Chapter 5
STAR
The days smear together like paint you forgot to let dry—bright and pretty from a distance, sticky and ugly up close.
The palace hums on its clockwork: breakfasts that taste like obligation, escorted tours with politely fascinated dignitaries, afternoon “rest” periods that are actually wardrobe fittings, and evenings gilded with speeches I never asked to give.
Through all of it, Rayek is there—within arm’s reach, within heartbeat—only he’s not.
He’s a shadow wrapped in protocol. He answers in monosyllables that sound like something you’d stamp on a cargo manifest.
“Route clear.”
“Confirmed.”
“Affirmative.”
When I try to snag him between moments—on the terrace, in the armory hallway, outside the stables where the greathounds howl at the wind—he gives me that emptiness he’s perfected.
Once upon a time, we sparred with wooden blades until the sun blistered the back of my neck and my palms sang for hours.
We’d argue about openings over a chessboard, throw insults that were really compliments.
Now the chessboard sits in its velvet-lined drawer and my mouth tastes like unsaid things.
Sneed notices everything. Of course he does.
He reconfigures seating charts, escort patterns, and “accidental” detours so flawlessly that I rarely end up within whispering distance of Rayek.
A lot of doors mysteriously require repair right when I walk by them.
In the mirror, my face has learned a new expression: a smile with a headache inside it.
Kaspian, meanwhile, refuses to be loathsome.
He’s quick with names, gentler with staff than I expected, and punctual—which should be illegal in noblemen.
He keeps asking me real questions: where the wind is strongest on the north ridge, which pastry is least likely to turn my mouth blue during a photo op, what the old hymn plaques in the chapel actually say.
He doesn’t fawn. He doesn’t boast. He listens, which is its own kind of disarming.
We are on the north terrace during a midafternoon pause, sunlight slanting off the glass balustrade so hard I could cut myself on it.
A server sets down crystal and a carafe of white wine so cold it sweats.
I’m pretending to study the vineyard beyond the walls because if I look to my left I will see Rayek at his post, black uniform pressed, jaw wired shut by willpower.
Kaspian leans one hip against the rail and follows my gaze—and by “follows my gaze,” I mean he looks straight at the seven feet of stoic muscle glaring holes through the horizon.
“I must confess something,” Kaspian says, breezy but edged, the way people talk when they’re toeing the line of a joke to see if it holds. “Your mountain of a bodyguard glares at me like a rival.”
My fingers misjudge the stem of my glass.
The bowl tilts; cold sweetness slaps against my wrist. I grab the carafe before it suicides off the rail, and the entire tableau goes still for a heartbeat—wine beading on my skin, sunlight turning the droplets into tiny mirrors, the faintest click of boots behind me as Rayek adjusts to intercept a crisis that is not a crisis.
“I’m not offended,” Kaspian adds quickly, grin back in place, eyes not unkind. “If I were him, I’d probably hate me too.”
The laugh that jumps out of my mouth sounds wrong—even to me.
It’s too sharp, like a knife clattering on tile.
I dab my wrist with a napkin and make a joke so bad even I wince, something about the perils of being very hateable.
Kaspian’s smile eases into something sympathetic—dangerous, that—and he pivots to safe ground, pointing out a hawk coasting over the vineyard like a dark comma in a long sentence.
Conversation moves on, scene preserved, crisis: averted.
But the comment sticks under my ribs like a burr.
Is it that obvious?
At dinner, I catch my reflection in the curved silver underplate: flushed cheeks, eyes too bright, the shape my mouth makes when I’m pretending not to look left. My spine stiffens into perfect posture. I taste lemon glaze and politics.
The next morning, the gang arrives like an antidote.
CynJyn slouches into my room first without knocking, a contraband energy drink in one hand and her boots leaving dust prints on my grandmother’s antique rug.
She looks like sin in a borrowed jacket: yellow skin glowing against black leather, horns threaded with cheap holo-ribbons pulsing at some ridiculous BPM that only teenagers and space-rats can survive.
Lloyd lopes in behind her with his ridiculous shoulders and his even more ridiculous grin; Boo Boo squeezes past him, already stuffing pilfered fruit in her jacket pockets like a disaster squirrel; Smurfette has braided blue ribbons into her hair and attached at least three illegal devices to her belt; Chuckles carries the conscience of the group and a portable speaker shaped like a skull.
