“What about the crown prince?”
“Now, he needs to be removed from his position. Sooner rather than later. I have an idea or three on how to start undermining his power base. It’s shaky already and really shouldn’t take much more to topple it over.”
Of course he had a plan. Why wasn’t I surprised? I was beginning to suspect he knew one of his Tasks, which was why he so adamantly refused to take the throne. He’d alluded to it before, knowing a second Task, but of course I didn’t have the right to pry. Although I was dying to pry.
“All right, let’s hear about this plan for Prince Victor. Does it have anything to do with Aurora?”
Prince James put head into hand, elbow propped on his desk, and gave me a warm look, which made me tingly and a little shy all at once. He’d released his hair from its tie, so the platinum locks fell softly around his shoulders, softening the chiseled features of his face. “One of the things I like best about you is how quick you are on the uptake.”
I cleared my throat and reached for my tea to avoid his eyes without making it obvious. “I hardly think that’s a stretch. You’ve been looking into Aurora for weeks now.”
“Doesn’t the name just sound like a gambling hall?”
“Well, yes, but it’s a legit business.” I weighed his expression as I spoke. “Or is it?”
“Hmm…technically?”
“Gods, goddesses, and little demons.” I sighed before taking my sip of tea. “What do you know that I don’t?”
“Well, Aurora is a legit business, but it’s shoddily run. I think it was meant to be more of a paper company to hide Victor’s dealings, debts, and such, and his cronies are taking advantage of it. From what I’ve seen, the embezzlement going on is insane.Only the income from royal coffers is keeping Aurora flush enough to operate on a surface level.”
I startled so badly I almost sloshed tea all over my hand. “It’s that bad?”
“Could be worse. This is only what I know from what little information I can pull together. They’re being very secretive with the books. For good reason, apparently.” Prince James made a face, nose scrunching up. “We’ll need to pull the royal funds out immediately before they really do go bankrupt and take all our money with them. Which Victor won’t be happy about, but I don’t give two fucks about his opinion.”
This reinforced my opinion all over again: Prince James had what it took to be a king. He knew how to ask the right questions, look over the reports given to him, and see the overall picture. Not every mind could do that, and he had the talent. I truly wanted to somehow convince him to go for it. I wondered if he’d learned this skill set from his previous life? If he’d battled the Demon King, he must have been in the upper nobility then, too.
“Then let’s get this proposal in before we piss him off.” Not to mention I wanted to go home at some point tonight. Before it became tomorrow. “I need more tea if I’m to focus.”
Prince James immediately popped up and went to the sideboard.
Seeing him doing this for the umpteenth time, I had to challenge the action. “Did you not have servants growing up?”
“Well…I did. But not like here.” Prince James spoke as he went about making a cup of tea. “My mother, as you likely know, was a courtesan, and while she had a nice settlement from my father, it wasn’t on the same level as what an actual prince would have. So we had a cook, a maid, a gardener, and that was it. My mother wasn’t a hands-on type of woman, either, so really, the staff raised me. Them and my grandparents. I spent a goodportion of my formative years in the kitchen helping our cook. I feel more comfortable seeing to my own needs.”
Now his behavior made more sense. I hadn’t known his precise upbringing, just that he was a bastard child. He seemed perfectly at ease with his background and not at all apologetic or embarrassed by it. Strangely, he once again seemed very human to me. Moments like this made me almost forget to address him as my boss.
A loud clatter sounded, then Prince James swore and jumped back a foot.
I came out of my chair automatically. “Did you burn yourself?”
“No, no, just spilled some of the tea. Sit down, I’ve got it.”
In the next second, he cast about, found a cloth, then reached for the vial of blessed water from the small altar near the door. The vial that was supposed to be there symbolically, not actuallyused.
“Your Highness. You’re not supposed to use holy water to clean!”
He shot me that mischievous grin over his shoulder, the one I couldn’t take at all seriously. “But it cleans the hell out of shit.”
Gods above and below, he had not. Shidteus’s balls, he had. I groaned and slumped in my chair for a second. “You are utterly impossible.”
“Not the first time I’ve heard that,” he rebutted cheerfully before finally collecting the cup and returning to the desk. “It’s fine, it’s fine. It’s all to a good use. I had to clean the tea up before it stained everything.”
“Uh-huh.”
“There’s this tone, this note of disbelief in your voice—”
“Yes, can’t imagine why it’s there.”
