Page 27 of Fallen Crown

“Are you asking me how I hurt myself?” Talking about the logistics of my injury is easy enough. The aftermath is the hard part.

“When we first started training together, I asked Posey to find out what happened to you,” he says. “Not much printed in the press about your accident.”

His admission catches me off guard, and I’m not sure which piece to address first—that he sent Posey Jensen after me or that he scoured the press in Chile to find out the details.

“You asked Posey Jensen to dig up information on me?”

“I don’t deal well with people who don’t like me.” He shrugs as though his admission is nothing. “I don’t think Posey found out anything, if that makes you feel any better.”

“It doesn’t.” My family might be fractured in places on the inside, but on the outside, we’re a brick wall. Come for one of us, and you come for us all. It’s the best part about being a Tucker. We’re everywhere on the island—generation after generation—and we don’t feed each other to the gossip mills. “You could have asked me. It’s not like what happened is a secret.” My stay in the hospital is the part my family worked to suppress. NDAs and money locked down anyone who treated me there and when we got back. I could never figure out if my parents were protecting me or the Tucker image in Bellerive.

“Wren seemed a little uptight about it,” he says.

“You asked Wren too?” This conversation is slowly raising the hackles I’d thought were lowered for good.

“If I’d asked you a few weeks ago, would you have answered?”

“I would have told you to mind your own business,” I say as the door behind us opens, and Jag enters with Gary, another guard on the property. Rather than giving him what he’s asked for, I hook myself onto the rope and nod at Gary that I’m ready.

“You’re not going to tell me.” Brice releases a long-suffering sigh and steps into his harness.

“Apparently, you only wanted the information to use against me.” I survey the wall and pick my handholds, beginning my climb. “Information warfare.”

Within minutes, Brice is climbing below and beside me. He’s not a sure enough climber to catch me before I reach the top.

“You need to see it from my point of view,” Brice says.

“Oh? Seems like a childish point of view if your main concern was whether or not I liked you.”

“Everyone likes me.”

“Impossible,” I say. “There will be someone who has met you and doesn’t like you. Statistically speaking, that’s the truth.”

“You got those stats handy? Would love to see some evidence of your nonresearch.”

“I’m busy beating you up the wall.” I gauge a difficult transition, and I make the leap, hanging off the wall by one hand for a moment. “I’ll have to dig them out for you later.” I grunt as I correct myself. “All my research is focused on you. So, it’s a bit narrow.”

“That’s bullshit. Anyone I like, likes me. Vice versa.”

“That’s friendship. You’re describing friendship.” I shift my weight to take me a little farther from his climbing line.

“I do have a lot of friends.”

“Really? Or are they acquaintances? Who have you talked to about your dad?” I’m prodding a wound I know he doesn’t want to touch, but to me, as someone who’s been in the pit of grief, it’s a valid question. After my injury, I realized how few people I could actually depend on. It’s not a great feeling.

There’s a long beat of silence, and I’m not sure he’s going to answer. Maybe I went too far. The two of us seem to be locked in silence or combat, and there hasn’t been too much in between.

“Nothing about the situation changes if I talk about it,” he says. “Let’s just climb.”

“Your Highness—” I say.

“Don’t.” His voice is tight below me. “You’ve been calling me Brice all week. I’m not sliding backwards with you. I just don’t want to talk about it.”

I reach the top of the wall, and I sit on the ledge, waiting for him to catch up. He grunts as he pulls himself over the edge, and we stare out at the vastness of the barn side by side while Gary and Jag chat down below, our ropes in their hands.

“We were coming down a cliff edge,” I say. “Not far. To save time, because we’d been gaining on the lead team, we made the decision to free climb. We’d done it before. So many times before and at greater heights. Should have been easy.” I take a deep breath. “Wren lost a handhold, and when I grabbed her to help her back on, my foothold crumbled under me.” The memory snakes down my spine. “She made it back on. But I didn’t. I fell, and I didn’t get back up.” The impact of hitting the ground, the sound of my ankle snapping, and the taste of blood in my mouth comes back to me in a flash.

“Spooked you?” He glances at me, but it’s more curiosity than concern in his gaze. I’m alive and functioning, so how bad could it have been, right? He’ll never know.