Maybe it’s how I’m dealing with my grief, but after we go inside, I head to my office and call for Mina. I tell her to bring me a feeder. Ten minutes later she returns, and I drink and drink, and I only let the woman go when Alivia steps in and tells me that it is enough.

I lick my lips as I watch the woman wobble out on shaking legs with Mina’s help.

I harden as I look back at Ian and Alivia. They sit on the plush couch against the far wall. I sit on the edge of my mahogany desktop, surrounded by a collection of things from all of my previous lives.

It’s been unused for nearly three hundred years, but it’s been taken care of as if I had been here just last week.

Eshan headed to bed. His human body needs it a lot more than the rest of us immortals.

“You can stop looking at me with those sad eyes,” I say, reaching for the tiny skull that sits on one corner of my desk. “Yeah, I’m an emotional mess right now and there’s a lot of shit going on inside of me, but I have a ton of crap to take care of, and not a lot of time to do it, so please, just stop with the pity.”

“You don’t have to be a bitch about it,” Ian growls. “We’re just trying to help.”

“This is how you can help,” I snap, glaring at him. “If you knew anything about me, you’d understand.”

I regret the words the instant they’re out of my mouth. I close my eyes, letting out a slow breath through my nostrils. “I’m sorry,” I say. “My nasty words get the best of me every once in a while.”

I open my eyes to meet Alivia’s, and there’s this little look in her eyes that says, I think I know where you get that from.

“You’re nearly all the help I have right now, and I do appreciate it,” I say, trying to make it better. “I just…I can’t deal with all the emotions piled up on top of the…stuff I have to figure out and do.”

“I get it,” Alivia says. “Everything I went through when taking over the House of Conrath made me into a little bit of a monster. And it’s nothing compared to everything you have to tackle. So if being nasty helps, be nasty.”

She actually pulls a little smile out of me.

It seems we have more in common than just our looks.

“Okay,” I say with a sigh, turning the little skull over in my hand without really realizing I’m playing with it. “Something just the two…three,” I correct, my eyes flicking over to Ian’s. It’s going to be a long, long while until we get along. “Of us need to talk about.” I take one beat, my eyes sliding back to my biological mother’s. “My father.”

I see Alivia actually recoil a little bit. She sits further back in her chair, her shoulders draw in a bit.

“Have you seen him here at Court?” I ask, point blank.

Ian looks over at Alivia and I can read a lot in his eyes. He’s worried for her. About how she’s handling all of this. But he also hates this. The fact that she had sex with a man who wasn’t him, even if it was years before they ever met, and something so heavy came of all this. Something that came back to haunt her and throw her life into so much chaos years later.

Ian is an asshole to me, to a lot of people in the world, I’d expect. But he does love Alivia, and I can see, he’ll do whatever he can to help and protect her.

“Yes,” Alivia says. She releases her breath as if she’s been holding it. She looks pale. “He was in the Great Hall when all the others gathered for the…questions. I knew it was him immediately.”

I’m actually relieved. This is one thing at least that is simple, black and white.

“Good,” I say with a nod. “Now, you said you were pretty sure he gave you a fake name when you met him.”

Alivia nods.

“So that raises one red flag,” I say, looking at the little skull. I think it’s from a squirrel. “And the fact that he ran into you, it just doesn’t seem like a coincidence, does it? One Royal and another?”

She shakes her head. “I’ve thought about it a lot over the years,” Alivia says. “I really don’t know how he could have known I was a Royal, unless he happened to be following my dad, Henry. Once he learned I was alive, my dad used to check in on me every once in a while. I guess he could have followed Henry and made some assumptions.”

“I don’t know what it would have mattered,” Ian says, shaking his head. “What’s the point of a Royal male getting a still-human Royal female pregnant? The end result would have been the same if he’d gotten just any regular human female pregnant.”

“So you think it was a coincidence?” I ask Ian.

He nods. “If it had been intentional, and he really had sought Alivia out, I mean, he would have recognized Liv yesterday. She wasn’t hiding. Wouldn’t he have remembered her and stepped forward to say something?”

He has a point.

“I think it was just a random hook up,” Ian says. “All the Royals admit it, there are some who just sleep their way across countries trying to create more offspring. To either add power to their House, or, well, to try and make you.” He gestures to me.

It makes me sick. But it’s true. Cyrus greatly rewarded the families I was born into. When I was Edith, it was my father’s major goal in life: to produce the offspring that would one day wake up as the Queen.

“I don’t know,” Alivia says, shaking her head. “It’s just…the odds of this happening randomly? They just have to be non-existent.”

She looks up at me, and I don’t know what to say. “I don’t know,” I admit, shaking my head. “Both arguments seem solid and logical. I think for now though, we have to treat this like he knew what he was doing. I don’t want to approach him yet, neither of us know anything about the man. But I think we need to see if he remembers Alivia or not. We have to test it.”

Ian nods. “It would give us some answers. If he plays dumb and doesn’t seem to remember Alivia, we’ll be able to tell. If he admits to it, we’ll know it was a power play and I’m sure he’ll be happy to claim responsibility for bringing you back into the world. It would give us some answers.”

I nod. “It’s a start. Alivia, we’ll have you discreetly identify him and then I’ll have Mina bring him in.”

She nods and I know Mina could hear everything when the door opens, revealing her, waiting just outside. Alivia and Ian stand, joining the menacing looking woman.

“Make him sweat first,” I tell Mina. “Let him imagine the worst and he’ll confess the truth easier.”

Mina nods and the three of them leave.