I was so scared I could barely breathe.
Henry was here.
3
Henry
A lot of guys complain that they think with their dick too much. Always the penis, always getting them into situations they really shouldn’t be in.
I always thought it would be nice if my dick would think, though. Or my brain, or my heart, or even my big toe, for God’s sake. Because I was starting to believe that my problem was that I didn’t think with anything at all.
It was absolutely, definitively, completely fucking stupid to have gotten in this sleek, black car with Sebastian but there was no way on Earth I could have ever backed down from his challenge.
I had seen it in Sebastian’s eyes, as he tried to puff himself up and stand up straight and look at me like I was some sort of peasant that meant nothing to him, just because he was on track to become a king.
After years of ignoring me, that had been his reaction.
Years and years and years of him refusing to contact me, even though I knew damn well he could have if he’d tried. He was a prince, for fuck’s sake. He could have pulled strings. He could have found me. He could have told me why on Earth he was bending to the will of his ice-cold mother, why he still lived in the castle even though I knew damn well he hated it.
But he’d never tried to contact me.
And now he was sitting, rigid and expressionless, right next to me, and his indifference to me was more palpable than ever.
He certainly looked princely as he stared down at a pocket-sized leather-bound notebook, clutching a pen that looked like it was made out of pure gold. His knuckles were white as he scrawled in the notebook, probably drafting some decree that would lead to banning me from Berrydale for all time.
“Fuck you,” I said simply as I watched Sebastian, and was immediately met with four pairs of staring eyes. “Jesus, keep your eyes on the road,” I said to the driver.
“My name is Xavier. And what did you just say to the Prince?” the driver said, thankfully turning back to the front. The rest of them still stared at me.
“I’ll say it again louder this time,” I told Sebastian, staring right at him. “Fuck you.”
The woman in the front seat gasped.
“Unacceptable,” Xavier said, turning on his blinker to pull over.
“Keep going, X,” Sebastian said, briefly putting his hand on Xavier’s shoulder.
“How can you allow this man—”
“This man is Henry Denton,” Sebastian declared, his voice calm and unaffected. “He was… my friend, when we were children. It’s been a long time since we’ve seen each other.”
“Eleven years,” I said. “Of silence.”
“Ten years and ten months,” Sebastian clarified, his lips slightly parted as his eyes danced across my face. “Henry and I have matters to discuss, which will be sorted when we’re back at the castle. But I promise you, he means me no harm.”
“Glad to hear you still trust me that much, Sebastian,” I said.
He swallowed, his jaw set tightly. “We’ll have him at dinner tonight, too. Genoveve, let the staff know we’ll have one extra.”
The woman in the front seat must have been his assistant. She nodded, but still looked at me with questioning eyes.
I puffed out a laugh. “Like hell I’ll be eating at a dinner table in that castle.”
Sebastian looked back down at his notebook. “Mother is out tonight, visiting a cousin a few hours north,” he said. “We’ll need someone with a sharp tongue to take her usual spot, won’t we?”
“Don’t speak of your mother this way,” Xavier chided him, like he’d had to say the same thing a thousand times before.
It was a massive relief knowing that his mother would be out of the castle. But it still didn’t mean that I had any intention of going to a dinner in the place. Sebastian’s gaze made me feel like I was a bug he might squash at any moment, and I had a laundry list of things to do back at my own cottage, anyway.
I was furious when I looked at him. His cheekbones that had only become more defined after years of time. The hard look in his eyes, where back in the day there had only been innocence.
He was breathtakingly handsome, and yet it seemed like all of the light and life had been ripped from him so long ago. The yearning that used to inhabit his gaze was replaced with a tight caginess, like he was a starved wolf, protecting himself no matter the cost.
Time had done beautiful and awful things to Sebastian. But the boy I’d once known was clearly gone.
“The tangerines, please,” Sebastian said to one of the servants that had come to his side, displaying a tray full of options for us to snack on. She placed the bowl of fresh fruit on the table between us.
Sebastian had swiftly taken me through the stone halls of the castle the moment we’d arrived. In the car I had been so focused on watching him, getting angrier with each time I looked his way and found him furrowing his brow and looking down at his notebook.
He’d barely even glanced at me for most of the drive up to the castle. When we’d finally arrived, I stepped out and looked at the castle up close for the first time in my life.
It was colossal. Seeing it so close felt like a dream. I’d stared at the thing from down in the village for so many years, but I’d never been nearby. It had felt malevolent, somehow, like a place I had always been better off staying far away from.
It still felt that way. There was no denying its beauty, but Frostmonte Castle was no place I wanted to be.
I’d gotten chills up my spine as Sebastian took me through the corridors. I hadn’t thought about ghosts in years, but Frostmonte reminded me of every night I spent as a kid, being afraid a ghost was lurking around every corner.
Even if the castle didn’t have real ghosts, Sebastian himself felt like one to me now. A relic of my past. Something that used to be so alive, so kind, but now existed only as a shadow of himself.
We were sitting in a small room now. The walls were all stone, of course. The decorations were ornate, with beautiful dark red drapes around small windows, pulled back to reveal breathtaking views of the lands and villages below. The chairs we sat on were soft burgundy leather, framed in some expensive-looking dark wood.
The room was dark other than the pure light coming in from the window at our side.
Nobody could have looked as haunting just eating a slice of tangerine as Sebastian did. I had forgotten how much his presence changed a room—back in the day, he seemed to make any place quieter and more peaceful, but today…
Today everything felt charged. Like Sebastian knew how much power he had, and he wasn’t afraid of it like he used to be.
“So is this why you made me get in the car?” I said.
He lifted an eyebrow.
“So I would sit here and watch you eat orange slices?” I continued. “You must be even lonelier than I thought, Sebastian.”
He eyed me, and I swore I saw him trying to hold back a smile. “I knew you’d still be the same, Henry.”
“You don’t know me at all,” I said quickly, my voice rising a little despite my best efforts to seem unperturbed.
I curled in on myself. It was cold in the castle to begin with, but this little room was drafty, and I couldn’t stop feeling like Sebastian himself was radiating ice.