5. My Husband, the Prince

(Maxine)

Barely a day married and my new in-laws already had me under house arrest.

Honestly, on brand for a family that decorated with murder wards.

They'd given me the prettiest cell I'd ever seen. Silk on the bed, fresh flowers, a bathroom bigger than my first apartment, and a door that would not open for me no matter how sweetly I asked. Marwick warding. I'd run my hands over the frame twice hunting for a seam and gotten nothing but a low buzz against my palms that said, very politely, no.

Three hours of pacing the perimeter like a rescue dog nobody came for. Vampires don't do boxes. We get itchy. We start counting exits and finding exactly one, and then we start doing math about how many guards stand between us and it, and whether chewing through them would technically void the peace treaty.

The treaty. Right. The thing I was supposed to keep front of mind. I'd married Prince Morrison Marwick III to stop two kingdoms slaughtering each other for another two centuries, and also for reasons that were none of his business, and I was starting to suspect the second job would be harder than the first.

The door buzzed. Not for me. For him.

Morrison came in wearing yesterday's fury and a clean shirt, which was a genuine shame, because I'd been fond of the ruined one. Two fingers on his right hand were wrapped where the spell had taken the skin off saving my life. He didn't mention it. Obviously.

"Why did you drink my blood?"

No good morning. No how did you sleep in the panic room, darling. Straight to the point, like he'd rehearsed it in the mirror.

"Is that your opener with everyone, or am I getting the newlywed special?"

"You bit a mage prince on Council soil and you're still breathing. That doesn't happen. So either you knew my blood wouldn't kill you, which means you knew something about it you had no business knowing, or you didn't, which makes you the most reckless woman I've ever met." He crossed his arms. "I want to know which."

"Can't it be both?"

One word back would've told me I'd scored. He gave me nothing, which told me the same thing, only slower. His sentences went clipped whenever I got to him. I'd clocked that on day one, and I planned to milk it for the next ten years.

"You married me under false pretenses," he said. "That's the phrase the lawyers will reach for. I'd rather hear you say it."

"Sure. I married you under false pretenses." I perched on the arm of a chair worth more than a car. "So did you. So did every couple paraded across that island. That's not a marriage, it's a hostage swap with a seating chart. You want me to feel bad for wanting something out of the deal? Everyone wanted something. I'm the only one who smiled about it."

"What did you want?" Quieter now.

And there was the trap, wearing a question for a costume. Because the honest answer was a door I couldn't open for him any more than his wards would open for me. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

"A prince." I gave him all my teeth. "Obviously. I'm a social climber. You must've read the reviews."

He held my eyes a long moment. Whatever he was digging for, he didn't hit it, and my blank face bothered him more than a lie would have. A lie he could use. I handed him nothing to use.

"Stay in this room," he said at the door. "For your own safety."

"Allegedly."

"I mean it, Maxine."

"I heard you the first time."

I had zero intention of doing it. Whether I had the means was another question.

***

The door wouldn't open for me, but a door is only one way out of a room, and Marwicks had built this pile back when great houses still ran on staff nobody was meant to see. Behind the wardrobe: a narrow servants' passage, unwarded, because sealing a corridor a duchess would rather die than walk had apparently struck someone as a waste of a good spell.

Amateurs.

I wasn't running. Running is for people without a plan. I had one. I wanted the restricted archive, because somebody in this gorgeous murder palace knew exactly what had happened when I drank Morrison's blood, and exactly who'd fired an ancient spell through the wall to open me like a letter, and not one of them was volunteering. So I'd help myself. I've always been more of a self-service girl.

Finding it was the easy part. In a house this paranoid you walk toward whatever they've warded hardest. My nose did the rest: old paper, cold stone, and the ozone hum of a lot of magic stacked in one place.

I got exactly as far as the door.

It was a serious door. Iron, ancient, carved over every inch with the same notation that had tried to gut me the day before, humming hard enough that the soles of my feet buzzed from six feet off. I hadn't touched it. I was still calculating whether touching it counted as a bad idea when a voice behind me said, "Persistent. I'll give you that."

Morrison was propped against the far wall like he'd been there a while, arms folded, watching me case the one room in the building guarded better than the crown jewels. Of course he'd known I would escape my cell. He'd probably run a private book on how long I'd hold out before finding a way.

He must have noticed the look on my face, or perhaps mindreading was one of his magical abilities, unrecorded and thus absent from that file I’d read on him. Because when he next opened his mouth, he clearly knew what I’d been thinking.

"Twenty minutes," he said. "I had you down for forty. You've ruined a very smug morning."

"Add it to the list of ways I let you down." I didn't insult us both by pretending I'd wandered here by accident. "You could've told me what your blood did to me. This is what happens when a man hoards information."

"What it did to you?" He pushed off the wall and came at me, unhurried, and every step shut the distance until the warmth of him arrived a half-second early, his magic answering mine before the rest of him caught up. My skin lit like a struck match. Traitor. "You want to know what it did to you?"

"I mean. A little. It's been a strange day."

He stopped close enough that I had to tip my chin to hold his eyes, which I resented, because nobody looks unbothered craning their neck. His voice dropped. "It's carrying my magic through your body as we speak. I could find you anywhere in this palace with my eyes shut. When you're afraid, I taste it. When you're—"

He caught himself. Smart man.

"When I'm what?" Butter wouldn't have melted. I knew exactly what. That kiss we shared started it. I could hear his heart doing the thing it did whenever he stopped trusting his own face to behave.

He didn't bite. "Who are you protecting?"

The question strolled straight past every good defense I owned and knocked on the one door I keep locked. My face stayed easy. My face is a professional. But he stood near enough to catch whatever my body did that my face wouldn't, and the small, satisfied stillness settling over him said he'd caught it.

"Nobody," I lied. "Only child, no friends, a wildly overdeveloped survival instinct. Ask anyone."

He didn't believe me. Nobody should.

He studied me a beat longer, then filed whatever he'd decided somewhere for later. "One more question. Then I walk you back to your very expensive cell, and you can plan your next jailbreak in peace."

"So generous."

"Did you volunteer for this marriage because of me?"

And that one I could answer without lying, which was almost funny, because the true answer and the answer he'd believe were the exact same word. He thought he already knew what it meant. He had it completely wrong, and I intended to keep it that way as long as I possibly could.

"Yes," I said.

I didn't explain. He waited, and I let him wait, and something in his face slid out of plain suspicion toward something worse, something on its way to a real question. Then he walked me back in silence. The whole way I could hear his heart, steady and unconvinced, and his magic sat looped through me like a leash I'd never agreed to wear.

Fine.

We'd see whose leash it turned out to be.