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My heartbeat sped up until I heard nothing else. He was as out of reach as the first night he caught me, and I thought him bat-bitten for believing me a princess. My fluttering heart did not care.
He blinked, seemed to absorb my presence, and his internal walls became impenetrable as he stalked toward me.
Though I’d never been one to swoon, the room spun.He cannot be here. Cannot—I needed time to plan what to say. To find the answers that would show him I was real. Show the danger he was in so I could walk away when he rejected me again.
I retreated without meaning to. He grabbed my arm before I could blink.
We stood like that, neither speaking nor moving, our chests heaving.
“This gonna be a problem?” the barkeep asked behind me. “I don’t think your friend would want his favor traded for you hurtinga girl. He was a stickler for that kind of thing. And it’s bad for business.”
Dimitri’s enticing lips twisted into a sardonic smirk. “Don’t worry on her behalf, she can throw me across the room. And he would very much have wanted for me to catchthis girl. She owes us both.”
There was only one person I had heard the prince refer to as a friend. I turned to the man behind the bar, reevaluating him, but still unable to understand how he fitted into this. “You knew Alexei?”
The man lowered his voice and could not have looked more suspicious if he tried. “Worked for him and the crossbones for years.” He puffed up his chest. “I’m a royalist.”
“And paid well for it,” Dimitri said in a voice that shut down any argument, then turned to me, anger darkening his eyes and voice. “Come,Vanya, we have things to talk about even loyal ears shouldn’t hear.”
Dimitri steered me away while my name falling from his lips echoed inside me. How many times had I wished for him to whisper it? That I could give him that little piece of truth? Somehow, he had found it without me.
Instead of to a table, the prince steered me out the back door and into the putrid and already occupied alley.
“Who’s this?” a hulking shape asked and despite not knowing Dimitri’s intentions for dragging me here, I pressed against the prince’s side. The part of me that wanted nothing more than for him to wrap me in his arms rejoiced in how they still automatically closed around me. It made me forget the last days. Made me want to hear him whisper my name over and over in his dark voice. Part of me was hope unwilling to die.
“I told you to leave. I’ll do this onmy own,” Dimitri said, exasperated rather than frightened. “Her answers belong to me alone.”
“My job’s to keep you safe.”
“Your job is to figure out where the food went after it entered Tal.”
“You asked me to swear to you personally. My job’s to keep you alive.”
Irritation flared, and I wished I could see the prince’s face. It seemed he had acquired a bodyguard. With the plots against him, I could only approve.
Dimitri pulled me past the stranger. “Then follow at a distance.”
The alley was narrow enough that I brushed against what felt like a mountain of hard muscles and equally steady emotions.
On the wider street, lanterns hung above shops, eateries, and less savory establishments. Hard enough that I could not escape, Dimitri wrapped my arm around his, a mockery of how he had led me through palace halls. My two lives crashed together as his scent of leather and griffon brought back memories and a closeness I was sure he no longer felt. Lumi might have lied to me, but when she said she would bring Helia to the palace, I had read the truth in her hard eyes and had no doubt she’d followed through.
Still... He was here.
He knew my name.
And he had never been, could never be mine.
Dimitri stuffed his eyepatch into a coat pocket, as if he needed to see me fully, while his mental walls blocked every trace of what he felt. I studied his profile, seeing only the practiced lack of emotions he displayed in court. The cold face that made nobles scurry out of his way.
“It’s time totalk. Why did you invade my life, Tempest?”
I would have much preferred it to be time for kisses, but at least he was not shouting or arresting me. “Tempest?”
“I had to call you something when I didn’t know your name. Who sent you to the palace? Talk.”
“I’m—“ At the thought of mentioning the curse, invisible fingers closed around my throat. I placed my hand on the bag tied to my thigh, the letter inside heavier than a boulder. “I’m trying to help you and Tal. Dimi—”
“Why would I believe a word you say if you still protect whoever hired you?”
