12. The Keybearer #3
He trails behind me like fog, carrying the restraint of a man who hasn’t decided whether he’s hunting or being hunted.
Ghosts begin to shift curiously, reaching for the palpable hunger that surrounds him, that terrible hunger for truth stripped bare.
He wants to know me. To know what I didn’t say. To know what lies beyond that door.
And want, in Sheffolk, is always how it begins.
Eric takes my lack of response as his cue to make a U-turn back towards self-preservation, lest he be cursed by the local witch from the rumours he’s heard.
He leaves me standing with Pascoe, close to the throne room, where the steward tries for nonchalance yet proceeds to prod at me as though I’m a disaster survivor.
Honestly? If anybody deserves a badge of survival, it’s Eric.
Most can’t even stomach our drawing room, with its shifting shadows, let alone hints at our family history.
Pascoe departs with a squeeze to the shoulder, and I take advantage of what little free time I’m granted to occupy my favourite window alcove.
My phone is already in my hand by the time I take a seat, fingers itching for access to anything regarding the exiled prince. Something halts me at the precipice of my digital excavation site. Percy is the stalker, not me. I’m not that type of woman; ask anyone.
Then again, I’m not the type to kill and bury her fiancé either, so that argument’s moot.
Sure, my dignity made me promise that I wouldn’t stalk. But then I met him, and there’s no way in hell a man like that doesn’t have dirt on everyone. He probably memorised my Wikipedia page, so I’m really just evening the playing field.
Unease takes its first hesitant steps into the dangerous territory of obsession, enough for me to contemplate asking my cousin for the details to her fake Instagram page.
Gran raised me better than this; the ghosts of Redford have taught me better than to run tongue wagging after any info involving Atherbournes.
Fine, tell my dignity I tried.
I open Safari and type his name into the search bar. Like a normal, nosy girl. The first few links that pop up are exactly what I expected, with quite a few journalists referring to him as a ‘royal fuck-up’.
Tabloid after tabloid, there’s another altercation he was involved in. Fool was caught smoking weed in St Herra’s Cathedral during his grandmother’s funeral. There are rumours he went to rehab for something, but no troll is willing to stumble out from underneath their bridge to elaborate.
I dislike those comments with a decisive hmph before moving on.
Okay, so apparently he has an Instagram account.
Four point eight million followers, and he has one post. One.
Singular. It’s a high-quality photograph of him and his brothers at a state function three years ago.
Though Kairos and Henrik are grinning, Eric isn’t even looking at the camera and resembles somebody awaiting execution.
Some PR intern probably had to force him into the frame.
Henrik commented with two black hearts, whereas Kairos left a ‘delete this immediately’, and upon closer inspection, I notice the latter is mid-blink in the image.
There’s no caption.
A lone highlight reel is titled ‘Statement’, and it’s a link to a recent press conference in regard to the poor sod who got socked in Milan. I muffle a snort because Eric doesn’t even speak in the clip—his lawyer does all the talking.
And yet all of these people are following him.
For what, his anti-content content?
I click on his tags, and my thumb stops at a pixelated picture of him, zoomed in times one thousand, where he’s shirtless on some Venetian balcony with a model draped across his lap.
I stare at the photo longer than I probably should before funnelling my attention onto a long-dead fan page someone once made for him.
That ultimately leads me to a practically ancient blog post, with a title that makes my soul unplug itself from my body.
Too Smart for Palace Walls: Prince Eryxon Accepted into University of Creswyck at only 16
I read it a few more times until it begins to sound familiar, like the name of a distant aunt whose birthday you attended as a child.
I would’ve been thirteen that year, too caught up in personal ghosts and cursed fears to give a shit about the royal family.
But now? Now I read as though my life depends on it.
The bastard graduated from high school at sixteen , whilst I was still trying to figure out how to curl my hair without bursting into tears.
Some deeper digging has me landing on a PDF of the university journal, where I find another photo of Eric in an Armani suit and an array of medals around his neck, shaking hands with a chancellor.
And he’s wearing glasses. Actual glasses, perched on his straight nose as he smirks at the camera—thin black frames that have my throat making an embarrassing noise.
First-class honours in Mathematics. At age nineteen.
And this part here is what makes my stomach turn: a BA in Classics completed two years later, including a handful of modules in Ancient Philosophy.
Who the hell does that? A Master’s in Philosophy follows at twenty-two, with some phrases I don’t understand, but the word ‘distinction’ practically glares at me.
The trail ends there. My phone trembles as I scroll so fast I nearly get a nosebleed. Eric has to be twenty-four now, and those two years since his last graduation are unaccounted for.
Instead, the mics and cameras drift towards his ‘difficult behaviour’ and the ‘rebellious streak’ his lifestyle has contributed to.
Everyone references how arrogant he is, yet not a single one comments on how lethal his mind is.
It’s almost sad; the one thing he was good at, they tried to bury.
Because it had to have been deliberate; no sane person would walk away from all that.
The less I find, the more the walls screams at me that Eric Atherbourne just became a whole lot more intimidating.
Duchess Adelina got a sword-swinging would-be usurper. And I, centuries later, get stuck with a prince who probably would’ve given Aristotle an inferiority complex.