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Chevalier’s brothers might not have been treating me any differently now that I was the queen, other than modifying their teasing accordingly, but almost everybody else did. There was a lot more bowing and curtsying everywhere I went, and most of the people I’d convinced to drop the title before my name when I had been a princess suddenly forgot all familiarity and added the title again. It was as though everyone expected me to become a distant, haughty ruler overnight. One who never lifted a finger to do anything for herself.
It baffled me. I’d always needed to keep busy, whether that meant maintaining the library in spotless condition when I was a maid, or filling every spare minute of my schedule with studying when I became a princess, and everybody knew that. On more than one occasion, I’d heard murmurings about me overworking myself from people of all classes and stations. But those same people expressed surprise when I continued studying and keeping busy.
And when I announced my intention to take over the management of the servants, I received smiles and acknowledgements to my face, followed by the servants going behind my back to the princes for instructions, as they’d always done.
I had to tell Chevalier and his brothers to step back and let me handle everything. Having them fight my battles for me would do no good in the long-term. I also had to order my guards to stay out of it unless there was a physical threat to me, because I didn’t want to intimidate the servants into obeying me. I wanted respect. And not because of my relationship with Chevalier.
That was another problem. It was no secret I was more sociable and less intimidating than him, and noblemen began stopping me in the hallways to ask if I could deliver official documents and put in good words for them. It annoyed me, and it only reinforced the idea that others saw me as nothing more than a buffer for Chevalier. I often had to bite off sharp responses before I turned them down politely and advised them to speak with Chevalier directly.
And then there was Chevalier himself. In public, he was still the cold, distant aristocrat whose glare could freeze a person’s blood in their veins, but in private…
“Chevalier!” I exclaimed, giggling before my back pressed into the door and his lips pressed into mine. “You can’t keep—mm…doing this…”
He chuckled, his breath and his thumb ghosting across my lips before he kissed me again, and I couldn’t find it in myself to push him away.
“I have to go…”
He hummed in response, maybe in agreement, maybe just an acknowledgement; it didn’t really matter. I had already given in, wrapping my arms around his neck and kissing him back.
It was a new game he played, one where I rolled the dice every time I passed him in the hall. Sometimes, and I never knew when, he’d grab me and pull me aside for a few minutes of kissing, touching, and murmured words. And it really wasn’t fair, I thought, trapped between him and the door, heartbeat to heartbeat, breath to breath. He would walk out of here with his usual cool dignity, and I would be a blushing, flustered mess, avoiding my guards’ eyes and those of anybody else in the vicinity.
A happy, blushing, flustered mess.
“I’ll be working late tonight,” he breathed in my ear. “Don’t wait up.”
How he could deliver those words in such a seductive tone was beyond me. I bit my lip to stop myself from making a sound when he nibbled at my ear, but I couldn’t stop my fingers from curling into his jacket.
“Maybe I can…catch up with Theresa…mm…”
I felt his smile against my skin as he scattered kisses across my cheek and neck. He’d never smiled when we first met, and now, he smiled almost constantly when we were together. Not in public, of course. Only for me.
Maybe that was why I let him get away with so much.
Eventually, he stepped back, and I swallowed and smoothed my skirt, trying to compose myself before we left the room. I knew he was smirking. I could feel it, even if I couldn’t see it, too busy avoiding his eyes in the dim lighting. Whatever room this was, it had seen no use today before we’d arrived, judging by the drawn curtains.
“You’re getting as bad as Clavis,” I muttered.
“Does he do this to you as well?” he asked with amusement, not taking the bait.
I lifted my chin and straightened my shoulders. “Maybe he does. Who can say?”
I turned to go, half-expecting Chevalier to grab me again, but I was not expecting Clavis himself to grab me the moment I stepped into the hallway. It was that sudden. I took a single step, and then I was halfway down the hall before I registered his laugh of delight and his hand closing around mine.
“Sorry, Chev! Emergency!” he called cheerfully over his shoulder.
“Clavis! Slow down!”
My guards had to be laughing their heads off back where we left them. I knew they weren’t chasing us, since I couldn’t hear the telltale clanking of their armor over my panted breaths and Clavis’ maniacal laughter. The palace was a blur of carpet, tapestries, and servants, diving out of the way as a prince of Rhodolite dragged the queen of Rhodolite at breakneck speed through the halls. This wasn’t exactly helping me garner respect from anybody.
“Clavis—”
“Out of the way! Coming through!”
