Total pages in book: 47
Estimated words: 44703 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 224(@200wpm)___ 179(@250wpm)___ 149(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 44703 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 224(@200wpm)___ 179(@250wpm)___ 149(@300wpm)
Followed by approximately forty-seven emojis, half hearts, half confetti.
Tonight? See you tonight?
I scroll until I find a link. I tap it.
L’Alliance Today. Digital front page. A photograph of me I have no memory of anyone taking, a candid from earlier today, walking beside Alexei, beneath a headline in elegant silver lettering.
PRINCE ALEXEI LYKAIOS ANNOUNCES ENGAGEMENT TO HUMAN PARTNER ZIA MORGAN
Posted seven minutes ago.
“H-Have you seen this?” I show him my phone. “They’re—”
“Telling the truth.”
Lying was what I was about to say, but I guess that’s pointless, and all I can do is gape. “What do you mean you’ve—”
“I had Ruby contact them when I saw the Caro making a nuisance of himself.”
I’m torn between pinching myself and just, I don’t know, gaping even more. What on earth is happening?
“Shall we continue this somewhere more private?” he asks, and before I can answer, he’s steering me toward the elevator bank, and I let him because the alternative is standing in this hallway with my phone exploding and an audience of supernatural beings pretending not to stare while absolutely staring.
The elevator doors close behind us, and the words just go flying out as soon as I’m sure no one’s going to hear me.
“I can’t marry you!”
My pulse is hammering. My phone is buzzing. My mom has made plans for tonight. And the Prince of Atlantis just upended my entire existence with four words in a corridor.
“Of course you can.”
Since I can’t imagine someone like Prince Alexei being deliberately obtuse, I just...I just don’t know how to get through to him at this point. “Is this a prank?” I blurt out. “Or some kind of experiment? Because if this is part of my job, you need to explain—”
“I want to marry you, Zia Morgan.”
He wants to marry me?
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“It doesn’t have to.”
What does he mean it doesn’t have to? It’s almost like he’s saying he’s marrying me because he truly wants me, like he suddenly fell head over heels for a nobody like me, and...no, no, no.
Not again.
I’m so not falling for that again, not after what happened the first time I let a non-human sweep me off my feet.
The thought has memories crowding my mind, and I find myself shaking my head, partly in denial, but mostly out of fear. Because I just can’t.
I can’t let the past happen again.
Billy was a wolf shifter from a regular pack, and even he couldn’t withstand the pressure of choosing a human. So what happens when the pressure comes for the Prince of Atlantis? When it’s not a mid-tier wolf pack but the Blood Oval? When it’s not disappointed parents but an entire supernatural world asking why he chose a nobody?
I already know the answer.
I’ve already lived the answer.
Four sentences on a phone screen. My family doesn’t approve. I can’t go against them. It’s over. Please don’t contact me.
That’s what happens. Every time, with every version of this story, that’s what happens. The preter world looks at the human girl and does the math, and the math always, always comes out the same: she’s not worth it.
And I can’t survive being not worth it again.
“I can’t,” I whisper. “I’m sorry. I just can’t.”
The prince only looks at me, and just when I think he’s about to say something cold or cruel or just something very princely—
Oh!
One moment there is distance between us and the next there isn’t, and I can’t even track how it happened because his movements are so fluid, so without aggression that my body doesn’t register it as a threat.
It registers it as something else entirely.
His hand comes up. Not to my spine this time. To my face. His fingers brush my jaw, feather-light, tilting my chin up, and the touch is so gentle it makes my breath hitch and my eyes sting because nobody, nobody, has ever touched me like that. Like I’m something precious. Like I’m something he’s been waiting a very long time to hold.
“Your Highness—”
“Alexei,” he corrects quietly.
And then he kisses me.
It’s not how I imagined a first kiss with someone like him would be, and I haven’t imagined it, I haven’t, except for maybe once on the plane and possibly twice during the Expo and okay, fine, the point is that this is nothing like what I would have expected.
Because it’s gentle.
His lips meet mine, and everything about it is soft and aching in its restraint. He kisses me like he has all the time in the world. Like this elevator could stay suspended between floors forever and he would be content to spend every second of eternity right here, his fingers on my jaw, his mouth on mine, coaxing me open like he’s asking a question he already knows the answer to.
And my body answers.
I don’t decide to kiss him back. I don’t make a choice. My body simply...responds. My lips part under his. My hand finds the front of his shirt, not pushing, not pulling, just holding on, because my knees have stopped working and the only solid thing in the world right now is the fabric beneath my fingers and the warmth of his mouth.