Page 1 of Grand Romantic Delusions and the Madness of Mirth, Part One

M irth

“A chosen-mate matching event,” I echo stupidly, swaying slightly on my bare feet. “For me.”

“You’re welcome to add names to the invitation list,” my father says, getting as pissy as he’ll allow himself to be even when dealing with his least-favorite child.

I remember to shut my mouth at least. Gaping like a fish in my father’s presence hasn’t been tolerated since I was two.

I don’t, however, manage to uncurl my hands from the fists clenched at my sides.

My perfectly French-manicured nails dig into my perfectly soft and creamy skin.

Though I keep my short nails square-tipped, I’m moments away from drawing my own blood.

Not because I’m a shifter. I might be one of the most privileged people on the planet, but even I’m not lucky enough to be able to manifest claws to rend my way through the centuries of royal history suffocatingly stuffed alongside me in my father’s study.

“Add names …” I fi nally say through clenched teeth, scanning the leather-bound tomes on dark-wood shelves rising the full four meters to the ludicrously landscape-painted ceiling.

I could take two steps to the fucking window and see one of the most breathtaking mountain views in the entire world.

That landscape has weathered the centuries without a constant need for weekly dusting and a special fucking varnish that only a fabricator mage is skilled enough to apply.

I’m struggling to hold onto the moment.

To hold the energy, the practically useless essence, within me. If I self-destruct here, maybe I’ll finally do something significant with all the untapped power that resides under my skin. Maybe I’ll wipe this castle off the side of the mountain and significantly improve the vista.

Of course, that would also slaughter dozens of innocent people. And not wanting to do so is the primary reason I hold my essence so tightly. So tightly that I barely have access to my lesser empathic abilities. Barely have any significance in the —

My nails bite into my skin.

A chosen-mate matching event.

It’s not … it’s only been five months, seventeen days, and …

I glance at the ostentatious grandfather clock to my left. It towers next to the ornately carved dark-wood door. Five months, seventeen days, and eight hours since … since …

My father clears his throat, almost gently.

My father is not gentle. Fair-minded? Yes. Forthright? Yes. Focused, precise, and epically powerful? Yes.

Gentle? No.

I want him to yell.

I want him to break, as I’m breaking. As I’ve been breaking for almost six months .

He summoned me. I’ve been holed up in my apartments in London, barely surfacing most days. But he summoned me, and I’m here. And I thought …

My brother’s ashes sit in a pristinely white marble urn on the mantel over the unlit fireplace, just off my father’s huge burnished-gold mountain-ash antique desk. But that’s not the prestigious placement it seems to be.

Armin wouldn’t have wanted to be trapped inside a —

I stuff my hands in the pockets of the sweatpants that I snuck out of Armin’s rooms. Not that either of us has lived at my father’s seat of power in years.

The Prague Phrontistery Academy logo, from the school both of us graduated years ago, is emblazoned across the ass.

From the depths of the pockets, I grasp my abandoned earbuds in my palms. For a moment, I consider pulling them out, shoving them in my ears, and blasting all my thoughts out of the forefront of my mind.

Which is my go-to response to practically anything requiring engagement these days. That and audiobooks. There’s nothing like an unhinged thriller to remind me how ridiculously cloistered and —

“Mirth …” My father sighs.

I flinch at being so named, only just managing to check myself from stumbling back in response.

He pinches his lips so tightly that they go white against his tanned skin.

Under that tan, he’s as naturally pale as I am.

He’s just been skiing, apparently somewhere sunny enough to lightly streak his hair as well, normally as dark as my own.

And why wouldn’t he ski? He resides in a castle in the middle of the fucking Alps and owns everything as far as an essence-enhanced eye can see.

He’s one of the most powerful awry in the world.

It’s not as if his eldest son, his fucking beloved heir with whom he shared the same epically powerful abilities, is dead.

I grab onto the anger that flashes through me, warming me finally from within, at his lack of obvious grief. Such bright and utterly vicious ire is a completely uncharacteristic emotion for me.

And with it, the bottomless well of useless essence I usually keep smothered deeply within my core, within my soul, sleepily uncurls. I struggle to get it under control so I can function, so I can speak, through the onslaught.

