Series: Fever Falls Series by Riley Hart
Total pages in book: 99
Estimated words: 96260 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 481(@200wpm)___ 385(@250wpm)___ 321(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 96260 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 481(@200wpm)___ 385(@250wpm)___ 321(@300wpm)
Funny to think that not an hour earlier, I had my tongue down another guy’s throat.
“Where is the King?” I asked Mallow, who stood at her side.
“He and the Queen are returning from their engagement after the speech in the eastern part of Praeve. They’ll be arriving shortly.”
“In the meantime, I’m going to go down and find this poor American, who we have abducted,” I said, trying to dig that fact into Mallow’s and Cromley’s thick skulls, “and then hopefully I can talk him out of making this into some sort of huge catastrophe. I’m pretty confident we don’t need America sending some former president over to rescue one of their own citizens from our fucking dungeons.”
I stormed out of the conference room.
“The dungeon,” I muttered, pissed at the thought of that poor kid being confined to a place intended for lowly criminals.
On my trek, I got a call from Frederick. “Where are you in the castle?”
“North side. What about you?”
“I’m at the main entryway. I’ll come to you.”
“No, I’ll meet you on my way down to the dungeon.”
“Okay, I’ll deliver the bad news as soon as I see you.”
“Eager to hear it,” I said as facetiously as I could manage before hanging up. Between all the walking I’d done during the parade and the walk across the palace, my legs were getting nearly as sore as my mood.
I greeted Frederick with, “So tell me this bad news,” wanting more than anything to know what could possibly make this day any worse than it already was.
Frederick handed me his phone. “Apparently, the great citizens of our nation were as picture-happy as ever and captured what you thought was a private moment.”
He already had a picture pulled up on his cell—Keegan and me kissing. I was wearing my mask, though, and it was a side shot, so arguably, it wasn’t necessarily me.
“I feel like there’s more than this…?”
“Do you remember that moment when Keeg went down? You threw your mask off and got up in the royal guard’s face…” He ran his finger across the phone, pulling up another photo. “This moment.” He revealed a picture of me without my mask on but clearly in the rest of the Robin outfit from the other picture.
“Oh.”
“Yeah, so obviously they know you kissed a guy.”
“Well, that’s not particularly terrible.”
“Not in and of itself, but—”
“Oh fuck,” I said, realizing what it was going to look like to Lucas, who I knew was immediately going to think I was just being insolent and going against the family’s wishes.
“Where was this?”
“Prince Watch.”
That fucking rag-mag blog.
“I can’t have any fun, can I?”
“Yeah, well. At least you know.”
“The question is, does Lucas know?” My phone vibrated in my pocket, and I checked to see that it was my brother before handing it off to Frederick.
“Oh, no, no, no,” he said. “You’re not passing this one on to me.”
“Just talk him down for me, and I promise I will make it up to you. Tell him I’m busy. I have to go see this American we’ve imprisoned in the palace.”
“As your advisor, I think I should advise you that we should start using the word detained, for PR purposes. We have detained an American boy.”
“That doesn’t sound that much better than Anti-Equal-Marriage Royal Family Abducts Gay American Tourist.”
Frederick’s eyes widened. “You can’t throw those kinds of words out to the universe without expecting the press to psychically pick up on it and smack that on tomorrow’s headlines.”
“Which is why I’m going to figure this mess out, but just stall with Lucas for me. Please.”
He sighed. “Okay, okay. I’ll do my best. And at some point, we need to have a serious friend-chat about everything that went down today.”
I halted in the hallway, turning to him. I could see the concern in his eyes as he took my hand and asked, “Are you okay?”
I could tell he was just trying to be a good friend, something I genuinely appreciated, especially considering that the rest of the madness centered around this debacle had little to do with how I felt.
“I’m not sure right now,” I confessed. “But again, we can get to that part later.”
He nodded and offered a quick hug. Then he headed the opposite direction, toward Lucas, as I proceeded toward the dungeon, which I had only been to recently for games of hide-and-seek with Cassie.
Certainly never to see anyone kept prisoner.
A few guards were stationed at the entrance, and they escorted me to his chamber.
Maybe Keeg would find some ease in understanding all the confusing events that had led to his being attacked by the royal guard.
Of course, maybe he would just be pissed, considering how much I’d lied to him in the short time we’d known each other.
Whatever I encountered was definitely what I deserved.
I was long overdue for facing some hard truths.