CHAPTER THREE #2
We pass the Bellecourt installation again, and I catch a flash of white-blond hair behind the display, one of the brothers, I think, though I can’t tell which one.
The Bellecourt booth has drawn a crowd that’s spilled into the adjacent aisle, and navigating around it means the press of bodies forces us closer together.
Alexei’s hand returns to my lower back, guiding me through the crowd, and this time it stays.
It stays, and my spine is on fire, and I’m smiling at a Fae delegate who is asking me about fragrance-free environments for winged races and I’m answering intelligently and thoroughly while the Prince of Atlantis has his hand on my back and my entire nervous system is staging a revolt.
When we clear the crowd, his hand drops.
I miss it immediately.
And I want to scream, because missing the touch of a man I barely know is exactly the sort of reckless, self-destructive nonsense that got me into trouble with Billy, and I refuse, I absolutely refuse, to be that girl again.
Even though I keep catching him. Small things.
How his hand hovers near my lower back when the crowd presses close, not touching but almost touching, holding a space that belongs to me.
How his body angles between me and the crowd, subtle but consistent, like he’s shielding me from something I can’t see.
How, when I finish a technical answer that satisfies a particularly difficult delegate, something in the set of his jaw changes.
Not a smile, not even close, but a settling. A satisfaction.
Like I’m passing a test I don’t know I’m taking.
Like he already knows the answer and he’s just waiting for me to catch up.
This is insane, and I need to stop, because I’m at a professional event representing my company and I can’t afford to spiral into a paranoid romantic fantasy about my employer based on a near-miss on a plane and some ambiguous body language at a trade fair.
I take a breath. I refocus. I pull up the next set of notes on my tablet and prepare for the next booth.
And then Alexei steps away to speak with a Lyccan council member, and I’m alone for the first time in hours, standing by a display of our V-Series prototypes, reviewing my notes and breathing actual air that doesn’t smell like mountain water and old forests and whatever it is about him that makes me forget how to be a functional human being.
“You’re the product designer, aren’t you?”
I look up.
The man in front of me is tall and striking, with a beauty that makes your brain go momentarily offline. Sharp cheekbones. Pale eyes. A smile that looks friendly the way a cat looks friendly right before it decides your hand is a toy.
Caro.
I know it before I register the tells: the particular stillness, the faint porcelain quality of his skin, the way his gaze lingers on the pulse point at my throat for a fraction of a second longer than is polite.
“I work in the product development division, yes,” I say. Friendly. Professional.
“Your presentation on the V-Series was impressive.” He takes a step closer. A small step, but the space gets significantly smaller. “You have a real gift for making complex things accessible.”
“Thank you. It’s really about understanding what the end user—”
“I don’t often meet humans who understand our world as well as you seem to.
” Another step. His smile widens, and I catch the barest glint of something sharp behind his lips that makes my pulse skip for reasons that have nothing to do with attraction.
“Perhaps we could discuss your work further. Over dinner.”
His gaze drops to my throat again, lingering this time, and a chill races down my spine that has nothing to do with the air conditioning. Because I’ve read enough about Caros to know that when one looks at you like that, at the pulse beating under your skin, it isn’t just interest.
It’s appetite.
And I’m alone, and human, and standing in a gap between booths where the crowd has thinned, and for the first time all day, I feel the full weight of what it means to exist in a world that was not designed for people like me.
I open my mouth to respond, to say what, I have no idea, something politely deflective and slightly panicked, when a hand settles on the small of my back.
Warm. Large. Unmistakably deliberate.
Every thought I’ve been having evaporates.
“Miss Morgan.” Alexei’s voice comes from beside me, and it’s the same as always, cool, measured, but there’s an edge beneath it that I’ve never heard before. One that makes the Caro in front of me go very, very still. “We’re needed at the next appointment.”
He doesn’t let go.
His fingers spread slightly, the pressure increasing just enough that I can feel the heat of his palm through the fabric of the dress Ruby chose for me. It isn’t a grip. It’s a claim. Quiet, absolute, and completely unambiguous to everyone in the vicinity who has the supernatural senses to read it.
The Caro’s eyes shift from me to Alexei, and whatever he sees in the prince’s expression makes him incline his head, and just like that, he’s gone, dissolved into the crowd.
