Page 15

Chapter 15

Caspian

It was . . . nice. Yes, nice was the best word I could come up with, to hear them saying that Verisa was beautiful. I’d always thought so, but Verisa was my city. Me saying Verisa was beautiful was like a mother saying her kid was beautiful. She was biased, so of course she thought that.

Seeing them all in awe, though, made me puff up like a strutting peacock. Damn right my tail was the prettiest.

“We’ll have to go through the western gate of the palace,” I told Kit. “My car had an electronic security opener installed for the eastern one, but it’s at the bottom of the river now, and there are no guards stationed there to let us in. The manned gate is off the coast highway past Tropic Lane.”

It might have just been the way I jostled my broken rib when I’d leaned forward to speak to Kit, but there was a sharp jab in my chest at the reminder. Mom’s car was gone. At the bottom of a river and not coming back. A lot like the woman herself.

Kit, having slowly taken my discomfort at how he kept looking away from the road to heart, only glanced up at me for a second, rolling his eyes. “I have no doubt. But there’s also no way in the hells we’re going there.”

“No way we’re . . . what?”

Maybe it was the concussion talking, and I’d certainly had some lingering confusion pop up from that, but I couldn’t figure out what he meant.

“How are we going to look for the Sunrunner if we don’t go to the palace?” Frost asked, and I wanted to simply point to him to indicate that he was asking the sensible questions.

“Like I said,” Kit answered. “I’ve been to Verisa before. I know damned well that Dane Sunrunner didn’t even spend half his time at the palace. I ran into him in a club there a few years ago. Man’s practically ripe for assassinations, wandering around one of the biggest cities in the world with just one bodyguard all the time.”

That was a fair point, and one I’d tried to make to my father once. He’d given me an indulgent smile and told me not to worry so much, and Aunt Rachel had told me to mind my own fucking business and stop trying to spend the family’s money on extra bodyguards my father didn’t need. It had never really stopped niggling at me, though, the fact that my father wasn’t careful with his own life.

“I mean, Nausa makes him dangerous, even if he’s not at his best,” I pointed out. I wasn’t even sure why I was trying to make it seem better, since I mostly agreed with Kit, but somehow I also felt responsible for my father’s behavior.

Kit scoffed, turning down a narrow side street I didn’t immediately recognize. “Nausa’s not a lot of use if someone slides up behind him and slips a knife between his ribs before he notices they’re there. And even a giant dire wolf isn’t terribly frightening if it’s so drunk it can only sleep.”

These were excellent points, and ones I’d considered myself in the past, but there had never been much I could do about them. My father, on the odd occasion he remembered I existed, still seemed to think I was a child. Any time I expressed an opinion, he treated it like I was a precocious five-year-old who was reciting my multiplication tables. So very cute and clever, but never saying anything worth listening to.

Kit turned down an even tighter blind alley, and suddenly we were in a parking garage. He hadn’t been kidding about knowing his way around Verisa.

He navigated the garage expertly, finding a space in a below-ground level and parking, and by the time he turned the car off, there was a woman in a stylish business suit with a tablet waiting next to the car. She gave him a coy smile when he stepped out. “Mr. Emrys. How nice to have you with us again. Your usual room?”

He smiled back, flirty and amused, but shook his head. “I’m afraid that won’t do this time. We’re going to need a security suite. Preferably something on the fifth floor.”

Her eyebrows shot up, but she nodded, holding up the tablet and scrolling through for a moment before nodding again. “I have just the thing. Is two bedrooms all right?”

“That’s fine,” he agreed.

The rest of us started spilling out of the car, and oddly, she made a point of not glancing at us.

“Indefinite?” she asked him.

“Indefinite,” he agreed. “But probably not more than a week.”

They exchanged some more pleasantries as he handed her a credit card and then she handed him an envelope with room keys she’d just made, and a moment later, she was gone.

“This is a hotel?” Ember asked, watching the woman disappear into an elevator. “Where’s the front desk?”

“It’s not that kind of hotel,” Kit answered, opening the back of the car and starting to grab bags. “But no one’s going to know we’re here, or where in the building we are. Or, frankly, who the hell we are.”

“She didn’t even look at us,” Frost pointed out, as I had also noted.

Kit chuckled at that, tossing his brother a bag. “Yeah, they pay attention to the driver, not who he’s bringing. Besides, if they’re going on previous experience, they were probably concerned I had Huxley Dawnchaser with me, and they sure didn’t want to know about that.”

Frost stared at him, mouth gaping open, so I tucked an arm into the crook of his. “On the plus side, I’m pretty sure Aunt Rachel would never in a million years think to look for me here.”

He looked back down at me, and his whole face transformed when he did. Sympathy, concern, and most of all, this sweet smile that I’d yet to see him offer his brother.

No, that smile seemed to be just for me.

“Help me up to the rooms?” I asked. “It’s probably a little pitiful since all I did was sit around the hotel and then sit around in the car all day and night, but I’m exhausted.”

“Of course,” he agreed immediately, his expression somehow going even more earnest. “And it’s perfectly understandable. You were injured saving all our lives in the crash.”

