Chapter 1
I stared at my father, waiting for him to say something after the bombshell he’d dropped on me. The torment in his eyes was too much to bear, and it was almost a relief when he turned his head away.
My mind whirled as I tried to think of a response to his declaration that the Seelie crown prince was my brother. My brother, who had died twenty years ago, when he was two months old. The only plausible explanation was that the stress of my near-death had caused Dad to have a mental setback.
Guilt pressed down on me. The doctors had warned me this could happen if he didn’t take it slowly. I needed to call them. The possibility of Dad having to go back to the treatment facility gutted me, but we couldn’t risk his health. Fifty percent of recovering goren addicts went back to using within the first year, and my father would not be one of them.
I laid my hand over his. “Dad, you look pale. Maybe you should lie down for a few minutes.”
“I don’t need to lie down. I’ve slept enough in the last four months.”
“But –”
He swung his gaze back to me. “I’m okay, Jesse. It’s a shock and a lot to take in, but it’s not a delusion.”
I stared into his clear eyes. His tone was rational, and he didn’t look like someone on the verge of a mental breakdown. But his claim that a faerie prince was his dead son was the kind of thing that got people admitted to a psych ward. All I could think of to do was hear him out and see where it went.
“Can you tell me about it?”
Dad drew in a shaky breath. “I don’t know where to start.”
I reached over to take his hand. “Why do you think Prince Rhys is Caleb? Did someone tell you that?”
“No. Your mom recognized the prince when she saw Tennin’s photos of him. She said the hair is different, but the prince has my eyes, and he looks like I did when I was twenty.” Dad let out a weak laugh. “I know how that sounds because I thought the same thing at first.”
“Why didn’t Tennin tell me this?”
Dad shook his head. “He didn’t know. Your mother didn’t tell me until we were back in the car. I thought she was imagining the resemblance until she pulled out an old photo of me she keeps under the visor.”
I realized I was holding my breath. “And?”
“If my hair was blond, I could have been Prince Rhys’s twin when I was his age.”
I had to see this for myself. Standing, I went to the cabinet where Mom kept all the photo albums. They were labeled by year, and I pulled out the one for my parents’ late teens. My heart thudded as I carried the album back to the couch and sat beside Dad. I stared down at the cover, afraid of what I would see when I opened it.
“Do you want me to do it?” Dad asked when I made no move to look inside.
“No.” I lifted the cover. The first few pages were of Mom with her high school girlfriends, followed by an 8x10 photo of her in her cap and gown. I turned the page slowly to reveal Dad’s graduation picture, and it was as if someone had punched all the air from my lungs.
“Oh, my God,” I whispered. Whipping out my phone, I brought up one of the thousands of online pictures of the Seelie crown prince. I laid the phone beside Dad’s photo, and my world tilted on its axis. It wasn’t only the eyes that were the same. Prince Rhys and the eighteen-year-old version of my father had identical smiles and the same tiny cleft in their chins. The prince had more refined features, like a marble statue with all its imperfections polished away, but Dad was right. They could have been twins.
I looked at Dad, who was watching me expectantly. Twenty-three years had passed since that photo was taken, and his face was leaner now with crow’s feet near his eyes and lines around his mouth. When I looked past those things, all I could see was the young man smiling up at me from the album.
“How did I not see it? The first time I talked to Prince Rhys, I felt like I’d met him before, but I thought that was because his face was everywhere.” I shook my head. “What about Bruce, Maurice, and your other friends who knew you back then? None of them saw a resemblance between you and the most famous faerie in the world?”
Dad shrugged. “I doubt they would remember exactly what I looked like back then without seeing a photo. That happens when you age together. As for everyone else, people don’t always see what is in front of them, especially when they aren’t looking for it. Who would think to make a connection between me and the Seelie prince? You didn’t.”
I looked down at the two photos. I knew from personal experience how easy it was not to see something that was right in front of your eyes. I still wondered how I hadn’t realized who Lukas was until Rogin Havas had let it slip.
I pursed my lips as I searched for the right words to phrase what had to be said. “Prince Rhys looks like you, but that doesn’t mean he’s Caleb. I mean…Caleb died. You and Mom saw him, and there was an autopsy and a funeral.”
I flinched internally and saw an answering expression on Dad’s face. He and Mom never liked to talk about that time, but there was no way around it now.
He shifted position and glanced away before meeting my eyes again. “The medical examiner said Caleb died from pulmonary atresia, which is almost always diagnosed soon after the baby is born. Caleb was two months old, and he didn’t have any of the symptoms. He looked like a normal, healthy baby. Your mom…” He swallowed. “She didn’t believe the dead baby she found in the crib was ours. She said a mother knows her own child, and that someone had switched her baby for a dead one.”
Dad’s voice cracked on the last word. Tears pricked my eyes, and I blinked them away.
“The baby looked like Caleb, and the M.E. said there was nothing suspicious about his death. I explained that to your mom, but she was too distraught to believe it. Nothing would convince her Caleb was dead.”
“What did you do?” I asked around the rock lodged in my throat. I had always seen the sadness in Mom’s eyes when Caleb’s name came up, but my parents had never gone into detail about his death, other than the cause.
He cleared his throat. “I thought she would come to accept it after a few days, but she refused to even make the funeral arrangements. And then she started going up to strangers with babies to check that their baby wasn’t Caleb.” Dad paused, his face etched in pain. “It was bad for the first year. After a while, she started to be more like her old self, but I don’t think she was happy again until we found out she was pregnant with you.”
“You guys never told me any of this,” I said hoarsely.
“Your mom didn’t want you to know. It was a very dark time in our lives, and she was ashamed of how she behaved.” His face twisted in agony. “No one believed her when she said the baby wasn’t Caleb – not even me. And all this time, she was right.”
Needing to do something, I laid the album on the coffee table and got up to walk around the room. It hurt too much to think about what my parents had suffered back then, so I focused on their disappearance.
“What happened the night you disappeared, Dad?”
He straightened his shoulders as if he was shaking off the pain. “Your mom wanted to see the prince in person. We called one of our contacts at the Ralston and found out he was doing a photo shoot in the small ballroom on the sixth floor. The odds of getting near him were slim, but we had to try.” Dad stared past me as he remembered the events of that night. “The moment we stepped off the elevator, I knew your mom was right. Prince Rhys is Caleb.”