I stare at the letter, but none of the words make sense. I can make out my brother's signature, the stamp of his royal signet ring, and the gold embossed crown and coat of arms at the top, but the handwritten letters swim on top of the official court stationery like I'm staring into a linen-colored alphabet soup. My dyslexia is picking the worst time to make a comeback. Confusion does that to me. Makes it harder to read, harder to concentrate, harder to do everything.

I thrust the sheet at my assistant, Louis, whose complexion is ghostly white. “Read it to me.”

He clears his throat. "I, Stephen the Fifth, of the Kingdom of Matlavia, the Dominions of Ceramine, and the Isles of Lithos, do hereby declare and affirm my renunciation and abdication of the Throne for myself and for my descendants. This declaration and affirmation shall be given full force and effect immediately."

I rip the letter out of Louis’s hand and stomp to the desk phone, leaving him standing there in stunned and paralyzed silence. I almost break my finger jabbing the top button on my keypad. The phone rings only once before I hear, "hullo?"

"Dammit, Steve, April Fool's was last month. You get zero points for pranking everyone a month and a half later. This is—"

"It's Johan, Your Highness. I'm sorry for not answering the phone according to protocol, but King Stephen—I mean, His Royal—Mr…" He trails off. "Sorry," he says in a choked voice.

I pull the phone away from my ear and stare at it. Johan is Steve's right-hand man. He used to be the head of the Royal Guard and the Matlavia Special Forces. That guy doesn't cry. I don't think he's equipped with tear ducts. What in the hell is going on? There's no way Steve abdicates. He's been abducted and forced to write this! I snap the phone back to my ear.

"There better be a damn good reason that you're still breathing while my brother's been kidnapped. Don't move. I'm coming up." I slam the phone down and march to the door. "Louis, alert the Guard. I want a team in the Chamber within the next ten minutes."

"Shall I call a meeting of the Councilors, too?" Louis worries, trotting beside me.

"No. I don't want any leaks until we figure out exactly why Steve was taken. Is it political? Money? What? Now tell me everything about this letter. Where? Who? What? Why?" I force myself to walk normally. The Royal Chambers are a suite of five rooms solely occupied by the King of Matlavia. One of them is where Steve conducts all his personal business and then the rest are his private living space. Unfortunately, they are on the opposite side of this damn thirty-thousand-square-foot palace and it's going to take ten minutes to get there, but if I run, everyone in the palace will know that something's wrong.

I nod to a passing valet carrying linens and then to a maid watering plants. There's a shit ton of people around the palace at all hours of the day and night. There's no damn privacy here even though it's big enough to house a dozen families.

When I arrive at the Royal Chambers, the first thing I notice is the absence of guards. Usually there are two on either side of the door. I whip open the heavy double wooden doors expecting to find a team of guardsmen pouring over maps, radioing search teams, marshalling a rescue squad. Instead, it's a slipper-clad Johan with worry lines in his brow so deep, I could plant wheat grains, and Commander Brande of the Royal Guard.

"Where is he?" I ask.

Both Johan and Brande bow deeply. I frown. Too deeply. I'm the dilettante second son. The spare. I get half bows from the staff and bare head nods from people like the Commander, who think my scandals are bad for the kingdom.

Johan walks over to me and hands me another letter, which I promptly shove at Louis.

"Read it," I order and walk to the floor-to-ceiling windows that overlook the king’s private garden. On my way, I shove a set of golf clubs out of my path. Stephen and his damn golfing obsession. Maybe he’s drunk on the seventeenth green.

"But, sir," Johan balks. "There's sensitive information in there."

"Louis has been reading my shit since I was ten," I remind my brother’s secretary. Everyone knows I have dyslexia. It's no secret. "It doesn't look like a ransom letter."

"No." Louis shakes his head. "It's not. It's another letter in King Stephen's hand explaining that he no longer wishes to marry or be king and that he's very sorry for the trouble he's caused but asks Johan and Brande to help you be a good king."

"This is bullshit. Steve has never once indicated he doesn't want to be king, and I know for a fact he has zero problem marrying Lady Callista." I saw the two of them having sex in the private family pool about a month ago and it wasn't some mild, arranged marriage sex. It was full-on hair-pulling, ass-slapping, deep-thrusting fucking. I was thrilled as shit that Steve and Callie were this compatible, because Steve always said that he hoped I'd marry for love since he couldn't.

If he wasn't in love with Callie, their incendiary sex life could make up for a lot of ills. I figured I would be an uncle in nine months or less. I address the Commander. "You need to get your guard together and figure out who took Steve. The longer we stand around with our dicks in our hands, the farther away he gets."

The Commander shakes his head. "There's no evidence he was taken. I've reviewed the security tapes on the grounds. King Stephen left at seven p.m. accompanied by his personal security contingent. At seven twenty, they arrived at the airport. A private jet took off seventeen minutes later. It is in the air currently. We radioed the pilot and he affirmed that he is flying King Stephen to America with his mistress, Aliyah Khoury. The two do not plan on returning."

"Mistress?” Straight-arrow Steve with a mistress? The fashion designer Aliyah Khoury? And after that fuckfest in the pool with Callista? No way. “Okay, so we know this chick kidnapped him. Let’s fuel up a jet and go.” I spin around from the windows and clap my hands to get some action.

