“Everything okay ma’am?” Vince asked, as though the answer to that wasn’t obvious. He looked like he was serious, though – like he genuinely wanted me to answer.
“I don’t think we have enough free time to go over my issues,” I laughed bitterly.
He looked at me with a sympathetic quirk in his eyebrow. “You can talk to me, you know,” he said. He then seemed to catch the tone of his statement, and he backed away, going pale. “I mean...you can tell me if anything is bothering you.”
Having someone to talk to about these things would be good. I thought about my aunt, about Antonio, about all the people who tried to give me advice. The unfortunate thing was that the only person I wanted to talk to about any of it was Carlo. He was the only one I could imagine telling all this to.
How did someone get over that? That’s the problem with having only one real friend: it’s all or nothing. It’s a gamble you can lose. And it seemed I was losing quite a bit. Carlo had lied and now I was not only in physical danger because of it, but I’d lost the only person I felt comfortable talking to about it. For that, I could almost hate him – not because he wanted to steal my crown or take away my safety, but because he was robbing me of the one person I felt truly comfortable with. That was what made me feel worst.
“It’s going to sound pathetic,” I said. “I’ve never had a friend before, not really. I finally get one and he manages to ruin the whole thing for me.”
I didn’t want to look at Vince. I didn’t want to see the normal bite of the lip, the thin frown, the usual signs of someone pitying me. I’d gotten it before from my parents and my brother and random relatives at Christmas when they asked if I had a boyfriend or any friends I wanted to invite over for anything.
But when I finally felt brave enough to turn and look at him, he was looking at me with a soft expression. He wasn’t frowning, he wasn’t looking at me with eyes that said “poor you,” quickly to be followed by an offer of some gift or other. He was simply looking at me and nodding. Then he shrugged.
“If it helps, I don’t have any friends either,” he said, sitting down, though I suspected he didn’t notice what he was doing. “Part of the reason they picked me out was because I was the quiet, stoic type and they wanted someone who wasn’t going to make a big fuss or anything. What that translated to was that I was an introverted kid who had no friends.”
He didn’t seem the type to be utterly friendless. He had a kind face, bright blue eyes – the picture of the captain of the football team, or future president. But from the corner of my eye I could see his leg bouncing up and down with a fidget that he seemed unable to control. He was nervous. I wanted to reach out and put my hand on his leg to help comfort him, but I knew I shouldn’t.
“I don’t know if I’m introverted, exactly,” I shrugged. “I think it was a mixture of me being too afraid to go out and get any friends and people not knowing how to act around me.”
He looked surprised. “I figured people would flock to you. It’s awful, but teenagers love having famous friends.”
“I think I made it difficult.”
He laughed and any extension of the conversation was cut short when my aunt rounded the corner and Vince jumped to his feet so fast I thought he was going to knock over a vase. I stood up as well, but with less urgency.
“Well, this is an unfortunate turn of events,” she said with a thin mouth and a sympathetic frown. Hers was the look I’d been dreading, pity for a girl without friends who finds out that her only friend was, in fact, lying to her the entire time.
“I still want to meet with him tonight,” I blurted. Even as I said it, I knew it was stupid. There was a very real chance that they already had him in custody; we’d been sitting around for hours at this point.
My aunt raised an eyebrow. “Excuse me?”
“I want to give him the chance to tell me about this himself,” I said. “If he hasn’t already been carted off by security.”
“Why do you want that?”
“Because he told me he wanted to go to dinner to tell me something.”
“And what purpose would it serve to hear him admit to his wrongdoings?”
“It would give me some closure. And a way to…understand why.”
I could see my aunt fighting the urge to roll her eyes and I felt my face heating up. I didn’t want her to refuse me in front of Vince. He seemed to understand the discomfort of the situation and turned his head away, pretending (and failing) to look busy elsewhere.
“You want to risk your safety for personal reasons?” she asked incredulously.
“Don’t pretend you’re surprised,” I said, getting some bite in my voice and rolling my own eyes. “I’ve never had a friend before and I’ve certainly never had an almost – anyway, I want to know what he’s going to say. You can send the entire army with me if you want and they can arrest him the second we’re done talking, but I want to know what he was going to say. I deserve that.”
“You deserve that?” she echoed in a patronizing tone. I ignored her.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m not saying we don’t arrest him. It can easily be done. Just give me the chance to hear it from him.”
“He could be leading you into a trap.”
“That’s what security is for.”
“And if that trap is a bomb? How do you imagine your bodyguards are going to defend against that?”
It was difficult to explain how I knew he wasn’t going to hurt me. And I knew that wasn’t going to be enough of an answer for Aunt Sonia. She wanted facts, and she wanted Carlo in handcuffs. I didn’t blame her. If this was all true then I knew he would have to be imprisoned. But I needed to know, without it being tainted by other ears listening.
“Please grant me this,” I said, this time weaker, smaller, whispering. “I need to know if he was ever really my friend.”
“And you can’t wait for an interview once he’s arrested?”
