Chapter 25
Deliberate Kiss
ELLA
Nothing has changed. Yes, the old crush has returned, damn it all to hell, but it will go away.
It always has before. I just need those old, homespun virtues Mama is always talking up—diligence, grit, better posture.
As I practice these qualities, I’ve been distracted by days of dangerous headlines.
“May I Have the Honor? How Princess Freja Popped the Question”
“The Queen Caught Flat-Footed on Christmas Eve”
“Lies, Royal Lies, and CCTV Cameras”
“The Guest List: The Security Guard, The Photographer, The Secretary, and The Intern”
Even Alma’s as-yet-hidden love life gets a look in.
“Vorburg’s Crown Prince Spotted Crossing Border”
The palace is a hive of activity. Mama’s staff crafts strategies that get discarded and statements that never go out, busily winnowing the words down to their most essential, potent elements.
I stay out of it like the agreeable princess my mother needs me to be, but it’s time to get serious. The hour has arrived to make the prime minister pay for destroying my sister’s peace.
I can be diligent when my mind is bent to something I’m passionate about.
I wake early each day, hastily brush my teeth and shower, bowing to the knowledge that I’m one of those people whose mental focus correlates with how wild her hair is on any given day.
Opening a brand-new laptop, I check the VPN connection, check it again, check it thrice, and take a deep breath. No more idle threats.
There’s no such thing as being incognito when you hold the title to your own personal duchy, own a bright orange Mini, and appear in the press wearing jewelry sourced from your mother’s underground vault. Online, however, I am a shadow.
“Okay, loser,” I say, flexing my fingers.
For hours I dive into the life of Neer Jakkon Torbald—the nineteenth prime minister of Sondmark—following his rise from a posh private school and into public life as a backbencher for the Blue-Greens, a political party best defined by its electoral flexibility rather than any deeply-held policy goals.
Along the way, he entered into a marriage to Gerda Raukema, the daughter of a political benefactor. The birth of two daughters, now aged eleven and nine, followed.
The family—blond, matched, and wrangled—gives off a cyborg quality in official portraits, although informal pictures paint a softer image.
There’s a snap of Torbald walking his girls off to their first day at school, scooping the younger one into his arms to dart across a busy street, while listening to the older one who looks like she never shuts up.
Relatable.
I wheel through a cascade of photos captured by the press pool photographer, where he is seen glad-handing constituents, hobnobbing with heads of state and oligarchs, and kissing babies. I read articles and follow footnotes, discovering Neer Torbald’s station within a vast network of connections.
I expect to find a shady underworld and secret organizations.
Instead, upon breaking down the polling on a granular level, I discover that his constituents love him for delivering on promises to bolster local manufacturing firms and streamline simple healthcare wait times using telehealth portals.
I toss down a pen and plow fingers through my hair.
Vede. If I didn’t know how unctuous, insular, and petty he is, maybe he’d have my vote.
If I voted. Which I don’t. One of Mama’s policies.
My phone emits a low chime—the first three notes of “Love Crime.” Marc. “May I bring my homework over?” he asks.
I glance at the dozen odd tabs open on my computer, and the long list of notes on my desktop.
“If you want,” I answer, voice calm even as my toes dance along the rug.
After hanging up, I twirl out of my computer chair and peel off my t-shirt.
I dive into my closet, tearing it apart in my quest for something cute.
My latest denim looks relaxed, but hugs my backside as lovingly as a sloth mom.
Should I pair it with a sweatshirt? Something silky?
My thoughts collide, and I drop to the floor in an explosion of high-end loungewear, bathed in the glow of the light over my limited edition Intelligence Force poster.
Dust motes twirl in the air, sparkling lazily as they descend, each one like a memory of me and Marc.
I was there when he tried to grow facial hair and looked like a weedy gangster.
I remember how he drove across San Francisco during rush hour to pick up Sondish herring when I made the college honor roll.
I choke on a laugh. There was the time he was dating an academic communist who used to raid my toiletries bag when she ran out of personal hygiene products.
My response was to buy ten boxes of jumbos, stow them under his bathroom sink, and label it “The People’s Collective”.
I look down at the chaos of clothes, reading the signs as I would a scattering of tea leaves. I pick up a light sweater in forest green—three-quarter sleeves with a subtle pattern picked out in the same fine wool—shrug into it, and give myself a hard look in the mirror. The seers are troubled.
This is too much. Not the sweater. It’s a perfect blend of comfortable and flattering. My business has never looked better. This. Marc and me.
“It’s just fun,” I mutter, wandering over to the bathroom sink and applying a quick swipe of eye liner. Maybe some mascara, too? I glance at the clock. I’ve got time.
I keep falling for Marc, but I always get back on my feet again. It’s a whole cycle, and I can repeat it again to get us back to what we decided this was going to be at the outset. Fun. But I’m gently working a few dots of blush tint over my freckles, making slower and slower passes.
Is this fun? I glance down and the blush applicator clatters into the sink. This is a date. I’m dressing for a date.
Vede.
A light knock sounds on the door, and I take a hard, assessing look in the mirror.
Marc has seen me in the full royal get-up without ever once dropping to his knees and promising half his kingdom.
He’ll survive a flattering sweater. I take a deep breath, willing myself to inhale rationality and sense with it.
I’ve been falling in love with Marc for a dozen years and, in all that time, he’s never fallen back.
Another knock. He has the code, but he’s being polite.
If I meet him at the door, I’ll look like I’m bounding up for my scratch behind the ear, so I punch the door mechanism, take a beat, and wander out when I’ve had time to collect myself.
“Hey,” I manage.