“Emergency,” CynJyn announces, flinging herself onto my chaise with dramatic suffering. “You’re becoming a statue.”
“I am not becoming a statue,” I say, even though I am very much becoming a statue.
“She is,” Boo Boo stage-whispers, eyes wide. “She says ‘indeed’ now.”
“I said it once.”
“Twice,” Smurfette corrects, tapping her wrist pad like a lawyer. “Yesterday at lunch and this morning to the linen maid.”
I bury my face in a pillow and scream into it politely. CynJyn peels the pillow away and drops it onto the floor. “Fixable,” she declares. “Tonight: hoverlounge. Outskirts. Moonlights. We’ll bribe the bouncer and lie to the drones and invent a saint’s day if we have to.”
“I have an embassy supper,” I say, because there’s always an embassy supper.
“You also have a heart,” Chuckles says gently. “It’s doing that tight thing.”
I glare at him because he keeps catching me being human when I’m trying to cosplay a crest. “This is reckless.”
“This is necessary,” CynJyn counters. “We’re not robbing a bank. We’re going to stand under too much neon and let the bass fix your blood.”
“Also, their fried synth-calamari slaps,” Boo Boo adds, completely unhelpful.
“What about Sneed?” I ask, because I have to ask.
Smurfette grins, the feral kind. “Already spoofed his logistics feed. For the next six hours, the east-wing maintenance corridor is flagged for ‘urgent pesticide fumes.’ Sneed won’t set foot near a bug.”
“And the perimeter drones?” I say, and even as I’m saying it, I can hear the yes in my voice.
“Blind spot at Gate Seven if you walk under the ivy and keep between the two rusted braces,” Lloyd says, smug as a cat that found a laser pointer. “Ten seconds of radio fuzz every thirty-two minutes when the gate cycles. We go on the second fuzz. I timed it. Twice.”
Chuckles raises the skull speaker like a toast. “I’ll tell the driver to idle on the ridge so the house cams don’t ping.”
“Driver?” I ask. “As in, we are not taking my—”
“Your shuttle is grounded by Sneed until after the embassy supper because he does not trust you,” CynJyn recites, sing-song. “Also you’d be caught in two minutes. We’re taking the Midge.”
The Midge is CynJyn’s uncle’s hovercar, which is technically a patchwork deathtrap with a sound system so good it should be illegal. It smells like oil and rind candy and freedom. I try to look disappointed; what happens on my face is hope.
“Fine,” I say. “But I’m not wearing something that screams ‘heiress runs away from home.’”
“Good,” CynJyn says, already rummaging through my closet like a raccoon in a jewel box. “We’re going for ‘heiress borrows her mechanic’s jacket and sins appropriately.’”
She pulls together a look that makes my mother’s ghost-shriek echo through the walls: black trousers that actually let my legs move, a cropped top in deep green to humor the crest, an old pilot’s jacket I filched from Father’s storage when I was sixteen because it smelled like dust and story.
They braid my hair back messily, smudge my eyeliner on purpose, and give me a pair of scuffed boots that have seen a life.
When I look in the mirror, I recognize the girl staring back: the one who races rainstorms and laughs too loud and doesn’t apologize for wanting.
We wait until the supper’s toasts begin—and the champagne flows and the cameras crowd—and then we slip.
Smurfette feeds a whisper into the utility network that makes the east stair sconces flicker like a haunted chapel.
Boo Boo stages a distraction argument with a footman about cheese knives that drags Sneed two corridors away.
Lloyd lifts the gate-side ivy with those big hands like he’s holding up a wedding veil; CynJyn checks the timer, eyes flaring bright at the count.
“Three,” she murmurs. “Two. Now.”
We slide under, breath pressed flat, shoulders brushed by rust and leaves.
The air smells like old water and copper.
My heart goes wildfire; my tongue tastes like battery.
The drone above us whirs away obligingly, tricks the blind spot, and the next breath we’re through, boots scratching dusty stone, running the service path that skirts the vineyards into the scrub where nobility pretends the world ends.
The Midge sits on the ridge like a sulking beetle, paint flaked, hoverpads whining in a low, familiar key.
Chuckles pops the passenger door and the interior coughs up the perfume of ionized dust and sugar.
We pile in: Lloyd up front because he’s a human airbag, the rest of us a knot of elbows and laughter in the back.
CynJyn slaps the dash; the console flickers.
The skull speaker lights its neon eyes; a beat slides into the metal, impatient and hungry.