I shook my head. “I need to know what he was, what he was planning, without him being arrested. I don’t want to think he’s just telling me what I want to hear in the hopes of getting a lighter sentence. I want him to tell me the truth without influence.”
She sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose tightly, the same way my father often did. It might normally make me feel at home, but right now it just frustrated me. I was impatient. And I was little too aware that I was being embarrassed in front of Vince.
“How do you plan on presenting this to Benecio?” she asked. “That you want to go on a date to see what could happen, despite the fact that this man is a known terrorist.”
“Don’t belittle it,” I mumbled bitterly. “And we don’t know he’s a terrorist himself. He has links to the group, that’s all.”
“Links to a terrorist group make you a terrorist,” Aunt Sonia said, her voice losing its sympathy and playful confusion. She was getting angry now. “He was present at nearly all the recent attacks—”
“They weren’t attacks; no one was hurt.”
I knew, instantly, it was the wrong thing to say. And even in my mind I knew it was wrong. But it came out so quickly, I couldn’t stop it. My aunt’s eyes changed, and again I recognized the look of my father. The simmer of boiling anger underneath the surface. He had a temper, and I wondered how my aunt was going to manifest her frustration and anger.
“Cassandra,” she said evenly. “Pardon my frankness, but you’re beginning to sound like one of them.”
One of them was said with such bitterness that I suddenly felt cold, like I was someone else entirely to my aunt, now. These were the people who wanted to take the crown from me, who wanted to change the way we’d run our government, disregarding generations of tradition. Some of them also wanted to do it violently, with no questions asked and no second chances.
I knew it, and in my heart I hated them. But I just couldn’t see Carlo as a part of them, and I didn’t want that hatred to taint my feelings for him. I trusted him. Presumably, he wanted the sa
me things they wanted. He was my friend, and he wanted to steal my entire world from me. It was making me angry and scared.
“I’m sorry,” I said quietly. “I didn’t mean that.”
Her glare melted into a softer gaze. She sighed and put her hands on her hips because she was deciding what she wanted to do. I knew that stance as well. She was actually considering letting me go through with this ridiculous plan.
“Without a chance like this, you would never have found Antonio,” I whispered.
She sighed, and I saw in her eyes that she understood. “You understand that you are my heir?” she said. “If anything happens to me, you will immediately become queen. You are indispensable.”
I wanted to say that I had a twin brother, there was someone else out there who could easily do the same job I was doing right now, silently and dutifully going to school and learning how to be a ruler. Benjamin wouldn’t like it, but he’d take on the responsibility eventually if he had to. But the point was that I had no intention of being hurt and I didn’t think that Carlo was going to hurt me. Whoever he had been when he agreed to join this group, that man was gone now, or changed. I believed, in my heart, that he was truly my friend.
“If you do this,” my aunt said, “You are going to be swarmed by security. The only other people in that restaurant are going to be security. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” I breathed out instantly, trying not to sound too desperate.
“I will get reports every hour. I will get proof of life from you until you step back into this palace.”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
She sighed and turned to Vince, as if waiting to see whether he was going to talk us out of this, deny the whole situation, say the guards weren’t going to participate. But he shrugged and nodded. Even if he disagreed, he wasn’t the type to speak out against it to the queen, I knew that much. Someone like Benecio would have been able to convince Aunt Sonia otherwise, but this man was a weak line of defense for reason.
“Fine,” she said. “Get ready, but know that I am very unhappy about this and if that boy puts one toe out of line I’ll have him in solitary confinement for the rest of his life.”
I grimaced as she walked off and fought down the urge to jump for joy. This wasn’t the type of thing to get excited about. I was going to walk right into the lion’s den for the sake of rescuing a friendship with a known terrorist. It was idiotic and I had no doubt I was going to get a massive earful from my mother when she eventually found out (and she would find out).
But I didn’t care. I’d successfully negotiated my way into handling this situation the way I wanted. That was a major achievement.
I turned and nodded to Vince who gave a small bow and walked away. I went to my bedroom with a smile on my face, but a serene posture.
I knew this was stupid, it was incredibly stupid. This was the kind of thing people yelled at girls for in horror movies. The thing was, this was about me. My aunt would tell me otherwise and so would the government. They’d all tell me this was a matter of national security, a threat against everyone. But it was personal, and there was no convincing me otherwise. This was a personal problem. Carlo had gotten to know me, had weeded his way into my life, and it hurt a great deal to know that he had done that with the intention to harm me. So since this was a personal issue, I was going to handle it like it was a personal issue. I was going to take care of it myself – with dozens of bodyguards around me.
“Do you think I’m being stupid?” I asked Antonio when I saw him later.
“No,” he said with a sigh. “I think you’re hurt and you want justice and answers, and that’s normal.”
“He said, with the patronizing tone of a judging father,” I said, rolling my eyes.
“What do you expect?” he asked. “You’re setting yourself up for something really dangerous.”
“Would it be crazy to think I know what I’m doing?”
“No, but I don’t think you do,” he said, crossing his arms. “This isn’t a spy movie. This is real life. These people are dangerous. You’re new here—”
“I’m so sick of people saying that to me.”