But then — finally — I’m unhinging my jaw and spitting vitriol in his direction. “Add names? To the list of assholes you want to line up? To fuck and breed me?”

The cut-crystal tumbler in my father’s hand cracks but doesn’t shatter. And not because his grip tightened.

I’ve managed to get his own power to slip its leash.

But I don’t feel any relief. I feel even more helpless, even more out of control, now that I’ve triggered him so easily.

Standing to my father’s right, as she always is when he calls me in for one of his delightful chats, Eleanor plucks the glass from his hand before it spills a drop. Anne, on his left, instantly replaces it with her own tumbler, the amber liquid within barely sipped.

Apparently, it’s more important to make sure that nary a drop of mage-brewed whiskey hits the thousand-fucking-year-old desk than it is to —

“It’s time,” my father says, deliberately setting down his replacement drink instead of throwing it back.

Maybe he’s feeling the urge to drink and drink and lose himself just for a little while? Lose himself for just long enough to forget why I’ve been called home? To forget why he’s suddenly demanding that I find a match?

My brother — my father’s true heir, true in all the ways that truly mattered in this world — is dead .

All that power. All that … love and comfort just snuffed out, stripped away. By a fucking avalanche. A singular, even unprecedented, event. Because what telekinetic dies while skiing, alone on a remote mountainside or not?

“So six months is all I get?” The circumstances of my beloved brother’s death ping around in my head, along with so many unanswered questions. No, not unanswered. So many unsatisfactorily resolved questions.

The bright anger drains from me, leaving my voice sounding weak, pathetic, even to my own ears. If I could just hold on to that anger, if I could just focus it, I might be able to use it to drag myself from this abyss of grief. “Not even six months.”

My father scrubs a hand across his face in an uncharacteristic display of vivid emotion.

Then, compounding that oddly human-like behavior, he reaches up for Anne’s hand.

The tanned, light-blond, dark-amber-eyed shifter instantly closes the slight space between them, slipping her bejeweled fingers into his open palm.

They just hold each other lightly. Eleanor, a pale-skinned combat-grade mage with a specialty in poisons, settles her hand on my father’s shoulder.

Her long medium-brown hair is loose, curling prettily around her shoulders.

Their combined gazes settle on me. Three against one. Pure pity is etched across Anne’s face. Eleanor’s strain shows in the deepening lines across her brow and on the edges of her remarkable sky-blue eyes.

My father … my father looks …

I haven’t actually shared the same space with him for over a month. We’ve barely exchanged a half-dozen words since Armin’s death.

He hasn’t shaved. He’s lost weight, enough for it to show in his face. The gray is deepening at his temples. But power, so much power, undeniable and everlasting, radiates from him, from his eyes. As it always does.

The violet eyes that matched Armin’s. That also match my own.

I take him in, anchored on either side by his chosen mates. His Royal Majesty Chancellor Bastian Wilhelm, hereditary emperor of the United European Nation and head of the World Council.

I can count the number of times he’s been just ‘Bast’ in my presence on a single hand and not use my thumb — a nickname I heard murmured by Anne in an intimate moment many, many years ago.

And just then, I put it all together.

The abrupt but formal summons from my apartments in London where I’ve been holed up, ordering me to my father’s seat of power.

The informal gathering in his study.

They’d all been drinking even before I was escorted from my rooms by one of the castle guards.

The chosen-mate matching event.

Only six months …

I sway, lightheaded as the realization sweeps through me viscerally.

I step sideways, then practically drop into the chair that had been initially offered — and declined — when I entered.

I always need to be on my feet for these conversations, for any conversation with my father in which I’m the sole focus.

An exceedingly rare event as a child. And then even more so after my awry nature exerted itself at age fifteen …

After it became clear that nature wasn’t … manageable.

Even before that, Armin had usually mitigated as much as he could between my father and me.

I’m never able to actually run, to flee, of course. But I’m always primed to do so. Except even that possibility is about to be stripped from me.

And it’s not that I’m not ready for what’s coming.

It’s that I’m incapable.

“You’re true blooded,” my father says. “But you will still need multiple chosen mates to hold the intersection point. We can find ways around the other duties if you cannot manage them as well.”