CHAPTER FOUR
DAY TWO OF SEVEN, AND the Prince of Atlantis has stolen four kisses.
I’m keeping count because I’m a rational, organized person who processes her emotions through data, and also because if I don’t quantify what’s happening to me, I’m going to lose my grip on reality entirely.
Kiss number one was the elevator at The Hive. That one doesn’t count because I was in shock and my brain had already shut down and you can’t be held responsible for kissing someone back when your entire nervous system has been replaced by static.
Except it does count. Obviously it counts. I can still feel it when I close my eyes, his fingers on my jaw, the aching gentleness of his mouth, the way his thumb traced my jawline after like he was memorizing the shape of me.
So. Four kisses. Five if we’re being honest.
The second kiss happened on the flight back from Miami, which I haven’t mentioned yet because I’ve been trying very hard to pretend it didn’t happen.
After the elevator, after the “I’ll give you a week” that was still ringing in my ears like a detonation, Ruby appeared from nowhere (the woman has a sixth sense for post-crisis logistics) and ushered me back to the plane.
I sat in my seat. I stared at the window. I didn’t look at him.
For approximately forty-five minutes.
And then, somewhere over the Gulf of Mexico, he said my name.
Just my name. “Zia.” And I turned, because I’m apparently incapable of not responding when he says my name in that voice, that low, intimate voice that makes two syllables sound like a confession, and he was right there, closer than I expected, and before I could form the words Your Highness, we need to discuss boundaries, his mouth was on mine.
Brief. Soft. Gone before I could even decide whether to kiss him back, which I did, which I didn’t mean to, which my lips apparently decided entirely on their own.
He pulled back and returned to his tablet like nothing had happened.
I spent the rest of the flight pressing my fingers against my lips and staring at the clouds and questioning every life choice I’d ever made.
Kiss number three was this morning. Monday.
Day two of the week. I was at my desk at 8:47, early, as always, because punctuality is the one thing in my life I still have under control, when the air in the design wing changed the way it always does when he’s nearby.
That shift in pressure. That gravitational pull.
I looked up from my screen and he was there, standing at the entrance to my section like he had every right to be on the fourteenth floor at 8:47 in the morning.
Which, technically, he did.
“Your Highness,” I managed, and my voice did that thing where it tried to be professional and came out breathless instead.
The entire design wing was watching. The whole company had been watching me since the L’Alliance Today headline dropped, their gazes ranging from curiosity to awe to the particular wide-eyed confusion of people who couldn’t fathom how the girl who ate onigiri at her desk had ended up engaged to their boss.
Join the club. I couldn’t fathom it either.
“Walk with me,” he said.
It wasn’t a question.
I walked with him, because what was I going to do, say no to the Prince of Atlantis in front of my entire department? He led me to the corridor outside the design wing, quiet, empty, the early morning light falling through the floor-to-ceiling windows in long amber strips, and stopped.
“You haven’t been eating breakfast.”
I blinked. “What?”
“You arrive every morning at 8:47. You go directly to your desk. You begin working immediately. You don’t eat until noon, and even then, it’s...” He paused, as if the words caused him physical discomfort. “Onigiri.”
Two things struck me at once.
First: the Prince of Atlantis knew what I ate for lunch.
Second: the Prince of Atlantis was offended by what I ate for lunch.
“Onigiri is a perfectly balanced—”
“There will be breakfast delivered to your desk each morning beginning tomorrow. And lunch.”
“You don’t have to—”
“Zia.”
There it was again. My name in his mouth. Two syllables that shouldn’t have the power to make my knees unreliable, but did, because nothing about this situation followed any rules I understood.
And then he kissed me.
Right there in the corridor. 8:52 in the morning.
The amber light falling around us like something out of a scene I’d read in one of the paperbacks on my windowsill, except in the books the heroine always did something empowered like push him away or demand answers, and what I did was make a small, startled sound against his lips and then stand very still while his mouth moved over mine with that same thorough patience, that same gentle restraint that whispered I have all the time in the world and I’m willing to spend every minute of it convincing you.
When he pulled back, I was gripping the edge of my tablet so hard the case was creaking.