Fuck me, how was the man the most perfect creature ever born? So sweet, and at the same time, unbelievably sexy.

Ember groaned. “Oh that’s sickening.”

Kit shoved a bag into her chest, accompanied by lifted brows. “You were the one who wanted this, remember? Now you’ve got it. They’re adorable and flirting with each other. They’re even going to share a room so you can have one and not sleep on a couch, so deal with it.”

“Why would I be the one sleeping on a couch?” she asked, tone whiny and very “baby sister,” in my admittedly limited experience.

He scoffed. “I dunno, maybe because they’re both more injured than us? And no, a hairline ankle fracture doesn’t count as more injured than Frost having a blinding migraine for the last day after he saved our lives.”

She grumbled, but didn’t say anything else aloud and we all lapsed into silence as we followed Kit toward our rooms.

Me, I couldn’t stop thinking about how Kit had changed his tune about whether I was allowed anywhere near his brother. Was it just because of the accident? Or rather, the not-an-accident? Or maybe he just pitied me for the disaster that was my life, and the fact that apparently, Aunt Rachel was trying to kill me.

It was a little pathetic, when I thought about it from an outside perspective. It hadn’t even truly shocked me, the notion that my own aunt wanted me dead. She’d never liked me, never wanted me around. At best, I’d been mildly inconvenient for her. Why would it have been a surprise that she wanted me dead? Without me, she could be the Sunrunner, and no one would ever spend “the family’s money” without her permission again.

I had considered the possibility that it was one of Blair’s parents out to get me, but that didn’t actually make sense. The first incidents that Kit had assured me were attempts on my life had happened before I’d named Blair my heir, not after. Even now, my cousin would only inherit if everyone knew that my father died before me, so Dad would already have to be dead for that to work, and while he was currently missing, there had been no statements about it, no public outcry.

It was a little disheartening, in fact, that he could go missing for a week now, and no one would say a word about it. His own people didn’t even know that he was nowhere to be found.

Worse than that, I wasn’t sure they would care if they did know. What had my father done for them in the last decade? He’d almost stopped being Lord Sunrunner and fallen deep into a pit of his vices.

In fact, the whole mess made it harder to be angry with Aunt Rachel. She was almost certainly the one doing his job, after all, so didn’t she deserve the credit for it? The control that came with it? The power of Nausa?

Don’t be a jackass , Mella grumbled. You know better than anyone that no one ‘deserves’ a stone’s power. You’ve never been one of those entitled pricks who thinks just because a stone talks to you, you’re owed their power. You know that’s not the way to be .

It was a fair enough point. One of the first things Mella had told me when we’d bonded was that she didn’t go in for all that shifting stuff, and I’d never once questioned her. She had a right to choose, after all. It wasn’t as though I had a right to order her around any more than she had a right to order me around. We shared. If she wanted something, we discussed it, and same for me.

Rachel might be doing his job, but is Sunrunner better off for it? she asked, pressing her point. Look around your lands, Caspian. Your people. Are they happy? Has she done a good job? Homelessness in Verisa is up. Exports are floundering. Even tourism has suffered under Rachel, because she’s so fucking miserable that she doesn’t understand you have to spend money to do good .

Mella wasn’t wrong. For years, I’d been worried about the economy in Sunrunner lands. The fact that things were falling into disrepair and not being fixed, from Sunrunner-owned parks where tourists spent the spring and fall, to the palace itself. The fact that so many of our cattle ranchers were an aging lot with no one who wanted to take over their work when they retired.

Sunrunner lands were on the edge of crisis and had been for years. I’d felt both useless for not doing anything to stop it, and helpless to try, since no one in power listened to me. The few times I’d tried to forge ahead and help regardless of whether it was allowed, Aunt Rachel had responded with anger and even outright threats, so I’d mostly kept my mouth shut.

Once, I’d tried to press a plan to house and give jobs to the homeless of Verisa, but before it had even gotten off the ground, the government official in charge of allocating funding had been caught embezzling the money, and the whole plan had been wiped away as though it had never existed.

What did I even know about actually doing the work of running a country?

I could almost feel Mella roll her eyes at that, if she’d had eyes. I don’t know, everything you spent fifteen years being tutored in? You didn’t even go to real school like other kids. You got taught economics and politics and how to run a fucking country, by economists and politicians, starting before we ever met. You know more about how to run Sunrunner lands than the people doing it. Frankly, kiddo, it’s time for you to do the job. Father in crisis or not. If we find him alive and well, it’s time to tell him you’re taking over. Duel him if you have t o.

I can’t duel him, Mel , I sighed back. I don’t have a shift. He’d become a wolf and eat me .

You can and you will duel him , she answered, more stubborn than usual. I’m telling you. Find him and we’ll end this, once and for all. I’m sick of him and fucking Nausa ruining our country. Lazy ass, turning into a wolf and pretending that’s something oh-so-special .

I didn’t have the heart to argue any more, but also . . . I had absolutely no way to win a duel with anyone, least of all my father. I couldn’t even beat Aunt Rachel and her grizzly bear shift. She’d eat me alive.