Chapter 198 Breakfast Tantrum
ADRIANA
I started the morning with a tantrum.
Specifically, I took the breakfast tray that the maid brought in, looked at the food on it with the expression I had developed for occasions requiring maximum condescension, and set it on the floor beside the door.
“Tell the king,” I said, “that I don’t eat food I haven’t seen prepared.”
The maid stared at me with a blank look.
“Go,” I said pleasantly.
She went.
I freshened up and got dressed in the clothes I had brought instead of the ones from the wardrobe Landon had apparently had prepared for me, which I had not touched, and sat by the window to wait.
The tantrum was not about the food. The food was probably fine. It was about establishing, as early and as clearly as possible, that the woman sitting in this room was not the eighteen-year-old Landon remembered who had been so grateful for attention that she had stayed in a relationship with him for five years and thought it was love. That woman had accepted whatever was given to her because she had not yet understood that she was allowed to want more.
This woman wanted specific things and intended to have them and was not going to be managed by ambient generosity.
He came himself, which was what I had calculated. Forty minutes after the maid left.
“You didn’t eat,” he said, looking at the tray on the floor.
“I have some standards,” I said. “I’d like to see the kitchen.”
“The kitchen—”
“Or I don’t eat. Either way.” I stood. “I’d also like to see my son today. That was the agreement.”
“I said tomorrow—”
“You said tomorrow yesterday. Today is tomorrow.” I walked toward the door, which required walking past him, which I did without slowing. “Show me where Leo is.”
He caught my arm. Not hard, it was the instinctive gesture of someone who was used to being able to stop people by reaching for them, and I looked down at his hand on my arm and then up at his face and held his gaze until he let go.
He let go.
“After breakfast,” he said.
“After I see my son,” I said. “Then I’ll eat whatever you like.”
He studied me with the expression he’d been wearing since I arrived, trying to find the girl he remembered inside the woman standing in front of him, and failing, and not quite understanding why he was failing. He had built his entire plan around a version of me that no longer existed. That was going to keep causing him problems.
We walked through the palace to the courtyard and a car was waiting, which meant Leo was not in the main palace. I had suspected as much. I stepped in without being invited and sat.
The ride was short. Twenty minutes, rough road for the last half. I tracked everything.
The secondary facility was a stone building at the edge of what I could smell was a significant gorge system. Two other cars were tailing us. Landon’s presence meant they stood aside without question.
Inside, the room was larger than I had expected. Children sat in clusters on the floor, eating from bowls that held more food than Brianna had described — Leo had apparently negotiated improvements, because Leo would negotiate improvements — and the general atmosphere was exhausted and frightened but not actively deteriorating.
I found Leo in six seconds because I always found him, regardless of the room.
He was sitting against the far wall with a girl I didn’t recognize and he was looking at me before I had taken three steps into the room, which meant he had known I was coming before I came through the door.
He must have heard the car and identified it and was not surprised and was managing his reaction the way his father managed reactions — from the inside out, giving nothing away to the room while giving everything away to me in the two seconds our eyes met before he looked away.
My chest cracked open and sealed itself back shut in approximately the same moment.
I kept walking. Past the clusters of children who were looking at me now, the strange adult who had walked in with the king, who was not acting like the king, whose bearing was different from everyone else in this room. Past the girl who was watching me with the specific attention of someone who had been watching Leo for long enough to know what mattered to him.
I stopped in front of him.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi,” he said.
I sat down on the floor next to him, which was not what Landon had been expecting — I felt his uncertainty behind me without looking. I ignored it. The floor was cold and hard and I sat on it because Leo was sitting on it and this was not a moment for standing over my son looking down at him.
“You look thin,” I said.
“The food was bad until recently,” he said. “It’s better now.”
“Good.”
“The route out is the eastern side,” he said, very quietly, not looking at me. “The blind spot in the guard rotation is every four hours. The gorge is to the north and you don’t want to go north.” He paused. “Daphne drew a map.”
I looked at the girl. She looked back at me steadily and unfolded a piece of paper from her sleeve and handed it to me.
“Good girl,” I said, and meant it entirely.
I tucked the paper away without looking at it, still not looking at Leo, both of us facing forward like two people having a very ordinary conversation.
“How many of them are yours?” I asked.
“All of them,” he said immediately. Then, quieter: “Twenty-three. He released the others.”
Twenty-three children were going to need to move fast when the moment came.
“Are any of them injured? Anyone who can’t run?”
“Two who would be slow. Daphne and I have been planning for that.”
Of course he had.
I pressed my hand briefly over his and then took it away because Landon was still in the room and I was not going to give him the satisfaction of seeing what this moment was costing me to hold together.
“I’m going to make him give me dinner tonight,” I said. “I need time. You have until tomorrow morning.”
Leo nodded once.
I stood up, brushed off my knees, and turned back to Landon.
“Thank you,” I said. “I’ve seen him. Now about that breakfast.”
He looked between Leo and me with the expression of a man who suspected he had just watched something important happen and couldn’t identify what it was.
I walked toward the door.
He followed.