CHAPTER FOUR
Sebastianos
“Buuuut… you promised me you’d be home last week.”
In most cases, a female voice henpecking me like that would be enough to make me grind my teeth and look for the nearest exit. But as it were, the owner of this particular feminine voice wore pigtails, was missing one of her front teeth, and carried a half-naked fashion doll everywhere she went.
“I came as soon as I could, Princess,” I said as I turned from my desk and smiled at Penelope, Crown Princess and heir to the throne of Cassia. She was my first cousin, but I treated her more like a little sister than was probably proper. “After I left the United States, I was asked to take care of some things in Italy that took longer than expected, but I’m here now.”
“I missed you, Sebby,” she said as she sprang into my arms before I was ready, nearly sending us both crashing to the floor as my computer chair wobbled beneath us.
“I’m fairly certain you’ve grown, Pen.” I gave her an assessing look. “You have. You’re nearly as tall as I am now.”
“And nearly as strong too,” she said as she flexed her bony little arm for me. I made my most impressed face and squeezed her little bicep between my thumb and forefinger.
“You’ve been doing your push-ups?” I asked, and she nodded enthusiastically.
“Swimming lessons too. I can make it across the entire pool and back now.”
“I’m proud of—”
“Your Highness, there you are.” Penelope’s middle-aged nanny came rushing into the room, and when she saw me, she stopped and dropped into a curtsey. “Your Grace.”
I nodded a greeting at the middle-aged woman. Her hair was bound into a tight bun and her prim skirt and blouse didn’t dare carry a wrinkle.
“Good morning, Mrs. Kent,” I said, turning my chair until Penelope faced her caregiver, who she’d likely given the slip as soon as she could that morning.
“I apologize for losing sight of Princess Penelope, Your Grace,” she said with a sigh. “She’s getting wilier each day.”
I gave Penelope a fake scowl, doing my best to not let my lips curl in amusement. “I expect nothing less from Her Royal Highness,” I said, knowing how much Penelope hated being called that. In retaliation, she tweaked my nose and darted from my lap and out the door.
“Best of luck to you, Mrs. Kent,” I said as the nanny turned and pursued her charge. “I believe you may need it.”
My reunion with Penelope over, I turned back to the stack of work waiting for me. My job seemed simple enough on the surface, but there seemed to be at least a million and a half moving parts when it came to the ever-revolving staff members and visitors, not to mention the fact that Riniasa Castle, home of the royal family, had about a million more rooms than could be safely monitored at all times.
It was a giant jigsaw puzzle that I feared would take a lifetime to piece together, especially since I’d been gone the past fourteen years, and while in the army, hadn’t kept up with royal protocol. Between making sure Penelope grew up into a proper queen, and now my responsibilities of projecting a positive image for the kingdom, it sometimes felt like the pressure fell squarely on me to figure it out sooner rather than later. And the pressure was intensifying, as there were whispers of plots and schemes that were getting louder every day.
We were a small nation on a larger island about the size of Alaska. We shared the island with our neighbor to the north, Amur, and our neighbor to the east, Baskos. The relationship between Cassia and the monarchy of Baskos was peaceful. The relationship with the Republican Nation of Amur? Not so much.
Sure, we had official diplomatic relations with their Premiere, but things weren’t necessarily friendly. They were fundamental and archaic — at least their government was — about many issues, namely religious freedom and the rights and freedom of women. It was a tricky situation that I’d always been happy not to have to figure out, but now that there were whispers that Amur wanted an unstable monarchy in Cassia, with the hopes of overthrowing our government. The whispers got worse once it was decreed that a female, namely Penelope, could take the throne, and because of the unrest, my role got a lot more complicated.
I sighed as I read through all of the briefings I’d missed while in America and then Italy. There were piles of them, and I’d been forced to work through lunch and probably would dinner before I even made a dent.
Nate, the mind reader that he was, arrived just after one in the afternoon and dropped a tray of food from the kitchen on my desk.
“Lifesaver,” I said by way of thanks as I dug into the meal. Our culinary specialties, thanks to our proximity to the ocean, were fish-based, but I’d never been the biggest fan of seafood and was forced to stomach it at most State events. The kitchen staff knew my preferences, keeping me full of all my favorites — pastitsio, souvlaki, moussaka, or keftethes for starters, but anything filled with a hearty beef wouldn’t be turned down.
“How’s it going?” Nate asked as he took his seat on the other side of my huge desk.
I motioned to the stack in front of me. “Boring as hell,” I said between bites. “You?”
Nate worked on side projects for me, investigating rumors and intelligence further than I had time to. He was good at it too. His ability with a computer was a gift.
“Nothing substantial,” he said with a shrug. “Just a lot of online whispers and smoke in mirrors — no details. Frustrating.”
I grunted as I chewed. I understood perfectly. I was mindlessly flipping through my secret social media account that nobody but Nate knew existed when a random picture of a llama sticking its tongue out popped up on an American celebrity’s profile.
I couldn’t help but think of the last time I saw a llama and the adorable woman wearing the shirt. I hated to admit that I thought about Little Ana Pipsqueak more often than I should have. I reasoned that it was because she’d disappeared like a wisp of smoke before I woke up, leaving me feeling off-center and more than a little disappointed.
