Save the Queen (Royal Secrets & Lies #3)

Prologue

Only God

I’ve never thought about my death.

I’m only twenty-four. I figured I’d live a long boring but happy life of working in the bookshop, maybe saving enough money to buy it when the owners retired.

They had no children of their own and as a young woman with dead parents, I was close to them.

I’d keep their legacy alive. Dinners and Sunday brunches, holidays, of course, with my uncles, Fran and Paul.

They were the best second-string family I could have asked for.

Maybe, one day, a nice man would wander into the store looking for a book and we’d get to talking. Then over the course of months and years, over dinner dates and walks in the park, we’d quietly build a friendship and then fall in love. We’d get married and maybe have a baby or two.

It would be the soft light of a lamp burning long into the night, the kind that could last forever. A marriage built on trust and companionship.

Not the hot, passionate strike of a match, quick to flame and even faster to burn out.

When Rhys walked into my bookshop it was all for the manipulative machinations of the late King of the Isle of Saints and his son.

It was for political gain.

I was falling in love, and I was nothing but a pawn in a dangerous game.

And then the Queen was struck from the board.

I would never be Stella Reyes again. That shy girl was dead. Poisoned on her wedding day, but the truth is, she couldn’t survive in this world. I couldn’t survive as I had been. Like a butterfly emerging from her chrysalis, I have ended one life, to live another.

Stronger. Better. At least, hopefully.

They may have killed that young naive girl, but from her ashes rises a queen.

My life was offset, the trajectory changed when my parents died, but perhaps, this is the life I was always meant to live.

A princess by my own birthright, I am Estrella Francesca Maria Cordova de la Reyes Alexander, crown princess of San Juan de Baptista.

My father was the heir to the throne before his death.

His brother, my blood uncle, is the King.

If anyone is prime to survive this life, it’s me. With so many dangers around us, so many unknown players on the board, we will have to tread cautiously.

Now only God can save the Queen.