I wanted to tell her, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t go back there, to Baker and the house, the dust and the blood. All the pain and guilt rose up inside me and locked my throat down tight. Maybe if I had her calming touch, I could handle it... but if I ran in there and took her in my arms, we’d start something we couldn’t stop.

I silently shook my head... and dropped my palm from the door. Then I got up and walked away. Through her bedroom. Out to the hallway.

But the further I got from her, the stronger the pull back towards her. I came to a stop on the threshold, the door handle gripped in my hand.

I couldn’t shut the door.

I couldn’t not be with her.

The instinctive urge to protect myself, to keep the memories sealed up tight, was strong... but the need to protect her, to be with her, was overwhelming.

I stomped back into the bedroom and over to the bathroom door. I stood there raging at myself, fists bunched, trying to get the words out. Eventually, I closed my eyes and laid my forehead against the cool wood. “I never told anyone before,” I muttered. “But I want to...I got to tell you. And if you hear it all and you still want me....”

She didn’t reply.

“Your Majesty?”

Nothing.

I raised my voice a little. “Kristina?”

Silence. A silence that made me go cold, right down to my bones.

I threw open the door. She was lying completely submerged, her hair sprayed out in a cloud around her head, her eyes open and staring at the ceiling. My stomach lurched. Please God, let her just be lying there soaking. Her ears are underwater, maybe she didn’t hear me. That had to be it. I’d move into her line of sight and she’d jerk upright—

I loomed over her, but her eyes just stared sightlessly up at me. Oh Jesus God, no—

I plunged my arms into the water and scooped her up. She was limp in my arms: no breath, no movement. What the hell happened?! Had she slipped and hit her head? But I would have heard something and there was no blood.

Then I saw the rash. Very faint, like twisting pink snakes looping around her limbs and across her torso. Something in the water. I’d heard of stuff like that, in Iraq. Nerve agents: you didn’t even have to breathe them in, just getting them on your skin was enough.

I ran. Down the stairs of the tower, through the palace hallways. Soldiers had begun to arrive to patrol the palace and I bellowed at them to get out of the way! The route to the medical facility was burned into my brain after all those hours trying to memorize the place. Down this hallway, into the elevator, four floors down—

I burst into the medical facility, hollering at the top of my lungs. “Doctor! Need a doctor!” A nurse screamed as she saw the naked, dripping princess in my arms. Doctors swarmed us and I told them about what I thought had happened. They snatched her from my arms and had her on a gurney inside of five seconds.

I raced with them into a treatment room. One doctor fed a tube down Kristina’s throat while another readied a defibrillator. A third started hosing the stuff off her skin.

I stumbled back out of the way to let them work. I could feel the shock getting to me, now: my legs had gone weak and my chest felt numb. “Will she be okay?”

The doctor who seemed to be in charge, a big guy with a silver beard, was wiping Kristina’s leg with a cotton swab. “I need to find out what she’s been poisoned with. If you’re sure it was in the water, then I have a suspicion….” He shoved the cotton into a test tube and filled it with a clear liquid, then shook it. The liquid turned blue. “There. We have an antidote.” He grabbed a vial from a cabinet and started filling a syringe. At the same time, the guy with the defibrillator paddles shocked the princess for the first time. Her body jerked, but then fell lifelessly back to the gurney. Please! Please wake up! I couldn’t lose her—

I fell.

It happened so fast, the first warning I had was when my ass hit the tiled floor. I hadn’t slipped: my legs had just quit supporting me. What the hell?

I tried to get up. Couldn’t. My arms didn’t have any strength.

That’s when I realized my clothes were soaked through with the bathwater, from carrying Kristina.

Some of the doctors broke off and surrounded me. “No! Save her!” My voice was getting weak. My lungs were barely moving air.

“No response!” yelled the guy using the defibrillator on the princess. “Charging, three hundred!”

“Get him on a gurney!” said someone else.

I was falling again, this time down a long, black tunnel. “Save her!” I croaked.

And then nothing.