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“Don’t you dare finish that sentence.”
“If you’re going to cry again… All right, ok, fine, breathe, ok? Nice and slow. Listen, it’s just us here. Me and you. We have nobody if we don’t have each other. Everything else aside, we are the only two people on the planet who know what this feels like. What it’s like to be the bastard child of a king. Hated by all. Belonging nowhere. Carrying the burden and the shame of an entire kingdom on our shoulders.”
“Well, crap, Hector.”
“Exactly. So, take your time. But don’t take forever, ok? And call me, we need to be talking.”
“What, you want to be my brother now?”
“Yeah, don’t you?”
“Ugh! Fine, I do. But if you tell anyone I said this, I’ll deny it.”
“Call me tomorrow, ok?”
“I will not!”
“My shift ends at five thirty.”
“I’ll call you at five thirty-one.”
“There you go.”
“I hate you, Hector, I really do.”
“No you don’t. And I hate you too.”
“Night, Hector. And thank you, all right?”
“Night, you idiot.”
fifteen
It turns out that I would not be allowed to see Marco anyway, even if I wanted to.
I’m not allowed to see anyone, really.
As soon as I step foot in Asteria, I have to go back to the hospital to be checked out some more (I didn’t finish all my check-ups before), and then I am cross-examined once more. Everyone is tense and scared, and I realize that I can’t go back to how things were just like that. Maybe at all.
The threat is very much real, and it needs to be taken care of before I’m allowed out in public again. I need to be ‘very severely hidden and restricted’, in the words of my aides and legal team. My guards are doubled.
The days pass slowly and painfully, all the pain pouring out of me like a still-fresh wound, and I can’t resist asking my dad once (only once) about the other royal child.
“I don’t know, baby,” he replies, and this time I believe him. “I really don’t know.”
I’m sure that both he and the palace are freaking out over the fact that out there is a guy or a girl with the king’s DNA, walking around with this huge secret that could implode our world. But there is nothing they can do, apparently. They have traced my dad’s relationships as far back as they could, and the trail has gone empty.
There is nothing to do but wait.
Turns out, waiting is the hardest thing to do.
And all the hurt and pressure starts closing down on me again. It’s just as well that they decide I would be safer away from Asteria for a short period of time. So I pack up and Angel comes with me to Switzerland to ‘recuperate’ as the news call it.
It’s weird being with him after being his enemy for so many years, but we kind of slip into this easy companionship that is more comforting to me right now than opening up would be. We can’t go back to being as close as we used to be, but we coexist just fine, and that’s fine with me. Because this is not a vacation. Basically, what we do in Switzerland is hide. We barely see anyone; we just sit tight and wait for news that it’s safe to go back home or to our schools.
I mostly see the inside of our hotel, the pool, the gym, and that’s it. I try to keep up with my studies, but it’s hard to concentrate. Christmas comes and goes, the year changes, and I barely notice.
Because all the time, I keep thinking about Marco, wondering when the phone will ring to tell me that he’s dead.