“Breakfast,” he murmured, as if the kiss had been a punctuation mark and the sentence was about nutrition. “Tomorrow.”
And he walked away.
He just walked away, back straight, stride even, disappearing around the corner like a man who had not just short-circuited every neuron in my body with a kiss that lasted approximately four seconds and ruined me for at least the next four years.
I stood in the corridor for a long time.
The amber light was very pretty.
I was very, very confused.
But also, and this is the part I keep circling back to, the part that won’t let me sleep, I was something else. Something I haven’t been in seven months.
I was wanted.
Not secretly. Not shamefully. Not in the dark, in whispered phone calls after midnight, in a relationship that a boy kept hidden because acknowledging it would cost him something he wasn’t willing to pay.
Alexei kissed me in a corridor at 8:52 in the morning where anyone could see, and then he announced breakfast deliveries like he was reorganizing the laws of physics to account for the fact that I skip meals.
The difference between that and what I had with Billy is so vast it makes me dizzy.
Which brings me to the other thing that’s happened this week: everything.
Everything has happened.
The office is different. Not in a bad way, exactly, but it makes me feel like I’ve been moved to a different planet that looks identical to my old one but operates under entirely different rules.
People hold doors for me now. Not just polite-holding, but that particular attentive door-holding that says I’m aware that you are connected to someone powerful and I’m adjusting my behavior accordingly.
My coworkers in the design wing, who were friendly before but in a normal, unremarkable way, now look at me with this mixture of curiosity and caution, like I’m a weather system they can’t predict.
Kirsten came back to work on Tuesday, took one look at me, and pulled me into the supply closet.
“Are you okay?” she asked, in the direct, no-nonsense way that I love about her.
“I honestly don’t know,” I told her, which was the most truthful thing I’d managed to anyone all week.
“Is he pressuring you?”
I thought about the corridor kiss. The breakfast announcement. How my name sounded in his voice, like it was something he’d been waiting to say.
“Not...exactly.”
Kirsten studied me for a long moment. Then she nodded. “If that changes, you come to me. I don’t care who he is.”
I almost cried. I didn’t, because I was standing in a supply closet surrounded by printer cartridges and that felt like an undignified place for an emotional breakdown, but the impulse was there.
Because Kirsten meant it. She would take on the Prince of Atlantis for me, and she’s five-foot-three and human and probably couldn’t take on a moderately aggressive squirrel, but she would try, and that mattered.
My mom calls every day now instead of just Sundays.
She has opinions about wedding colors. She has sent me fourteen articles about preter-human marriages from various lifestyle magazines.
She has started a group chat with three of her friends called “Zia’s Royal Wedding Planning Committee” that I was added to without my consent and still can’t figure out how to leave, no matter how many times I mute it.
I haven’t told her I haven’t actually said yes.
And that brings us to kiss number four, which happened approximately two hours ago, which is why I’m currently sitting in a bathroom stall on the sixteenth floor texting Trish and begging for tips on how to resist a guy who’s irresistible in every way.
Aaargh!
I put my phone away and press my hands against my face and try to remember what it felt like to be a person whose biggest daily concern was whether Beans 4 U would survive another health inspection.
A person who went home to her third-floor studio apartment with the window she leaves cracked because there’s no central air and the landlord’s idea of climate control is a motivational poster that says STAY COOL, and ate onigiri alone and didn’t think about princes.
Because here is the thing I haven’t said out loud, not to Trish, not to my mom, not even to myself in the privacy of my own apartment at night when the books on my windowsill catch the lamplight and the silence is thick enough to hold secrets.
I’m not stopping him.
He keeps kissing me, and I keep not stopping him, and the reasons I’m not stopping him have nothing to do with the power imbalance or the fact that he’s my employer or the engagement that I didn’t agree to that the entire preter world is apparently celebrating.
I’m not stopping him because I don’t want to.
Each kiss takes a piece of the wall I built after Billy and dissolves it. Not violently. Not with force. With patience. With the quiet certainty of a man who has decided something and has a lifetime of practice at waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.
He notices things.
That’s the part that’s destroying me.