All Chapters of His Royal Slut: Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

The ballroom had become a cage, and every person inside it could feel the bars. Daniel stood at the center of the floor with the full weight of the crown in his voice and none of the usual diplomatic cushioning. The music had long since stopped. The servers had frozen along the walls. Guests who had spent the evening trading smiles and soft political knives now stood in tight, uneasy clusters while the palace security net closed around them with methodical precision. Doors that had opened freely an hour earlier were sealed. Outer gates reported locked. Vehicles in the courtyards had been immobilized under direct order. “Raine has been taken,” Daniel said, and the words carried cleanly to every corner of the room. “No one leaves these grounds until he is found. Not guests. Not staff. Not family. Anyone who attempts to leave without my authorization will be detained. And anyone who had a hand in his disappearance......” His gaze moved across the assembled faces with slow, lethal clari

The ballroom had gone from a place of music and false smiles to something closer to a courtroom held at knifepoint. Guests remained trapped inside the sealed space under the full weight of the king’s order. Some sat along the edges of the room in brittle silence. Others stood in tight, anxious clusters, voices reduced to whispers that died the moment a guard passed too near. The chandeliers still burned overhead, indifferent to the fear they illuminated. Outside the tall windows the palace grounds were locked down to the last gate. No car moved. No servant crossed a threshold without clearance. The entire machine of the royal household had been turned toward a single purpose: the return of the man who had been taken from the terrace. Daniel stood near the center of the floor with his jacket discarded and his sleeves pushed back, the controlled fury on his face enough to keep even the boldest diplomats from approaching. Reports reached him in a steady, unsatisfactory stream, empty

Rain stitched the capital into a blur of headlights and wet asphalt. In the front seats of the dark sedan, Raine’s parents spoke in the low, practical tones of people heading out for an ordinary dinner. Reservations had been made at a quiet restaurant across the river district, nothing extravagant, just a table by a window and a few hours away from ledgers and the rising tension of partnerships that had begun to feel less like partnerships and more like traps. Their younger son sat in the back, small enough that the seatbelt still crossed him at an awkward angle, cheek resting against the cool glass as city lights smeared past in the rain. He was six. The argument his father had carried home from a private townhouse days earlier had registered only as adult weather, raised voices behind a closed study door, his mother’s strained quiet afterward, the sense that something in the house had become brittle. None of it had names he could use. He knew only that his father’s hands had bee

By morning the kingdom had already rewritten the night into a thousand versions of the same truth. Clips from the sealed ballroom, smuggled out through devices the lockdown had failed to fully suppress, spread across every major platform before the sun cleared the eastern roofs of the capital. The images were imperfect, shot from difficult angles under chandelier light, but they were clear enough. The king’s voice carrying the order that no one would leave until Raine was found. The later entrance of the bloodied village accomplice. The queen on her knees. The folder of evidence held in Daniel’s hand like a verdict. The moment the former consort of the crown was taken from the floor under guard while the assembled elite watched in stunned, unbroken silence. Public reaction landed in layers. Praise for Daniel came first and hardest. Commentators who had spent years calling him cold, distant, or overly severe now spoke of resolve, of a king who had refused to protect blood at the exp

The hotel suite sat high enough above the capital that the city noise reached it only as a distant, softened murmur. Nathan had chosen the place years ago for exactly that quality, discretion, height, and the particular anonymity that money could purchase when a man did not want the palace’s walls around him at every hour. The private elevator opened onto a short, carpeted corridor. His usual detail stepped out with him, two men falling into the practiced formation they had used for as long as he had required a shadow. Nathan was a little drunk. Not helplessly so. Not enough to blur the important edges of the evening. Just enough that the long dinner, the barbs from Daniel, the residual heat of the ballroom revelations, and the weeks of finding and nearly losing a brother again sat a fraction looser in his chest than they normally would. The alcohol had rounded the sharpest corners. It had not removed them. He unlocked the suite door and stepped inside. The main bodyguard, the one