Chapter 1 Prince
PRINCE
SEBASTIAN
Present Day…
The clock struck midnight and I was already gone. Not physically. Not yet. In my head I was halfway across the city, bow in hand, hunting the shadows that had hunted me since I was thirteen.
I stood in my quarters, staring at the portrait of her that hung above my fireplace. Oil on canvas. Perfect and lifeless. The smile was right; everything underneath was missing. Off-key humming. Carver's calluses. The way she bled out in my arms while the crown's protectors did nothing.
Eighteen years.
It felt like yesterday. It felt like forever.
My fingers traced the scar on my palm, the one I'd gotten that night. Thin white line bisecting the lifeline. A fortune teller once said my palm meant two lives. She was right. One of them belonged to a ghost.
Apollo lifted his head from where he was sprawled on my bed, tail thumping once against the duvet. His amber eyes tracked my movement, and I saw the question there. The same one every night.
“Stay,” I told him quietly, crossing to scratch behind his ears. His fur was warm under my palm, solid and real in a way nothing else in the palace ever felt. “I'll be back before dawn. Promise.”
He whined, low in his throat, but settled back down. Good dog. Better than most people I knew. Better than me, probably.
I moved to the wardrobe. Pushed aside the formal wear and ceremonial uniforms until I reached the back panel.
The hidden door was barely visible unless you knew where to look.
Servants' passage from when the palace was first built, back when royalty couldn't be bothered to see the people who kept them alive.
I pressed the concealed latch. The panel swung inward with a soft click.
Old servant stairs descended into darkness, the air thick with dust and stone that had not seen sunlight in a century. Cool air rushed up from below, carrying the smell of old secrets and older stone.
I pulled the door shut behind me and started down.
Each step felt like shedding skin. The signet ring came off first, slipped into my coat pocket where it wouldn't catch light or leave marks.
Then the watch my father had given me for my twenty-first birthday, platinum and engraved with words I'd stopped reading years ago.
The cufflinks élodie had picked out last Christmas, little silver lions that were supposed to be fierce but just looked sad.
Everything that marked me as Sebastian Laurent, Crown Prince of Laurentia, heir to a throne built on blood and lies and my mother's corpse.
The stairs wound down through the palace's bones. Past floors I'd never walked. Through walls thick enough to muffle screams. Into foundations laid centuries ago by men who'd understood that every castle needed its secrets, its escape routes, its places where inconvenient truths could disappear.
I counted the steps out of habit. Two hundred and forty-three. Always the same. Always ending in the same place.
By the time I reached the bottom, I was someone else.
The hidden garage smelled like oil and metal and freedom. My motorcycle sat in the center, black and sleek and illegal as hell. No plates. No registration. Nothing that could be traced back to the palace if things went wrong.
And things went wrong often enough that I'd learned to plan for it.
I opened the storage compartment built into the bike's frame and pulled out the case.
My hands were steady as I unlatched it, muscle memory taking over.
The bow nested inside like a sleeping predator.
Dark oak. Handcrafted. Every curve and angle memorized by my fingertips over thousands of hours in my workshop.
I'd built this bow from scratch. Learned to carve wood because my mother used to, because her hands had shaped the little archer I'd carried everywhere as a child.
Learned to calculate trajectory and draw weight and arrow velocity because helplessness was worse than death.
Learned to hunt because being hunted was all I'd ever known.
The limbs were reinforced with carbon fiber, invisible to the eye but adding pounds of draw weight.
The grip was wrapped in leather I'd treated myself, worn smooth in the exact shape of my palm.
And wound around it, like a talisman, was my mother's necklace.
The silver crescent moon and star she'd pressed into my hand before she died.
I ran my thumb over it, feeling the worn metal, the way eighteen years had smoothed the edges.
“For you,” I whispered.
It wasn't enough. It would never be enough. But it was all I had.
The quiver came next. Thirty arrows, each one hand-fletched with raven feathers I'd collected from the palace gardens.
Half had standard broadheads. The other half had obsidian tips, razor-sharp and weighted for punching through body armor.
