THE EXILED PRINCE SON-IN-LAW STRIKES BACK

Chapter 2: The Room Beneath the Bookbindery

Anton stopped in front of me and dropped his keys onto my tray. They landed in a glass of champagne with a small splash.

"Black car by the gate," he said, loud enough for everyone nearby. "Park it carefully, will you? You'll want the practice. Soon you'll be parking cars for a living, without a rich wife to feed you."

The guests around us laughed. Rupert laughed the loudest.

"Careful, Anton," Rupert called. "He might drive off with it. Refugees take whatever isn't nailed down."

Beatrice raised her glass. "Don't worry, everyone. The stray will be gone by summer."

More laughter. I fished the keys out of the champagne, wiped them on my sleeve and set them back on the tray.

Then I walked past Anton, past Rupert, through the crowd that parted around me as if I smelled bad, and stopped in front of my wife.

"Victoria," I said quietly. "Is this what you want?"

For the first time all night, she looked at me. Her green eyes were cold and tired at the same time.

"What I want has never mattered in this family, Leon," she said. "You should know that better than anyone."

Then she turned and walked away toward the terrace.

Rupert slapped my back so hard the glasses on my tray rattled. "Ouch. Even your wife doesn't want you, mate."

"Rupert," said a quiet voice. Charles Ashworth stood behind us, soft-faced and balding, with his tired eyes. For a moment, I thought my father-in-law would say something, anything, in my defense.

"The guests need more ice," he said, and walked away.

I stood there for a long moment with Anton's keys on my tray. Across the room, old Edmund Ashworth was watching me over the top of his cane. His face showed nothing at all.

I parked Anton's car. Then I went back for my own. My hands were steady on the wheel. Inside, they were not.

At midnight, when the last guest had gone, I drove the old Ashworth delivery van out of Kingsmere and down through the dark city. The white mansions gave way to office towers, then to brick buildings, then to the narrow lanes of the Riverside district, where the pubs were closing and the river smelled of rain.

I parked the van on Tanner Lane, outside a small, dusty shop with a painted sign: Halloran's Bookbindery.

The shop was dark. I let myself in with a key, walked past the shelves of old leather books and the smell of glue, and stopped in front of a huge iron printing press in the back corner. I pressed my palm against a worn spot on its side.

Behind the press, a door in the wall slid open. Narrow stone stairs led down into the light.

At the bottom was a long room with a low ceiling, full of screens, maps and quiet people. A dozen men and women sat at desks, talking softly into headsets in three different languages. A map of Europe glowed on the far wall, with little lights blinking across it from Rosegate to the mountains of the east.

When I stepped off the last stair, every person in the room stood up.

"Raven," someone said.

Here, I wasn't Leon Grey, the stray who parked cars. Here, I was the Raven, and this was the Sable Court, the secret network I'd spent twelve years building with my own hands. Loyal Kestrovian exiles, fighters, bankers and spies, hidden across three continents. Not one of them had ever seen me carry a tray.

"Sit," I said. "Please. It's late." Twelve years, and I still hadn't learned how to be comfortable when people stood for me.

They sat. A small figure in an oversized grey sweater hurried toward me, pushing thick glasses up her nose. Sasha Ilyin was twenty-six, with short black hair, a single silver streak at the front and a pair of headphones always hanging around her neck. She ran the network's communications, and she was the best hacker I had ever met.

"You saw it," she said.

"I saw it."

"Thirty days." Her voice shook a little. "The Crown Law. I've already got the text. If it passes, Parliament is gone, the courts answer to him, and the army swears an oath to him alone. Leon, he won't be a regent anymore. He'll be a king with no one to stop him."

"Who's backing the vote?"

"Money," Sasha said. "Somebody's buying votes. I don't know who yet."

"How many does he need?"

"The Crown Law needs two thirds of Parliament. Right now, at least thirty members are against it. Irina Volkova's whole party. But money changes minds fast in Kestrograd."

"Leon!"

Arms wrapped around me from behind, and I was lifted off the floor. I laughed in spite of everything. Only one person in the world still did that.

Nikolai Severin set me down and slapped my shoulder, grinning his crooked grin. He was twenty-nine, lean, with curly black hair and a leather jacket, and a silver cross hung at his throat, the one his mother gave him before she died. We had grown up together in the palace kitchens, the prince and the cook's son, stealing honey cakes and hiding from the guards.

"It's time, brother," Nikolai said, his eyes shining. "Twelve years. It's finally time."

"Maybe," I said.

"Maybe? He's taking the whole country!"

"I know what he's taking, Nik."

"Then let's take it back!" Nikolai spread his arms to the room. "We have fighters. We have money. We have people inside the ministries. What are we waiting for?"

"For the right moment," I said. "The wrong move gets every person in this room killed. And every person they love."

Nikolai's smile flickered, just for a second. Then it came back. "You always were the careful one, Your Highness."

"Don't call me that here."

"Here is the only place I can."

Behind him, in the corner of the room, an old man sat on a stool in a worn leather apron, a pair of reading glasses pushed up on his grey hair. He was broad and grey-bearded, sixty-two years old, and his left leg stretched out stiffly in front of him, the knee that had never healed right.

Colonel Stefan Dorov didn't say anything. He was watching the screen above Sasha's desk, where the news report was playing again on a loop: my uncle at his podium, smiling.

His hands were shaking.

Twelve years ago, that old man carried a sixteen-year-old boy out of a burning palace through a secret tunnel. He carried him across the mountains in snow up to his waist, with a bullet in his knee, while soldiers hunted them from the valley below. He had never once told me how much it hurt.

I walked over and put my hand on his shoulder.

"Colonel."

"He looks old," Dorov said quietly, not taking his eyes off the screen. "Your uncle. He looks old now."

"So do you."

He almost smiled at that. Then his face went hard again. "Thirty days, boy. What are you going to do?"

Every person in the room stopped working and looked at me.

I looked back at the map on the wall, at the little blinking lights scattered across the mountains of the east, every one of them a person who had trusted me with their life.

Then I reached up and pulled a thin chain out from under my shirt.

On the end of it hung a ring.