“Devyn called the other kings before he left,” she confides. “Asked them to keep an eye on you tonight.”
“Oh.”
“You’re blushing,” Celine exclaims. “That’s adorable. Quinn never makes me blush. He just makes me want to throw things at his head.”
I press my hands to my cheeks. They’re burning.
“I’m not—I just—”
“You’re in love with him.” Celine says it like a fact. “And he’s clearly obsessed with you, or he wouldn’t have called in favors from three kings to keep you safe at a party.” She grins. “I like you. We’re going to be friends.”
I don’t know what to say to that.
So I just stand there, hands pressed to my burning cheeks, while Celine loops her arm through mine and declares that we’re going to spend the rest of the evening together because, in her words, “Someone needs to protect you from the vultures, and it might as well be someone who actually likes you.”
And somehow—impossibly—the rest of the night isn’t terrible.
Celine is unstoppable. She talks over interruptions, doesn’t register the social cues that should slow her down, and barrels through awkward silences like they’re not even there. She deflects barbed comments with cheerful obliviousness. She steers me away from Amos three separate times. She tells me stories about Quinn that make me choke on my champagne—stories he would probably have her imprisoned for sharing, she admits, but she’s not worried because “he’d miss me too much.”
By the time the crowd thins and the evening winds down, my heart feels so full it might actually burst.
He called them. For me.
I’m standing near the edge of the ballroom, watching the last guests trickle out, when I realize I’m swaying.
Not from exhaustion. From...happiness.
Can I take this as a sign that maybe, just maybe...
The King of the South is starting to have feelings for his accidental bride.
Chapter Thirteen
THE BARON OF GREENWICHwas fuming.
His butler had just announced the arrival of the King of the South, and now every female servant in the manor seemed to have found urgent business in the front hall. The maids. The cook’s assistants. Even his wife’s elderly lady-in-waiting was peering around the corner with flushed cheeks and bright eyes.
Did they not realize this man could be the murderer of his daughter?
But no. One look at that sharp jaw and those golden eyes, and apparently all sense fled from their minds. They were staring at Devyn Chaleur like he was some kind of dark angel descended from the heavens, not a potential killer who had arrived uninvited to—
“Baron.” Devyn’s voice cut through the hallway like a blade. “A word. In private.”
It wasn’t a request.
Patrick’s jaw tightened. He gestured sharply at his staff—a silent command to disperse—but even as they scattered, he caught several of them stealing one last glance at the king.
Unbelievable.
They sat in Patrick’s private study. No guards. No witnesses. Just two men and the ghost of a murdered girl between them.
The older man had expected threats. Interrogation. Perhaps even violence.
What he had not expected was the silence. Devyn simply sat across from him and waited, those golden eyes patient and watchful, giving nothing away.
The silence stretched until it became unbearable. Until the baron found himself speaking just to fill it. “I wasn’t a good father to her.”
The words cracked on their way out. His hands—once steady enough to sign treaties and command troops—trembled where they rested on his desk.