The air in the room had turned from amicably comforting to tense very quickly. It was my fault, I knew. I didn’t want anyone to contradict me. I didn’t want to be told what I was doing was stupid and I wasn’t about to see reason the way they wanted me to see it. I knew what they were saying was the truth: this wasn’t something that was a matter of opinion or the possible twisting around of facts. There was a clear right and wrong here.
But who hasn’t avoided the truth?
“I know this is a very messed up situation.”
“Messed up?” For the first time ever, I heard Antonio raise his voice. He’d always been the laid back one, the calm one. He was like the cool older cousin who was willing to let you do the things you knew you shouldn’t even want to do in the first place. Now he was someone I didn’t recognize.
“This is not a game, Cassandra,” he said. “This man is a terrorist. His terror organization wants to remove the government. He wants to take your birthright away. They’ve demonstrated that they’ll use force and shows of violence to do that and you want to sit down to dinner with him to talk things out.”
“So it’s diplomacy.” I felt stupid before he even gave me the incredulous look.
“Diplomacy? Don’t act like diplomacy and what’s best for the government has a single thing to do with this. You want to find reasons to justify your boyfriend’s actions.”
He sounded cruel now, mean. I could tell he was seeing red, and he was almost shaking with anger. But he caught himself, and looked immediately apologetic. I understood that he wanted to protect me, but I was stung by his anger.
“Thanks for the advice,” I snapped.
He knew that the conversation was over. He nodded and swallowed thickly. He stepped out of the room quickly and quietly and I finally released a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding.
I paced the halls after Antonio was gone, just to work off the steam. I knew I was extra angry because I knew I was wrong, but I wanted to prove that my way could work.
But I also knew in my heart that I was doing this for selfish reasons, and looking back I’m not proud of the way I behaved. I look back on those few days and realize what a child I was being and how difficult I was making everything. I created a massive security situation and doing something that could affect the entire country, just so I could understand why a boy would pretend to like me, why he would pretend to be my friend.
I was, in short, an insufferable and selfish teenage girl. But I think it was a growing pain, a way to avoid the truth that I was growing up, that the world was closing in around me. I wanted to avoid that truth. This was a last show of immaturity before adulthood set in and people expected me to be nothing but a queen-in-waiting until the day I actually became the queen.
I let myself have a few minutes of unabashed, uncontrolled pacing and huffing and puffing out in the hallway before I calmed myself down and told myself I would be the regal princess the rest of the night.
I went to my room and tried not to think about how strange it was to be getting ready for a date that might end with the arrest of my date. I don’t think Seventeen magazine ever had anything to say about this. And for all of Cosmo’s tips on relationships and makeup, I doubt they had anything on being a literal femme fatale.
Still, I pushed it from my mind and got ready. I looked through my closet, leafing through the mixture of my own clothes and the expensive things my aunt had bought me and stocked my closet with. I wondered how I should dress, not unlike that day that Carlo came to the palace. This was, of course, different. This was an actual going-out date. We were going to a restaurant. That meant I probably should try harder than a casual sundress.
Even then, I felt a little sorry for myself. I was getting ready for a date that was a complete set-up, and pretending that it was normal. Was I really that sad? Could I really n
ot get an honest date with a boy, so I had to resort to going on one with a man who had been spying on me the whole time he knew me, and pretend it was a real date?
And it was still true that I wished I could talk to Carlo about it. I sighed and stared in the mirror, holding a dress in my hands. I was playing a game that could get me killed and was going to ruin my only friendship. I really needed someone to talk to. A friend. Maybe I could join more clubs on campus. Maybe I could take up intramural sports or something.
There was a knock on the door that interrupted my thoughts.
“Who is it?” I asked, continuing to glare into the mirror.
“I heard you might need a good talking to,” said Antonio and I rolled my eyes. I had a feeling my aunt had sent him to try and talk me out of going.
Regardless, I walked over and opened the door, letting him in and tossing the dress on the bed. He sighed, looking at it, and walked in with his hands in his pockets and went to look out the window.
“This is all very dangerous,” he said. “But you knew that and you don’t need another person telling you, so I’m going to ask you what it is you’re hoping to accomplish here.”
I swallowed and took a breath. I shrugged. It would be pathetic to admit that I was scared of losing my only friend. Antonio already knew that, and he wasn’t judging. He just wanted to help me. I might rather talk to Carlo about these things, but maybe I could talk to Antonio about them instead.
“Everyone thinks I’m nuts.”
“No one thinks you’re nuts,” he sighed. “They’re just worried.”
“Which is PR talk for ‘everyone thinks I’m nuts’,” I said. “I think I think I’m nuts. I’m getting ready to go on a date with a guy who might kidnap me or poison me or just straight up take out a gun and—”
“I’m going to stop you right there because none of that is going to happen,” he said, and moved to sit down on the bed. “And no one blames you. If anything, they’re embarrassed for themselves. They let this guy into the palace and didn’t know what was really going on. You’re new here, and he was your friend. It’s their job to protect you from things like this.”
ROYAL ROMANCE_A Royal Renewal Page 10
