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She didn’t understand how she was here again. How had she given this same man her heartagainonly to have him smash it once more?
She wandered without paying any attention to where she was going until it occurred to her that everything she’d said to Paris Apollo was true for her, too.
Ilonia seemed at times a fairy-tale kind of place, but it was all too real. Paris Apollo’s parents had been murdered, for God’s sake. It was just as dangerous for a future queen—or an ex-future queen, to be precise—to wander like this as it was for a king.
Or anyway, it was putting an unnecessary target on her back.
Madelyn found it helpful to have something to concentrate on. To figure out where she was, which was easy enough in a place she hardly knew because all she needed to do was look up to see the palace standing there at the top of the hill. She let it lead her home.
But when she got to the palace, sneaking back in that same gate, she didn’t slink off to her own rooms the way perhaps she should have. Instead, she smiled serenely at the guards and assorted night staff she passed in the halls as she made her way to Paris Apollo’s rooms instead.
She could admit to herself that she’d expected him to be there, perhaps brooding out on his terrace. But he was nowhere to be found in the vast, sprawling apartments. She searched each and every room, but they were all empty.
Madelyn decided that she would wait for him.
She crawled onto his bed, where she had sobbed out his name in pure joy more times than she could count in these last weeks, curled herself into a ball, and expected that she would stay wide awake.
Instead, she slept. And hard.
When she woke, it was to find light streaming into the room, indicating that the sun was high.
But Paris Apollo was still nowhere to be seen. There was no indentation on the side of the bed where he normally slept. She had the sinking feeling he hadn’t come back here at all.
She felt woozy and tired. And her heart ached as if it hadn’t been ripped right out of her chest on that dark beach.
Madelyn wanted to lie down. And stay there. But instead, she pushed herself up and onto her feet. And even though she wanted nothing more than to go directly down into the main part of the palace to start questioning the staff as to Paris Apollo’s whereabouts, she knew that there were too many wedding guests here.
Including her own judgmental parents, who she knew a little better today than she really wanted to. The last thing she needed to do was give them ammunition by appearing in last night’s dress, looking bedraggled.
So she took the longer, more private route back to her own rooms and was happy to find her trio of attendants within.
“I need to find the King,” she told them briskly.
“He’s not here, madam,” one of them said, sounding cheerful despite the quizzical look on her face.
“And we are to pack,” said another. “Straight away.”
The third looked alarmed. “Begging your pardon, of course.”
That Madelyn did not scream bloody murder was, she thought then, a mark of her character.
Instead of screaming the way she wanted to, she left the three of them to their packing and headed deeper into her rooms. She took a shower and fixed her own hair for a change, like the grown woman she was. She checked in on Troy and Corrine, confirming that while Corrine had heard the news, no one had broken it to Troy.
“Let’s make sure no one does,” Madelyn suggested under her breath.
“That’s the spirit,” Corrine replied, with her usual optimistic grin.
As ever, it was exactly what Madelyn needed.
She kissed Troy even when he tried to wiggle away in mock-horror that would likely be real in ten years—so she would kiss him all the same—and then set off. She took advantage of the exquisite clothes that had been provided for her. They accorded her an authority she knew perfectly well she didn’t convey when dressed in her preferred jeans. Even with her hair piled up on the top of her head like a commoner and last night’s hard sleep on her face, she knew that what the staff would see was their queen.
No matter what Paris Apollo might have ordered.
That was how she wound her way into the municipal part of the palace and found herself knocking on the door of Angelique Silvestri’s office, without anyone daring to block her way.
“I heard a terrible rumor,” the older woman said when Madelyn walked in.
“I heard the same one myself when I woke up,” Madelyn agreed. “From all sides.”
