Not that he’d tell Mark any of that. His brother needed Kris’s unfazed, raffish front—needed to sigh and roll his eyes. Because if Kris started acting too seriously, it’d be a neon warning sign that he was freaking the hell out, and Mark, being Mark, would back down from his abdication.
And that was not going to happen.
“The view from up here still makes my head spin,” Kris said. “But I’m getting used to it.”
Mark glanced distractedly out the nearest window. “I meant how are you holding up after last night.”
Oh. The engagement party? “Fine. It didn’t get that wild.”
He received a pained glance. “I thought it might have made you think of someone,” Mark said carefully, “and how much you miss her.”
Gut suddenly aching, Kris looked away.
He didn’t need an engagement party to remind him of Frankie. She was an emotional shadow, clinging to the heels of his heart, always half a thought away. The last time he’d seen her . . . it haunted him. I can’t do this, she’d told him. In the months since, he’d called, messaged, emailed—and heard nothing. At first, her silence had burned a hole in him, and restless frustration had poured out. He’d hardly been able to sit still. After a while, he’d forced himself to accept the obvious.
She’d returned to Sage Haven and heard the town gossip. The news—the extent of the secret he’d kept from her—had broken her trust in him. Without that, he wouldn’t hear from her again.
His fault.
All his fault.
Sometimes he crouched on the brink of going after her. He could skip the country, fly back home, and beg for her forgiveness. Lying awake at night was the hardest. Her absence would scrape over him like a phantom touch and he’d churn up the covers knowing he couldn’t keep living without her.
But he had no choice.
He was a prince of Kiraly. Soon to be the king. Slipping security in the city was one thing, but he wasn’t so irresponsible as to abandon his duty.
“Yeah,” was all he said to Mark, because he couldn’t remember if he’d asked a question.
“You still haven’t heard from her?” Mark shifted, sliding a hand in his pocket, looking uncomfortable. “At all?”
“Not so much as a snicker.”
Mark shook his head, gaze down and jaw tight.
“Don’t hold it against her.” Frankie didn’t deserve Mark’s blame. “I kept all this from her. Pretty big deal.”
Mark didn’t answer. Jaw still locked, he headed toward the door.
“Say hey to Ava and Darius for me.”
That broke the tension in his brother’s shoulders. Mark relaxed as he quirked a brow over his shoulder. “In response, I’m guessing Ava will scold you for walking out of the summit.”
“Not a doubt in my mind.”
Grinning, Mark closed the door behind him.
Kris leaned back in his chair, mentally trailing his brother down the stone steps that spiraled through the tower like an apple peel. Once he was confident Mark had reached the floor below, he pulled out his notebook from the bottom desk drawer, flipped it open and frowned over his recent speculations.
Yes, he’d put up his hand to be king.
But there were three persisting problems with that.
Everyone was well aware of the first. He had a strained relationship with authority—including his own authority, which he struggled to take seriously.
The second was Frankie. Kind of hard to rule a kingdom with a gaping hole in his chest.
The third was contained within the pages of this notebook. Theories, guesswork, hunches, and clues. He wasn’t a detective by a long stretch, but without knowing who he could trust—aside from Mark and Tommy, whom he refused to worry with his suspicions—he’d been left to handle this himself.
This being his deadliest source of stress: his conviction that the late royal family’s deaths had not been the accident the official investigation had claimed.
They’d been murdered.
And to keep the kingdom safe, it was up to him to prove it.
“Right, who wants to tell me what we’re doing here?” Frankie stood with arms crossed in the palace surveillance room, staring down a select group of her team.
Kris’s security detail.
Every single one of them looked unusually wide-eyed for five-thirty in the morning. Admittedly, Frankie in a bad mood got her team out of bed faster than a flipped mattress.
The king-in-training’s two main personal guards, Peter and Hanna, were positioned the closest. They’d accompanied him almost everywhere inside the palace and out since the day he’d arrived. Frankie had selected Peter, a lean-muscled man in his mid-forties, for his quiet competence and extensive military experience, while Hanna was the royal guard’s youngest member. Razor-eyed and quick-minded, the twenty-three-year-old was as enthusiastic as she was disciplined. She’d transferred from the police force where she’d consistently ranked best mark. Several of the other half-dozen guards in front of Frankie watched Kris overnight and on Peter and Hanna’s days off. The rest escorted the prince when he ventured beyond the palace grounds.
As he had last night.
“I imagine it has something to do with the footage you’ve lined up for us.” This suggestion came from Hanna as she cocked her head toward the nearest screen, her long blond ponytail swaying. Her uniform was impeccable, right down to the creases in her navy trousers.
Frankie arched a brow. “Care to be more specific?”
The woman winced. “And the fact that Prince Kristof disappeared again last night.”
“Bingo.”
There was a mass shamed shuffling of feet.
“We can all count.” Frankie’s agitation was running wild. She’d hoped it wouldn’t come to this, but royals were only allowed to disappear on her watch when she let them. Kris might think nothing of his own security, but it was Frankie’s job to protect him and he’d finally made that impossible to do from a distance. “This has happened too many times.”
Last night bumped it up to disappearance number five.
“Would we all like to find out how he does it?” No one was foolish enough to respond. “The last time he slipped you, I took the liberty of installing security cameras at his go-to hot spot.” The Bearded Bunting, a bar well outside the city’s nightlife district. It attracted few tourists—the bar was mostly a place for locals coming together to drink and dance and hook up. Basically, a melting pot of Kris’s favorite pastimes. “Let’s watch, shall we?”
Pressing play, Frankie turned her back on the screen under the pretense of assessing the reactions of her team. In truth, she couldn’t stomach watching it again.
She knew by the slight roll of Hanna’s eyes that Kris was dancing up close with several women in the bar’s back courtyard. Knew by Peter’s growing frown that his own face was captured as Kris wove past him to get inside, gesturing to the guard that he was grabbing another drink. Next up was a camera switch, and her team looked momentarily alarmed as they struggled to find him in the crowd. Not just due to the long shot taken from the rear of the room, but the ludicrous fashion trend that had exploded throughout the city since the brothers had arrived—cowboy chic. There were plaid shirts in every color combination, blue jeans, kerchiefs and cowboy hats. Kris wasn’t as easy to spot as he should have been leaning in to talk with a woman in a cute sundress, who looked delightedly shocked by whatever he’d suggested. And Frankie knew by the cringes of every single guard when Kris ducked beneath the crowd cover, removed his telltale checkered shirt and hat, and straightened in a white tank with the woman wrapped around his waist. As he wove through the crowd, she tugged a cap over his hair, wrapped her arms around his neck, and angled her head to kiss the side of his face—her long hair effectively shielding him as he ducked out the door.