl on his arm every year. Some years, several girls.
But none of them were me.
I have not talked to him in eleven years.
Until now.
“Angel, come on, it’s me,” I try again, although I am shaking.
I barely recognize this tall Greek god looming over me, his hand clenched viciously around my arm, his gray eyes flashing down at me. He grabs my wrist and pulls me into an empty classroom, slamming the door shut behind us.
“You,” he spits out, “stay away from me and my mom. You ruined my life, you and your father.”
“What? How?”
I don’t know this Angel. I realize, belatedly, that I came running here hoping to find the friend of my childhood, the boy of all those summers. But he doesn’t exist anymore. Just like my dad doesn’t.
I’ve been living a lie since I was born. The room sways around me, black spots dancing in my vision, but he’s grabbing me so hard, he is steadying me without meaning to.
Angel swears. “I wanted to go to Cambridge, did you know that?” his eyes flash in anger and pure hatred. “Got accepted too. They have exactly what I wanted to study, but instead I decided to fly all the way across the ocean and come here, just so that I would be far away from that—that man.”
No one refers to my father as a man. Or as ‘that man’. But Angel just did. He hates him so much.
“What are you talking about, Angel? I don’t know anything.” I realize I am in much deeper waters than I originally thought. I do remember, when I got accepted in UVM, that Angel’s mom called dad’s secretary to convey a special message from Angel, but it was hidden from me. I burned with curiosity, but I never managed to uncover what it was. “What did that message you sent say?”
He laughs drily. “He didn’t tell you, did he? He didn’t even tell you that. I am such an idiot.” He flings his head back and laughs, Adam’s apple jutting out. His laughter is ugly and bitter. “It simply begged,beggedhim not to let you come to study to a state so near me,” he says. “Because something likethiswould happen, I knew it. You would stalk me.”
My throat stings as if I have been swallowing tears for hours.
“He ignored it, didn’t he?” Angel steps closer to me, his tall frame towering over my short one. “The king ignored it.” When did he get two heads taller than me? When did he get those freckles on his long nose? When did he get that stubble on his chin? When did he get those cheekbones and those biceps?