There was a shriek, followed by the distinctive crashing and shattering of porcelain, and I threw back a “Sorry!” as we whipped around a corner. Several more turns and a few short flights of stairs later, and Clavis skidded to a sudden stop, spinning around to catch me by the shoulders when my momentum made me collide with him.
“What’s your favorite color?”
I gasped for breath, staring at him in shock. His golden eyes were as bright and shining as ever, and he wasn’t even breathing hard. Then again, he hadn’t just run across the palace in a corset.
Now, that would be funny.
When I didn’t answer immediately, he scanned me from head to toe, his irrepressible smile widening. “Wow. Did Chev do that to you?”
I shook my head, wishing I could deliver a full verbal tongue lashing, but the best I could do was issue a snappy, “You did.”
“Maybe you should sit down. Open the doors for the queen!”
That was when I realized we were in a little-used part of the palace below the first floor, just outside the heavily guarded vault. Far from where I wanted to be. And, judging by the glances exchanged by the guards before they unlocked the door, far from where they wanted Clavis to be.
“Are you allowed in the vault?” I asked breathlessly. “Or even near it?”
“Of course I am.” He seized my hand again and pulled me through the gold-plated double doors. “Now, your favorite color. What is it?”
Was he really asking that question?
“You said there was an emergency.”
“Here, sit down.” He led me to a plush sofa flanked on both sides by priceless vases, and I sat, grateful for the chance to rest and catch my breath. “Everybody gets you green things because of your eyes, but I’ve never heard you say green is your favorite color. I’ve never heard you say anything is your favorite. Food, desserts, wine, holidays—you always say you don’t have a preference. But everybody does. So, what are yours?”
He was serious about this.
I shot him a glare. “And that’s the emergency?”
“Ivetta, you’re allowed to like something more than anything else,” he said, giving me a patronizing smile.
“Fine. Fine.” I took a deep breath, shifting my focus to a landscape painted in vibrant colors hanging on the wall opposite me. “I guess my favorite color is green. Was there anything else you needed, or am I free to get back to what I was doing before you and Chevalier interrupted my day?”
“You ‘guess’? No, no. Let’s try this. I say a word, and you say the first thing that pops into your head.”
“Clavis—”
“Food.”
“I have better things to do.”
“Focus. Dessert.”
It was no use. I sighed again and said, “Um…I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do. How about this: rain or snow?”
“Rain.”
“That was quick,” he said approvingly. “Spring or summer?”
“Spring.”
“Favorite color.”
My eyes wandered across the works of art filling every corner of the vault as Clavis fired question after question at me. “Uh…green.”
“Don’t think about it. Food.”
“Pancakes.”
“Good. Dessert.”
“Chocolate cake.”
He paused. “Not beignets?”
“You asked.”
“Right. Chicken or fish?”
“To eat, or as pets?”
He burst out laughing. “Either. Both. Whatever.”
The most annoying thing about Clavis was how impossible it was for me to stay mad at him, no matter how obnoxious his behavior was. He had a reason for bringing me here and asking me these questions. I couldn’t fathom what that reason might be, but I knew that much. And I knew it was pointless to fight him, so I went along with it, answering every random, ridiculous question he threw at me.
“Cold or hot?”
“Cold.”
“Holiday?”
“Christmas.”
“First night you slept with Chev.”
“Nice try.”
He shrugged. “It was worth a shot.”
I shook my head, smiling despite myself. “Please don’t tell me that’s the reason you’re doing this.”
“Did you know there’s a haunted painting in here?” he asked, dodging my implied request for an explanation yet again.
“There is not.”
He leaped to his feet and held out his hand. “I’ll show you.”
Deeper inside the vault, covered with a heavy cloth and wedged between several other paintings and the wall, was the painting in question. Clavis carried it to a more open spot, and when he pulled the covering from it, I was a little disappointed to see a normal-looking portrait of a woman.
“She looks like Chevalier’s mother,” I said, studying her blonde hair and sad expression. “Except paler.”
“Very good. She was a sickly woman who lived one hundred and fifty years ago. Chev’s great-great-grandmother, or something like that. Vivian was her name. Before the Michel family became royalty, it was a family of knights, and her husband was a famous one known as the Knight of the Rose. He had to leave her frequently to go to battle, and he always promised her he would return, but one day, he didn’t. They say she’s still looking for him. Look. The eyes follow you wherever you go.”
I tilted my head to the side and moved around the room, watching the woman’s crystal blue eyes. They really did seem to follow me.