I'd tested them on ballistic gel. On Kevlar vests.
On car doors and brick walls and anything else I thought I might need to shoot through.
I pulled on the tactical gear next, piece by piece, each item transforming me from prince to something else.
Something darker. Black cargo pants with reinforced knees that had taken hits from concrete and worse.
Combat boots with steel toes that had caved in ribs when necessary.
A fitted shirt that moved with me like second skin, didn't catch on anything, didn't slow me down when speed meant the difference between breathing and bleeding.
The shoulder holster came next. Worn leather that smelled like oil and old violence.
Inside it, the knife. Eight inches of folded steel I'd commissioned from a blacksmith in East London who didn't ask questions because he knew better.
The weight of it against my ribs felt right.
Familiar. Like coming home to the parts of myself I couldn't show in daylight.
Then came the gloves. Black leather reinforced at the knuckles with carbon fiber plates that turned my fists into something that could break bone without breaking skin. I flexed my fingers, felt the leather creak, felt the transformation settling into my muscles like muscle memory.
But it wasn't complete yet.
I moved to the workbench where the final pieces waited. The ones that let me disappear into darkness and become someone who could do what needed doing without dragging the crown down with me.
The hood was custom-made. Black ballistic fabric that breathed but didn't tear. Fitted close to my skull, leaving no loose edges to grab. I pulled it on, felt it settle against my skin like a second face. The fabric molded to my features, hiding everything except the shape of my jaw and mouth.
Then the mask.
Black leather, cut and shaped to cover my eyes and the bridge of my nose. Simple. Effective. The kind of thing you'd see in old illustrations of highwaymen or vigilantes who knew that anonymity was the only armor that mattered when you had everything to lose.
I tied it behind my head over the hood, double-knotted it the way I'd done a hundred times before.
The leather sat snug against my cheekbones, cut my peripheral vision slightly but not enough to matter.
I'd learned to compensate. Learned to move with it.
Learned to see in the dark with half my face covered and still hit every target.
I looked at myself in the small mirror propped against the wall.
Sebastian was gone.
The golden prince with his charm and his smiles and his carefully maintained image had disappeared behind black fabric and leather.
I swung my leg over the bike and hit the ignition.
The engine roared to life, purring like a beast waking up hungry.
I keyed in the override code for the north gate, watching the security feed flicker on the small screen mounted to the handlebars.
Guards turned away right on schedule, same as they had for three years.
Cameras looped their footage. For exactly four minutes, I didn't exist.
I twisted the throttle and shot forward into the night.
The rain hit me the second I cleared the gate. Cold and sharp, soaking through my coat in seconds. Thunder rolled overhead, and I couldn't help the grim smile that pulled at my mouth.
Of course it was raining.
It was always raining when I did this. Like the universe had a sense of humor and I was the punchline.
London blurred around me. Streetlights smeared into gold streaks. Neon signs flickered in doorways. The glow of apartment windows where normal people lived normal lives, where sons didn't watch their mothers die, where crowns were just things in history books.
I wove through traffic, cutting between cars and taxis, heading east toward Belmont. Toward the parts of the city the tourists didn't see. Where the crown's influence ended and something darker began. Where men like me could disappear and no one asked questions.
My comm crackled to life in my ear. I'd hacked into the police frequency months ago, riding their channels for intel. Tonight was no different.
“All units, we've got reports of suspicious activity near the docks. Warehouse district, sector seven. Possible weapons trafficking. Approach with caution.”
I changed lanes, angling toward the docks.
The docks had been a pipeline for illegal arms for months now, weapons moving from foreign ports into the hands of radicals and criminals. I'd been tracking the shipments, following the trail, waiting for the right moment.
Tonight felt right.
The warehouse came into view fifteen minutes later, squatting on the waterfront like a rotting tooth.
Broken windows. Rusted siding. The smell of oil and river water and something metallic underneath, like old blood.
I killed the engine three blocks out and ditched the bike in an alley behind a row of abandoned shops, pulling the bow from its case and slinging the quiver across my back.
Thirty arrows. More than enough.
I'd never needed more than thirty.