She hadn’t even left a phone number or a last name, only a scant few details that my hungover brain had struggled to remember the next day. Graduate student. Studying abroad for the remainder of the year. No sex for the past eight months. Nicknamed Squeaks. Spent a summer in Peru. Llama lover. That was it. Despite the lack of details, Ana had never really left my thoughts since that night, and I was impatiently waiting for my memories of our night together to disappear like all the others.
But it wasn’t.
Nate slid a paper across the desk toward me, and I glanced down at it. “What is it?”
“Request to put an official portrait session on His Majesty’s and the princess’s calendar later next week,” Nate said. This was a lot of what my day was about. If anybody in or outside the palace wanted the presence of the princess, they had to submit a formal request, and it was up to me to make sure everything was properly prepared.
Sometimes, I felt more like a nanny than a duke, the title I preferred to that of prince.
I looked over the details that the Office of the Royal Photographer sent over. A two-hour session in the throne room and the east gardens next Thursday at nine in the morning. I glanced at the proposed attendees and saw nothing amiss. Thierry Masters, the photographer, three assistants, one new intern who’d been vetted and cleared while I was gone, and a catering team.
I signed off on the request and put it in the pile that would go to my secretary who would put the events on Penelope’s calendar and forward it to the king’s personal secretary to do the same. So much paperwork for such simple things, I thought to myself as I sent the assignment to our head of security who would then assign guards and agents to spots around the two locations of the photo shoot.
“Done,” I said and handed a printout of the plans to him. From there, he cleared it with the king’s staff and would take it back to Master’s office.
Not every event was that simple, but this one involved no outsiders who hadn’t been cleared, and no public would be attending.
“Thanks,” he said as I finished my lunch. “Settling in okay?”
I gave a nonchalant shrug at the question. Sitting at a desk wasn’t my favorite thing to do, but I hadn’t been given much choice in the matter. “It’s fine,” I said, but the face Nate gave me let me know he saw right through me.
“Bored out of your mind, aren’t you?”
I tossed my linen napkin on the tray and re-covered the plate with the silver dome it’d arrived under. “It’s an adjustment, that’s all.” It had been a difficult adjustment too. When I’d been essentially forced to retire, I’d been head instructor at the army’s search, evacuate, extract, and rescue school. It was a twelve-week course for the elite in the Cassian special forces, and it was one of the hardest combat training schools in the world, something I’d worked to maintain the past six years that I’d been there. We took in special forces operatives from all over the world too. I’d trained soldiers from the States, Canada, Korea, Britain, New Zealand, and Australia, just to name a few.
But duty had called. More specifically, Uncle Demetrius had called. Repeatedly. To the point that my commanding officer nearly chewed my ear off at the fact that I’d neglected to return three phone calls from our reigning monarch.
I knew what he wanted — me. He wanted me in the palace and safely away from any conflict brewing in the world, and he wanted my help keeping Penelope safe as the world got scarier and scarier while terrorists and extremists grew bolder every day.
It was the last half of that request that had won me over in the end, as my uncle would never force me to do anything I didn’t want to. But Penelope? That little cousin of mine could snap her fingers, and I’d come running. The precocious little girl with her blonde hair and bright blue eyes had been born two months after I lost a buddy in a firefight in the Middle East. It was the time I spent on leave holding the baby long nights while her mother struggled to recover that got me through my pain.
Penelope had me at her first smile. And for her, I’d leave a career that I loved that kept me far from my family and return to the crush of people around the palace. The glare of the paparazzi’s attention to my every move, the celebrity status that meant nothing to me besides a loss of personal freedom.
I didn’t have to endure the type of exposure most monarchs did, but what I did deal with was much more than I liked.
In the big picture, I got it. I understood what I was doing and why things needed to change. But during the day-to-day adjustment, I wasn’t particularly thrilled with my life. After so much excitement and comradery, it had grown empty, aside from Penelope, my uncle, and Nate, and full of small tasks that didn’t exactly make me think that I was really doing anything with my life.
“It’ll get better, Seb,” Nate said with a pointed look, and all I could do was give a curt nod. He’d left his position in army intelligence to join me here as my second-in-command, and while I called him my assistant, he had quite a lot of responsibilities of his own.
“It’s not bad.” I felt a stab of guilt for even complaining that much. “It’s just not what I’m used to, that’s all.”
I was trying to be as reasonable as I could, all the while knowing that I was being unreasonable and probably a little ungrateful for having such a hard time adjusting to my loss of personal freedom. I’d been the Duke of Becktonas for three months now, made so the minute after my father died of an aneurism unexpectedly. He had been the king’s younger brother, who was still morning the loss of his most beloved wife, Queen Helena, Penelope’s mother, just a month after my cousin was born.
It made sense that my uncle was trying to hold his remaining family together as tightly as he could — the royal family had suffered more loss in the last decade than in the past one hundred years.
But it didn’t make it easier.
I tried not to follow my friends from the training range too closely on social media because that ugly little jealousy bug would bite now and then, and I’d wonder what I’d be doing in that moment if I were back in my old life.
Letting out a long breath, I stood and carried the tray to a corner table for a servant to deal with later. “Thanks for lunch,” I said with a carefree smile I didn’t quite feel.
Nate just narrowed his eyes at me as he stood. “Things will get more exciting, Seb.”
I looked around the luxurious room and felt guilty for being so damn ungrateful. “You think?”
He gave me a little salute and headed toward the door. “Yes. I can feel it.”