Page 121 of The Unlikely Spare

“We need to blend in.”

Nicholas reluctantly ducks into the car and emerges a few minutes later. The royal prince has disappeared, replaced by a disheveled tourist with a T-shirt that hangs loosely on his frame and cargo shorts secured with what appears to be a braided belt adorned with wooden beads.

“I look like I collect refrigerator magnets and argue with tour guides about historical accuracy,” he says, adjusting the baseball cap over his dark hair.

“You look fine,” I reply.

Nicholas scans me up and down, his lip curled in distaste.

“Of all the crimes we’re committing today, I think our crime against fashion might be the most unforgivable.”

I can’t help snorting. Nicholas freezes, those blue eyes widening as if my laughter is some rare, endangered sound he wasn’t expecting to encounter in the wild.

For a moment, we just stare at each other. His T-shirt collar is slightly off-kilter, and I have to resist the urge to reach out and fix it, to let my fingers linger against his skin like they did last night in Auckland—Christ, was that only last night?

“We need to find a shop that sells phones.” Nicholas looks away.

I swallow hard. “It looks like the main town is that way. Keep your cap pulled low over your face.”

The electronics shop sits on a corner, its windows plastered with adverts for broadband deals and tourist SIM cards. I hesitate at the entrance, clocking three security cameras—one above the door, one behind the counter, one monitoring the back wall of phones. Unavoidable.

“Walk normally but keep your face angled away from the cameras,” I instruct Nicholas in a low voice. “Touch your nose frequently. It’ll disrupt facial recognition. And don’t speak.”

Inside, the air conditioning hits us like a wall of arctic air after the warmth outside. I select two basic phones while Nicholas hovers nearby, studying a display of phone cases with exaggerated interest. His fingers periodically rise to his face in a gesture that would look natural to anyone not specifically watching for it.

He shifts to let another customer pass, and his shoulder brushes mine in the narrow aisle. Fuck, the contact is electric even through layers of terrible polyester before he steps away with studied casualness. But I catch the slight hitch in his breathing.

The whole thing’s done in less than three minutes. The wad of local currency I routinely keep in my boot when undercover finally proved useful.

Once we’re back outside, we head toward the lakefront, which is a watery playground with kayakers and paddleboarders close to the shore. Farther out, jet skis carve frothy white trails like angry wasps and small boats trail water-skiers behind them.

Tourists are thick on the ground, phones up like they’re at a feckin’ concert.

Perfect. Nothing hides a runaway prince like a mob of lobster-red tourists in shite hats. Nicholas seems to sense this too, his posture relaxing as we join the flow of human traffic along the waterfront.

The irony isn’t lost on me that Nicholas, who usually can’t step outside without triggering a media frenzy, is now hiding in plain sight precisely because no one expects to see royalty dressed in clothes that would make a charity shop think twice.

Nicholas sits on a bench, immediately engrossed in his new phone, while I hover, trying not to be conspicuous as I scan thesurroundings for anything suspicious. I force myself to maintain professional distance, watching as his fingers fly across the screen. The afternoon sun lights his face, showing him brilliant and focused and so bloody beautiful. He’s looking at the images with an expression I can’t quite read—part vindication, part dread, like someone who’s just discovered they were right about something they desperately wanted to be wrong about.

“What is it?”

“One of the terrorists at Hobbiton yelled something at me. It sounded like the word ‘Haki.’ Last year, I opened a legal aid youth clinic in Nairobi, and I’m pretty sure it was called Project Haki.”

“How is that relevant?”

“Haki means justice in Swahili,” he says quietly.

He glances up at me, his eyes the same vivid blue as the lake, before he’s back to scrolling.

“Did you pay any attention to the protest signs when we were in Australia? There was a word I saw on a few of them.” He zooms in on a photo, which clearly shows a placard with the wordsMakarrata Now.

“Apparently makarrata means a coming together after a struggle, a process of truth-telling, conflict resolution, and justice,” he says quietly. “And in the signs from the protests against the monarchy in Auckland, there was a word that kept recurring. Tika. I’m willing to bet…”

The search takes seconds but feels longer, Nicholas’s breathing shallow as he scrolls through results. Then he goes absolutely still, his expression hardening into something between triumph and horror.

“Tika means justice.”

There’s a flush high on his cheekbones as he looks up at me. “Scotland Yard has been treating them as two separate threats, haven’t they?”