She says this in a flatly neutral tone, and I study her, looking for cracks in her imperious facade. “Yeah, it was sort of obvious once I had a minute to think,” I admit. “Kit knows, too.”
“I’m surprised he didn’t figure it out years ago,” she says, like we’re discussing nothing more scandalous than the weather. “Daddy trusts you, of course, but I’m here to make a deal.”
“A deal? What kind of deal?”
She eyes me over the table, her nails tapping against the polished wood. “That’s up to you, I suppose. What do you want for your silence?”
My stomach turns, and I pull the quilt tighter around me, flashing back to the moment I realized she was the one who had pushed Jasper Cunningham to his death. She’d tried to buy my silence then, too, but that was before we knew each other. Before we trusted each other.
“Maisie, I’m not going to—listen, I know you’re in a shitty position, but that’s because of Venetia and Ben, not me—”
“It’s only a matter of time,” she says with a shrug that’s painfully impersonal. “So let’s head that off at the pass, shall we? Or is that what you want? An unnamed favor in the future? Because I suppose I could agree to that. Either way, I’d rather not have you or anyone else holding this over my head for the rest of my life, so if you wouldn’t mind doing me the courtesy of naming your price—”
“Maisie.Maisie.” I have to say her name twice to get her to stop speaking. “I’m not going to blackmail you. I don’t care who your mother slept with, all right? Whatever happened back then is none of my business, and I won’t say a word to anyone. You’re still my sister, and I’d never do that to you.”
She stares at me. “But we’re not sisters,” she says, and it’s not a protest. Just a fact. “We’re cousins. Alexander and Nicholas are brothers—”
“I don’t care. Alexander raised you as his daughter, and that makes you my sister, okay? That’s it. End of story. Unless you don’t think of me as yours.”
“Of course I think of you as my—” She stops herself suddenly, and to my surprise, her blue eyes fill with unshed tears. “Evan. Evangeline. Maybe you don’t realize the seriousness of the situation at hand—”
“I get what this means for you and the country.” But I’ve been so buried in my own misery that I reallyhaven’tthought much about how heart-wrenching this must be for her, and how traumatic it must be having to live with this, especially considering her role as the future queen. “How long have you known?”
Maisie dabs her overflowing eyes with a cloth napkin. “Since I was eight. Mummy, Daddy, and Uncle Nicholas sat me down one day and told me that, while Daddy was of course my father and always would be, Nicholas was my biological…” She shakes her head again, as if she can’t even bring herself to say it. “I didn’t understand at first. I was so young that I didn’t even know how babies were made. I just…thought it meant I had done something wrong, I suppose.”
I take a deep breath and release it slowly. Eight years old. “That’s really damn young to have your entire world blown to pieces,” I say, and she laughs humorlessly.
“Yes, well. You were four.” She looks at me, and for a moment, there’s warmth between us for the first time since January.
“How did Ben…” I hesitate. “How did he find out?”
She swallows and reaches for her tea, then pulls her hand back into her lap to fiddle with the cuff of her sweater. “I don’t know. Daddy thought I’d told him when we were kids. We were like brother and sister then. Wewere…” She pauses, grimacing. “But I never said a word. I somehow understood how important it was to keep our secret, even from Benny, and the shame I felt…well, we didn’t have that kind of relationship, did we? Even then, I knew something was off. He didn’t make me feel safe, and I would’ve never trusted him with anything that made me so vulnerable.”
“So…Venetia?” I guess, and she nods, dabbing her eyes again.
“It’s likely. Unless he overheard something. Mummy and Nicholas aren’t always discreet, after all. And the DNA test theRegal Recordposted—”
“The what?” I say, stunned, and half my body twists toward the bedroom Kit and I share, as if I can reach my laptop from here. “A DNA test?”
Maisie nods, and she gives up on dabbing now, wiping angrily at the tears dripping down her cheeks. “I found it last year, when we were searching Ben’s room for the laptop. It was in the—”
“The manila envelope,” I interrupt, my eyes widening. I can picture it in my head—the large yellow envelope concealedbeneath the decades-old adult magazines that Ben had hidden inside his wardrobe. I hadn’t thought much about it at the time, but clearly I should’ve been paying attention.
“The manila envelope,” she echoes quietly in confirmation. “That’s when I realized he knew. It was a copy, not the original, and it’s old—from around the time we were born. It must have been…to confirm that I was…”
Again she doesn’t finish, and I exhale. Of course Ben would’ve dug something like that up. “Alexander knows all of this now, too?”
She nods, her leaking eyes still on the untouched tea. “I knew Ben would use it against me somehow, but I never thought he’d go this far. It’s sadistic. It’scruel.”
“It’s disgusting.” And exactly the kind of thing I wouldn’t put past Ben. “TheRegal Recordis just a gossip site, Mais. No one knows Ben runs it except for us. The palace can deny and discredit the accusations, and the entire country loves you—no one’s going to give it a second thought.”
“Of course they will,” she says, her nose growing stuffy as the tears flow freely down her face now. “They were ready to believe the worst in you.”
“But I didn’t grow up in front of them,” I argue. “No matter what supposed evidence theRegal Recordposts, it willneveradd up to the word of the royal family, okay? Alexander loves you. He won’t let Ben win this one.”
The words cut me to ribbons, but while they’ve been my own personal hell these past two days, Maisie gives me a look so blatantly hopeful that it’s instantly worth the agony. “Do you really think so?” she says, her voice catching. “Because all I canthink about is—is that it’s out there now. Eventually everyone will know, and—and they’ll hate me.”
“It won’t come to that,” I say, because it’s the only thing that sounds like the truth anymore. “Alexander chose you, and he’ll do anything to make sure that doesn’t happen.”
