Chapter 273 Bow to the Prince
ADRIANA
The party was already full when I came down the stairs.
I’d timed it precisely. I wanted to be observed entering but I didn’t want to be the spectacle of the entrance. I wanted the room to register me and then go back to what it was doing so I could watch it properly.
Hazel was at my shoulder before I reached the bottom step. She’d been briefed. She knew exactly what tonight was and exactly what I needed from her.
“The stall owner’s description,” she said quietly, close to my ear as we moved into the room. “I’ve cross-referenced it with the guest list. Three possible matches. I’ll point them out when I can do it without drawing attention.”
“Good.” I moved through the room, accepting greetings, returning smiles, saying the things the situation required. “Tell me when you’ve confirmed which one.”
The room was doing what rooms full of Alphas and noblemen always did at formal events — the surface performance of civility over the actual business of positioning and assessment. People were watching me carefully to determine what my mood communicated about the state of the kingdom, and I was giving them a mood that communicated nothing they could use.
Leo appeared at the base of the stairs about twenty minutes after I arrived. He’d changed out of the graduation uniform into something appropriate for the evening and he’d done something with his face that I recognized — the same thing I did, the same deliberate composure over something that was working very hard beneath it. He caught my eye across the room and I gave him the smallest nod I had, and he came to stand beside me.
“Hazel has three possibilities,” I said quietly, not looking at him. “I need you to look at each one naturally. Don’t stare. Tell me if any of them were at the venue today.”
“Okay.” He accepted a glass of water from a passing server and used the movement to scan the room. “Which three?”
Hazel appeared on my other side within minutes and guided both our lines of sight with the skill of someone who had been doing this for years. First to the left corner, then to the group near the fireplace, then to the man standing alone near the entrance to the east corridor.
Leo’s stillness changed almost imperceptibly when we got to the third one.
“He was there,” he said. Very quietly. “I don’t know who he is. But he was at the venue. He was near the refreshment area.”
“Did you see him near your stall?”
“No. But I wasn’t looking. He’s looking at you.”
“I know,” I said. “Don’t look at him again.”
I moved through the room for another twenty minutes before I let the circumstance arrive naturally — a path through the guests that brought me in proximity to him without making the proximity look designed. Up close, he had the specific quality of someone working to appear relaxed who had forgotten that truly relaxed people didn’t work at it.
He bowed. Said the appropriate things. I responded with warmth and a level of eye contact that was just slightly more sustained than comfortable.
Then two people I’d been wanting to deal with for a while came forward — a couple whose name I remembered because they’d been among the loudest voices against Leo’s position as Crown Prince. The husband and wife who had argued publicly that Leo didn’t have the right blood to inherit, who had made those arguments in enough rooms that they’d reached me eventually.
They bowed. I let them stay in it.
Leo appeared at my shoulder, having tracked the situation with the instinct he’d been developing for months. The couple stayed bowed, and I let the position extend past the point of comfort, and I watched the husband’s certainty start to fracture before I said anything.
“Rise,” Leo said, beside me.
They rose. The wife’s expression was controlled but her legs had been bent long enough that the relief of standing was visible.
“My Queen,” the husband started. “What a wonderful evening—”
I raised one hand. He stopped.
“Now bow to the Prince,” I said.
The silence that followed had a particular texture. Everyone in the immediate vicinity had registered what was happening, and the calculation moving through the couple’s faces was visiblem disobedience versus submission, which one cost more in this room tonight, in front of these people, in front of me.
They looked at each other.
They bowed.
I looked at Leo, who was watching the room with the calm expression of someone who had spent seven months learning from his mother exactly how authority worked when it was used with precision rather than volume.
“Thank you,” I said, to the couple. “Enjoy the evening.”
They moved away and Leo came to stand closer to me.
“The man near the east corridor,” he said quietly. “He’s moving toward the door.”
“I see him.” I didn’t move immediately. “Let him get there first. Hazel has someone on that exit.”
Leo looked at me sideways. “You planned all of this.”
“I used what was available,” I said. “There’s a difference.”
He was quiet for a moment. “She’s going to be okay,” he said. Not a question. The kind of statement people made when they needed to say something true out loud to confirm it was still true.
“Yes,” I said. “She is.”
I believed it. I had to believe it and I did believe it, and the two things existing at the same time — the fear and the certainty — were not contradictions. They were just what it felt like to be her mother on a night like this in a room full of people one of whom knew where she was.
My phone vibrated in my hand. Hazel’s name on the screen.
He stopped at the east exit. The guard has him. Come when you can.
I touched Leo’s arm briefly and moved toward the corridor.