Alexei doesn’t break stride. The touch stays, guiding me smoothly, firmly, away from the display, away from the crowd, toward the corridor that leads to the private suites.
His pace is even, unhurried as always, but there’s a difference in how he’s moving.
Coiled. Like the stillness that precedes a storm, if the storm were six-foot-something of Atlantean royalty in a dark suit steering a twenty-two-year-old human through a trade fair with his palm on her spine.
“Y-Your Highness—”
My voice comes out in a stammered whisper. His palm is warm against my spine and my pulse is doing things that would concern a medical professional.
“This is...this isn’t appropriate.”
“No.” His voice is silk over steel. “It’s not.”
“I’m working for you—”
“Yes.” His pace doesn’t falter. Neither does the pressure at my back. “But I’m also about to marry you.”
I stop walking.
Like, just stop. My feet cease to function. My legs forget their entire purpose. If I were a computer, there would be a spinning wheel on my forehead and a message that says Zia.exe has encountered an error and needs to shut down.
“I...what?”
He turns to face me. He lets go, finally, but the ghost of it stays, burning against my spine.
Those pale eyes look down at me, and I can see it again, that vast, barely contained intensity from the plane, from the moment before Captain Fishburne’s voice broke us apart, except now there’s no intercom to save me.
“You heard me, Miss Morgan.”
“I...umm...what?”
The words are tumbling out, tripping over each other, and I sound nothing like the woman who just confidently presented scent neutralization technology to a room full of supernatural delegates.
I sound like what I am: a twenty-two-year-old human who is standing in a hallway at a trade fair being told by the Prince of Atlantis that he intends to marry her, and whose brain has officially left the building.
And the worst part, the truly worst part, is that somewhere underneath the shock and the panic and the this makes no sense that’s screaming through my head, there is a small, traitorous, still-mending part of my heart that heard the word marry and...
Wanted it.
For one single, unguarded second, before I could shut it down, before the memory of Billy’s four-sentence text could rise up and do its job, that broken piece of me wanted it.
And I hate myself for that.
The hallway isn’t empty. Preters pass through, shifters, Caros, Fae, Souris, all possessing hearing that can pick up a whispered conversation from across a football field. He said “I’m about to marry you” at a volume that was perfectly conversational for humans.
For preters, he might as well have taken out a billboard.
I can already feel it happening. Heads turning. Eyes finding us. The electric quality of a crowd that has just learned something extraordinary.
And then my phone starts buzzing.
Once. Twice. Then continuously, like a small, furious animal in my pocket.
I pull it out with numb fingers. The screen is a waterfall of notifications I can’t read fast enough because new ones keep pushing older ones down.
Social media alerts from an account I haven’t touched since college. My single post, a link to my thesis, drowning in comments from strangers.
Congratulations!!!
OMG THE Prince Alexei??? How did this happen???
Girl you are LIVING
Messages from numbers I don’t recognize. A former classmate I spoke to exactly once wants to be my bridesmaid.
And one text from my mother.
Joni: Sweetheart is it true??? I just saw the announcement in L’Alliance Today! Congratulations! I knew it! I KNEW all along that Billy wasn’t right for you but I couldn’t tell you the truth. I’m so happy for you! Call me when you can! See you tonight!!
Followed by approximately forty-seven emojis, half hearts, half confetti.
Tonight? See you tonight?
I scroll until I find a link. I tap it.
L’Alliance Today. Digital front page. A photograph of me I have no memory of anyone taking, a candid from earlier today, walking beside Alexei, beneath a headline in elegant silver lettering.
PRINCE ALEXEI LYKAIOS ANNOUNCES ENGAGEMENT TO HUMAN PARTNER ZIA MORGAN
Posted seven minutes ago.
“H-Have you seen this?” I show him my phone. “They’re—”
“Telling the truth.”
Lying was what I was about to say, but I guess that’s pointless, and all I can do is gape. “What do you mean you’ve—”
“I had Ruby contact them when I saw the Caro making a nuisance of himself.”
I’m torn between pinching myself and just, I don’t know, gaping even more. What on earth is happening?
“Shall we continue this somewhere more private?” he asks, and before I can answer, he’s steering me toward the elevator bank, and I let him because the alternative is standing in this hallway with my phone exploding and an audience of supernatural beings pretending not to stare while absolutely staring.