Kit joins me at the table and cups my face, his lips brushing mine. “Genius,” he murmurs, and I can practically feel his bad mood melt away. “Though they’ll still find me somehow. They always do. May I?”
I hand him my spoon, and he takes a giant bite of cereal with the kind of hunger that makes it clear he hasn’t eaten since breakfast. Another wave of guilt washes over me. He should be able to buy a sandwich like any other student, but the few times he’s tried have ended with a dozen cameras being shoved in his face—or worse, like when a barista refused to serve him, which made headlines around the world.
“Ben posted again,” he says as he tries to hand the spoon back to me, but I offer him the rest of the bowl. “Apparently I’m cheating on you with a leggy blond.”
“Are you?” I say with only mild interest, and once he takes the cereal, I pull out my phone—my real one, not the one MI5 gave me for emergencies—and navigate to theRegal Record,the royal gossip site Ben secretly runs, which is now solely dedicated to tearing me and Kit apart. It’s surreal to see the pictures that Ben has somehow already posted of Kit’s short walk between the college and his supposed dormitory, accompanied by a tall girl in full makeup. “She looks like Helene.”
Kit wrinkles his nose at the mention of his aunt—or, more likely, at the insinuation that comes with their similar appearance. “She’s in one of my lectures—Vivianne Blanc. She was waiting for me by the door.”
In almost all the pictures, she’s smiling and glancing at the cameras, clearly basking in the attention. “Maybe you should ask her which she thinks is more effective, TNT or dynamite.”
“Don’t be silly,” he says. “Everyone knows it’s C-4.”
He presses his lips to my cheek in a milky kiss, and warmth spreads through me as I continue to swipe from one photo to the next. But without warning, that heat turns cold as the gallery of Kit’s afternoon is replaced by pictures of him before we met, stumbling out of nightclubs with Ben or Maisie or a group of raucous aristocrats I don’t recognize. And every single one features a different girl on his arm.
I’ve seen evidence of Kit’s former flings before. He has a type—tall and willowy, with stunning bone structure and the kind of beauty only a life free of any real hardship can achieve. Ben has been posting batches of so-called throwbacks over the past few weeks, amplifying the cheating allegations and clearlydetermined to drive a wedge between us. And I refuse to let it work.
That doesn’t mean seeing Kit with his eyes unfocused and his arm wrapped around a different girl each night isn’t uncomfortable. But he didn’t know me then. And I’m not about to hold his past against him, even though it’s hard to ignore the part where I’m definitely the weed in the otherwise expensive bouquet that is Kit’s love life.
Kit watches me closely now, cereal temporarily forgotten. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“Talk about what?” I say, exiting the site and setting my phone aside.
“The rubbish Ben is posting to get a rise out of both of us.”
I shake my head. “I know what he’s trying to do, too,” I say, my voice a touch too tight.
Kit’s gaze doesn’t waver from mine, so intense that I have to fight the instinct to look away. “I remember every detail of the night we first met,” he says. “I know you had other things on your mind—”
“Not really,” I say, trying to lighten the mood. “Just, you know, getting hauled across an ocean to meet my deadbeat father, whose face happens to be on your money.”
“Tale as old as time,” says Kit, and the corner of his mouth twitches into a smile. “But the moment you looked at me, I felt like my entire world shifted off its axis, and it would never be the same again. And I didn’t want it to be.”
Heat rushes through me, and I hook my little finger with his.“Is this your way of saying that you haven’t thought about those other girls since?”
“Not even for a moment. I was in a dark place when those photos were taken, but you gave me a reason to fight my way out. And by loving me, you give me permission to love myself again, too. That’s not something I’ll ever find at the bottom of a glass or in a club surrounded by strangers. Nothing like it exists for me, except right here with you.”
Before I know it, I’m kissing him again, slow and lingering this time. His fingers thread through my hair as he deepens the kiss, and I want to crawl into his lap, to wrap myself around him knowing I’ll never be safer or happier or more loved than I am when I’m with him. But as I shift my weight, a sharp knock echoes through the room, and the front door bursts open.
“Shit.”I pull away from Kit, nearly losing my balance as a tall man wearing a gray tailored suit strides into our flat. “Singh? What are youdoing? We don’t have a meeting until—”
“It was bumped up,” says Agent Suraj Singh of MI5 on his way to the kitchen. While he must notice that we’re both disheveled, he has the decency not to say anything. “Haven’t you told her, Lord Clarence?”
“Told me what?” I say, glancing at Kit. He focuses on the cereal instead, his cheeks as red as mine feel.
“I received a…er, text this afternoon,” says Kit, and he clears his throat. “From Dylan.”
My nails dig into the edge of the table. Dylan is—was—one of Kit and Ben’s friends from Eton, and when he ended up in thesame course at Oxford alongside Kit, he and his girlfriend, Aoife Marsh, pressured Kit to join Fox Rex.
That alone is more than enough reason to want nothing to do with Dylan. But Dylan is also the one who, with Ben’s help, sneaked onto Sandringham grounds on Christmas Eve and hunted Kit and me down like prey. Kit was grazed in the arm, and the same bullet hit me in the chest, barely missing my vital organs.
We should be dead. If Ben and Dylan had their way, wewouldbe dead. And while Ben has never physically attacked me himself, I’m positive Dylan won’t hesitate the first chance hegets.
“What—” My voice catches, and I try to adopt a casual tone. “What did he want?”
I can tell from the flicker in Kit’s dark eyes that he isn’t fooled, and he wordlessly hands me his phone. A text thread from an unsaved number is already on the screen, and I scan it, a knot of fear forming in my throat.
How does it feel to be a modern-day Prometheus, Kitters? Bring freedom to the people, and the gods will make sure you’re punished for eternity.