He looks tired when he walks in, but he loosens his tie, scoops me into his arms, and brushes my lips with a kiss. It’s easy and careless and makes me want to burst into ugly tears.
“I like this,” he says, nipping the fabric at my waist.
“Are you hungry?” I ask, slipping out of his embrace.
He shakes his head. “I took my team out for a work dinner.”
“To celebrate? Did the EC sign off on the acquisition?”
“The approval came in before markets closed.” I take his jacket just for something to claim my attention. “Are you mad at me?”
I aim a look of amused incredulity at the floor. “Of course not. Why would I be mad at you? Did anyone see you on your way up?”
“No.” He rolls his shirt sleeves past his forearms. “But anyone could check the visitor’s log.”
“No one will check. I’m not one of my mother’s special ducklings. As long as I’m not causing trouble, she’s not interested in my comings and goings.”
He breathes a laugh and touches my face. “No?”
I swallow. “I’ve been tracking Torbald’s whereabouts all day.” Best have it out now.
Marc’s hand falls. He leans on the arm of the sofa, gathering me close enough to stand between his outstretched legs. “I wondered if you were.”
“You’re not going to tell me to stop?” I look past his shoulder, but he tips his head into my line of sight.
“Would you stop if I asked you to?”
My eyelashes flicker. I wonder if there’s anything I wouldn’t do for Marc. I work my fingers under his heavy palms and his hands slip from my waist, trying to keep some kind of distance. “What are you working on tonight? Seong, Han Heyden, or Lindenholm?”
He digs into his bag, powers up a tablet, and settles into the sofa.
“Come here,” he says, stretching one arm out.
“I want your opinion.” I slide into the crook of his shoulder, slotting in as smoothly as a new graphics card into a motherboard.
He scoots me closer and presses an absent-minded kiss on my temple.
I weave my arms over my stomach to keep myself from holding him.
“It’s Alix,” he says. “She approached me about turning part of Lindenholm into a boutique hotel. Five suites in all.”
I turn my face up to him to find our lips a breath away.
I want to kiss him as lightly and easily as he kisses me, but he laid out a deal with guardrails and guidelines to protect himself from the danger of taking this further.
To protect himself from me. So, I train my eyes on the screen, frozen on a slide deck. “Do you need the money?”
He turns my face up and takes the kiss I held back, slowly, thoroughly, until the voice of warning in my head drops to a barely audible whisper and my skin whispers like a field of grass bending in the wind.
He lifts his head and clears his throat. “Amma left the estate in good shape if we carry on exactly as we have been. I want Lindenholm to be self-supporting, and the numbers don’t leave room for risks.”
“So you tell her no.”
“Look at this proposal,” he says, scrolling up and down a slide deck full of footnotes and pie charts.
“Is this Tom’s work?” I ask.
“She says he only provided her a list of things any good investor would want to know. She collected the materials herself.”
Alix’s intellectual life reminds me of Clara’s sorority sisters—girls who did their projects with hot pink glitter pens, but still had their flowcharts locked down. I take the tablet and skim through the proposal. “Cons?”
He wraps a finger around one of my curls, rubbing it against his lower lip in thought, and flips to slide seven. Alix hasn’t been sparing about the costs of her scheme. Her vision doesn’t include a few AKAE bunkbeds thrown together on a weekend.
“It complicates the estate,” he murmurs. “We’d have to add an actual carpark instead of the temporary one we’re putting together for the concert. Then there’s the installation of a professional kitchen… Here’s the footnote detailing local regulations. They’re not insignificant.”
“Lawyers can help you manage that.”
“She included the name of a local legal firm.” His hand drops over a hip and he wedges me closer. “But we’d have strangers coming and going. Weddings every weekend all summer…”
“In a sliver of the estate.” I brush my finger across the tablet, taking in the bigger picture.
“She’s capable of doing this, if that’s what you’re asking.
It’s smart that she wants to work out the kinks by starting in the walled garden,” I say, “adding a suite or two as she goes.” I nudge him.
“It’s only the east wing. There’s nothing really important over there. ”
“There are the woods,” he says.
My cheeks flame and he catches my chin, planting another slow, deliberate kiss on my lips. I look down again. Marc is in a mood tonight, and I fear California won’t be far away enough to ravel up the tangled threads between us and snip each one.
I clear my throat. “Pros?” I ask.
“Amma wants to relocate to Seong full time. There’s an old friend who wants her to stay. He—”
“He?” I grin.
“He’s helping her navigate government agencies, getting aid into the right hands.” Marc is happy for his mother, I can hear that, but he’s uncertain, too.
“Tom is based in New York,” I say. Where does that leave Marc? Alone. Chained to his ancestors in Sondmark.
“Alix says he’s willing to relocate.” Marc chews on his lip.
“Handsel could use an investment banker of Tom’s caliber.”
He nods. “Alix would be close. Her children would be close. I wouldn’t be running this place by myself.”
A hard knot forms in my throat, thinking of baptisms. Of flying into Handsel to stand at a font next to Marc as godparents, a tiny baby between us. Of Marc having his own babies after I’ve gone to California to enjoy endless MangaCon and the weightlessness of immense wealth.
I tuck a hand against his chest and think long thoughts about the path that led me here and the one that promises to lead me away again. I trace a button, flicking the edge of it with my thumb, and feel the steady beat of his heart. “Why don’t you say yes?”
The button slips through the hole—an accident—and he does it back up. His laugh shakes through me and he taps the back of my hand, trapping it with his own. “No scope creep.”
“What about Alix?” I remind him. He needs people, even if he doesn’t need me.
He releases a breath. “I’ll think about it.”