"I spoke with him," Commander Brande interrupts. "He repeated the same thing to me—that he no longer wishes to be king, that the arranged marriage is the last thing he wants, and that you should take the throne.”

“That’s such utter bullshit.” I gape at Johan and then Commander Brande. “Why are you still standing here? He’s being forced to say that shit at gunpoint!”

Angry that no one seems to care that my brother the KING has been kidnapped by some deranged woman claiming to be his mistress, I do what I should have done earlier if I’d been thinking straight—I grab my phone from my pocket and call my brother.

He picks up immediately. “I’m so sorry Thom.”

“Are you okay? Shit, don’t worry, Steve, we’re working on a way of getting you free from whoever has kidnapped you, just tell me where you are—”

“Thom,” Steve interrupts me firmly. “Stop. I’m not in any danger.”

“What the fuck? Of course you are! Whoever forced you to write this abdication letter will be caught, I promise you.”

“Thom!” Steve’s voice is rising. “Are you alone?”

“No, I’m with the goons who let you be kidnapped.” I glare at Johan and Brande.

“I wasn’t kidnapped and it’s not their fault. Look, go somewhere private so we can talk without being overheard.”

I walk to Steve’s bedroom and shake my head when Louis starts following me. It’s actually not completely private since there are security cameras installed there, but it’s all video, no audio. I close the door behind me and drop into an armchair. “Okay, I’m alone now. What the hell is going on?”

Steve sighs and I can hear the weight of the world in that long breath. “I’m sorry, Thom, it’s no joke, I’m abdicating.”

My hand grips the phone so tightly I’m afraid the case will crack. “Why? Please tell me how you can do this, because I don’t understand.”

“That’s the problem—I can’t do this, not any longer. When Dad died and I became king, I swore I wouldn’t be anything like him, I’d treat my wife with respect and do my best to fill the royal coffers that Dad drained. You know how hard I’ve tried to regain the money Dad spent, and I’ve only made a dent in the debt. Ten years, and just a dent.

“But the tipping point came when I realized that I was becoming like Dad and I started to despise myself and knew that I had to get away, I no longer was the best option for Matlavia.”

“Wait, what do you mean, you were becoming like Dad?” My head is pounding so hard, I can barely take in Steve’s words. “I saw you, you always treated Callista with respect.” Well, outside of the ass-slapping, hair-pulling fucking at the pool. Though as long as it was consensual that was respect enough, I guess.

“No, I didn’t and that’s when I knew I had to call it all off. Callista and I can barely stand each other, and if we feel like this now, how is it going to be in five years? Ten? Twenty? You know how it was with Mom and Dad, and if it was better when they were first married it had sure gone to hell in the years since. And even though she didn’t love him, it tortured Mom that Dad kept mistresses, you know that.”

Yeah, Mom had hated Dad and that hate grew with every new woman. “But you’re not like Dad, Steve! And besides, I saw you with Callista at the pool last month—sorry, didn’t mean to spy, it was totally by accident—and it sure as shit didn’t look like you two hated each other.”

“What, you saw us?” I can hear the embarrassed outrage in Steve’s voice loud and clear. “It’s a good thing I’m an ocean away or I would kick your ass, little brother!”

“Hey, I said it was an accident! Besides, I didn’t stay and watch the entire thing.” Well, truthfully I did linger a few minutes. “So how can you leave Callista?”

Steve sighs again. “Hate to break it to you, but what you saw was hate sex. It’s been that way between us from the beginning and I’ve been hoping that the more we get to know each other the better our relationship would be, but the closer we got to the wedding, the more we couldn’t stand each other. Yeah, there’s physical attraction between us, but not more than that, and definitely not enough to sustain a marriage. And what you saw was part of the reason I knew I couldn’t marry her—all we did was fuck, there was no tenderness, no respect, no real emotion. Jesus, we’re not even friends. And I knew if I married Callista we’d have the same kind of marriage that Mom and Dad had and it broke me.”

I sit there in my chair, stunned at what my brother has told me. My reserved, dutiful brother who had planned to sacrifice himself for the sake of the crown and our family, and I really can’t blame him for not being able to go through it. “Did you really leave with your mistress? I didn’t even know you had one.”

“Yeah, that was the other reason I knew I had to leave—I had no intention of being with anyone but Callista, but when I met Aliyah, I started to understand why Dad would cheat on an unhappy marriage. And it wasn’t fair to Callista when I already knew I felt more for another woman than I did for her.”

I close my eyes, knowing that my brother did the right thing for himself. But what about the rest of us? “I get it, Steve, I do get it. But where does that leave me? Matlavia? Callista?”

Steve’s voice is gentle. “Well, you are the king now. What you do is entirely up to you. And Callista never wanted to marry me—she wanted to marry the king. She’ll find someone else soon enough.”

But where would that leave Matlavia? We really need the money that Callista was bringing with her marriage to Steve. Shit. Maybe she’d give us a loan? A sudden thought occurs to me and I immediately push it away. No way, no how.

But dread fills me as I quietly say goodbye to my brother and Steve promises to stay in touch. I square my shoulders and turn to walk out of the bedroom, to face the men waiting for me on the other side of the door.