Darren
I had locked the crowned heads of the known world in my ballroom overnight, and the room I walked back into was a diplomatic catastrophe wearing party clothes.
Hundreds of dignitaries in wilted finery, sealed behind my guards since the fireworks. Kings detained like suspects. Alphas separated from their packs, envoys from their escorts, nobody fed properly, nobody told anything, every one of them watching every other one with the arithmetic of fear, and over it all the knowledge, spreading mouth to mouth since midnight, that the princess was gone and the thing that took her had wings.
I stopped first at the healers’ hall, because four of my best lay in it and a king owes his fallen his face.
They had been carried down from the nursery wing and arranged in clean beds, unmarked, u