“I think it’s a trick of how the artist painted the eyes.”
“You know, we could show this painting to Chev and see what happens,” Clavis suggested. “Maybe seeing him will satisfy her so she could rest in peace.”
I leveled Clavis with a steady look. “What are we really doing here?”
“Well, I think we’ve seen all there is to see here,” he said abruptly, throwing the cover over the painting again. “Now, I must swear you to secrecy before our next stop.”
So much for getting answers. Or any more work done today.
“As long as there’s nothing illegal about it, I promise not to tell,” I said, resigned to my fate.
And then he took my hand, and we were off again. The guards looked distinctly relieved to see Clavis leaving the vault, and I really couldn’t blame them. Especially when we turned a corner and he looked furtively in all directions before pulling me behind a tapestry. I held my tongue as he felt around the stone wall for the trigger, but as soon as we’d slipped into the secret passage and the door had shut behind us, I whispered the obvious question.
“Where does this go?”
He put a finger to his lips and led me up the narrow, dusty staircase. I sighed and followed, wondering who else knew about this passage, and how secure the vault could be if Clavis had a secret route that dropped him off right outside its doors.
A secret route that ended right outside his bedroom door.
“Don’t move,” Clavis directed, spinning me to face away from him at the top of the stairwell.
I sighed again and crossed my arms over my chest, listening to the clicking, tapping, and twanging of him deactivating the numerous traps protecting his room. This was weird, even for Clavis. It was almost like there was no purpose to any of it. No purpose, except…
“All done! After you, milady.”
“Clavis,” I said, turning around and walking past him into the room, “are you—”
“Have a seat,” he interrupted me. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
The door closed in my face before I could say another word. I stifled a third sigh and turned to survey the room, frowning when I saw he still didn’t have a bed. Just the white sofa with purple leopard print pillows and blankets in a room dominated by notes pinned to the walls, a bookshelf full of complicated technical books, stacks of official documents on the desk and coffee table, and in the far corner, his laboratory station. He was a much harder worker than he led people to believe.
I sat on the sofa and mulled it over while I waited. Chevalier hadn’t stopped Clavis from running off with me, and Clavis had appeared as soon as Chevalier and I left that room, which meant the two at least knew of each other’s plans, but more probably, they had been working together. And Clavis had taken me specifically and quickly away from the busiest parts of the palace to a quiet corner with hardly any other people. And now his room. If I didn’t miss my guess, the last stop would be my room. Because he was keeping me away from something. Distracting me.
“Alright, nobody will bother us now,” he announced, strolling into the room with Cyran on his heels.
“Oh, no. You pulled her into this, too?” Cyran grumbled, as informal as always with his employer.
“I’ve called you here today to finalize your parts in a grand scheme of epic proportions,” Clavis continued, ignoring his right-hand man’s complaints. “If we can pull this off, we may very well change life in the palace as we know it.”
Cyran and I made brief, sympathetic eye contact as Clavis unrolled a large piece of parchment across the coffee table. The complicated diagram sprinkled with mathematical formulae and Clavis’ illegible handwriting made no sense to me, but I didn’t need to know what it said.
“No,” I said firmly..
“Now, Ivetta will engage Theresa in conversation here,” Clavis said, pointing at one scribble, “and then lead her on this route to this point here.” His finger drew a circuitous route to another indecipherable scribble.
“I said no.”
“If we time this just right, Cyran will find Jin here, and he will then lure Jin here with the promise of a sweet treat made by Ivetta.”
Cyran groaned. “This is all about getting Jin and Theresa together?”
“She isn’t over whatever happened with Leon and Jin yet,” I interjected. “And I don’t—”
“The best plans required advance preparation,” Clavis replied dismissively. “This won’t happen for months. I still have to perfect the mechanism for the—”
“No!” Cyran and I cried in unison.
Clavis looked up from the diagram for the first time, clearly bewildered. “What better way to get them together than to catch them in the same trap?”
“We could just leave them alone and let things develop naturally,” I suggested.
Clavis frowned. “That hasn’t worked in all the years they’ve known each other. Now, the trick is keeping them from suspecting anything. And that’s where…”
I slumped back against the sofa, listening to his plan unfold as he pointed to various parts of the diagram, which made less and less sense the more he talked. Cyran exhaled heavily and crossed his arms over his chest, leaning against a wall in hopeless resignation.
Maybe it wasn’t a distraction, after all. Maybe it was just Clavis being Clavis.11Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ7H7PZkNZx1
