Their eyes were locked. Emotions he had buried deep, so deep, were rising, and he didn’t want them. Didn’t want to feel them.
“I shudder to think what the rest of your siblings are like,” Tierney said, humor lacing his voice. “Just how many of you are there?”
“I haven’t any family,” Theo denied, shaking his head. “No siblings.”
“That’s a lie.” Stasia’s chin tipped up, her expression stern and demanding and familiar. He’d seen it before on their mother’s face whenever she refused to relent. “His name is not Beast. He is Theodoric Augustus St. George, and the true and rightful king of Boritania.”
Her words shook him. Was this some manner of trick? Perhaps their uncle had sent her here to lure him back to Boritanian shores so he could finish what he had begun ten years ago. Gustavson wouldn’t have been wrong in choosing Stasia. Of all his siblings, he had been closest to her, before his imprisonment. They had been near enough in age. He’d been protective of her, knowing their uncle’s intentions of selling her off as a bride at the earliest opportunity, using her to increase his influence.
“Reinald is the true and rightful King of Boritania,” he said, speaking of their brother.
The one who had taken his place.
The one it had taken him years to forgive for believing their uncle’s lies. For doing nothing to stay Theo’s torture until it had almost been too late.
“That is why I’ve come looking for you,” Stasia told him quietly, looking far too solemn for a woman of her years. For a princess who should have had every opportunity in the world presented to her.
“Because Reinald has demanded my return?” Theo would have spat in the old Boritanian way, to show his disgust, but he didn’t think Tierney would take kindly to spittle on his Axminster. Instead, he snorted. “The only way I’ll go back to Boritania is as a dead man. Or perhaps, sister, that’s why you’ve come.” His mind spun. It would make sense. He had always known that if his uncle and brother would have sent an assassin for him, it would have been someone whom he least expected.
Someone like Stasia.
“Now you acknowledge me, when you accuse me of plotting your murder?” Her blue eyes bored into him, accusatory.
“Gin?” Tierney interrupted, offering a glass to Theo by pressing it into his hand. “Go on, old chap. I know you don’t ordinarily imbibe, but you look as if you need it.”
Theo’s fingers curled around the cool glass. Inside, he was cold. Cold and angry. His chest was tight. Ten long years he’d struggled to find his place outside Boritania. Ten years of building himself up from the beaten and broken man he’d been. And now, here was the past, standing before him, reminding him precisely of who he was.
“Am I not to be offered any?” Stasia demanded of Tierney.
Theo raised the glass to his lips and took a slow pull of the liquid, relishing the burn as it slid down his throat. Something passed between his sister and their host, a wordless challenge of power, perhaps. And then Tierney relented, bowing.
“Whatever Her Royal Highness desires,” Tierney said, his tone mocking.
He rose to his full height, stalked to the sideboard, and poured an amount of liquid into the glass that was far, far too much for a lady. Theo wondered if he should object, but then he quickly quelled the protective brotherly urge rising within, for he owed Stasia nothing. He didn’t even know if he could trust her. Indeed, he was reasonably certain he should not.
Tierney brought her the gin, and she accepted it, raising her glass in Boritanian tradition.
“Saluté,” she said, using the traditional Boritanian toast, and then she took a large pull from the glass.
Theo had to credit her—she showed nary a hint of dislike. Her expression remained perfectly unaffected as she swallowed the gin.
“There,” she said triumphantly. “Now we will speak.”
“Stasia,” he protested, not wanting to hear what she had to say. It had been too long, and this business with Lady Deering had brought vulnerabilities to the surface which he’d already believed long buried.
“Reinald is missing, and Gustavson has assumed the throne,” his sister said in Boritanian then.
And just like that, the careful world he’d built for himself in London splintered into jagged shards and disintegrated into dust.
* * *
Pamela and Lady Virtuereturned from their evening engagements that night with mutual sighs of relief as they alighted from Ridgely’s carriage and made their way up the walk. The rain of earlier in the day had given way to blustery cold, but at least the sky was clear for now. It wasn’t the weather which had left her weary, however. Instead—and much to her shock—it had been one of the few refuges in which she’d found comfort following Bertie’s death: society.
The dinner held by Lord and Lady Cunningham and the ensuing musical evening had been—
“Dreadfully boring,” Lady Virtue murmured at her side, quite as if she had been somehow privy to Pamela’s thoughts and was completing them for her aloud.
“Are you referring to my companionship or to our host and hostess’s entertainments this evening?” she asked the younger woman, all too aware that as the matron charged with shepherding her brother’s ward through theton, she was meant to encourage the girl.
