Stolen (Royally Hot 1)

My snarl caught her attention as I ran, but no sooner had she turned her eyes to me than I realized there was no danger. Sara hadn’t screamed because she was being attacked, she’d screamed because of what she saw.

She knelt in front of her father, pushing and tugging at his unresponsive body. But Milo’s lips were blue, his eyes cloudy, and his tongue bulged from his mouth.

Fuck.

Dead.

One glance at the situation told me what had happened. I wrapped my arm around Sara.

“He twisted himself up in his bindings,” I said, freeing his cold dead hands from under the rope he had slipped around his neck.

I laid him out on the dry forest leaves and closed his eyelids.

Sara pressed her hands to her lips as tears tumbled down from her dark lashes. “We killed him, didn’t we?”

I understood her grief, but she’d seen too little of the world to understand that not everything was within our control. I couldn’t have her blaming herself for the rest of her life for what had happened.

“He did that himself,” I said. “His bindings were secure but safe. This was deliberate. He chose to end his own life rather than face the consequences of his actions.”

“I never meant for him to get hurt,” Sara said, kneeling beside him, smoothing his dirty shirt as if her touch might bring him back to life.

I crouched beside her and drew her forehead to my lips. “If he’d lived, it would only have been for a public execution later. It’s a coward’s way out, for sure, but he spared himself the humiliation of that.”

She sniffled and, after a while, nodded in agreement. “I know. And I know he was awful, but he was the only father I ever knew.”

My heart broke for her, for so many damned reasons. She’d had a hard life, no doubt about it, but I could tell that grief was new to her.

What a bastard grief was, as I knew too well. It could take the fight out of any man, no matter how strong. And it angered me to know that the only protective, fatherly love she’d ever had, was actually just a transaction. Nothing unconditional about it.

Though she had seen him as her father, she’d been his commodity. She deserved so much better than that. None of it lessened the pain she was feeling now, though.

I knew we had to get back on the road quickly, but I didn’t rush her through her shock and sadness. After a few minutes, she looked up at me. “We can’t just leave him here. I can’t imagine leaving him to the animals and the elements.”

For a brief instant I flashed back to the night before, and him asking her to come sit on his lap. Calling her Princess and himself Daddy.

Fucker, I thought, let the vultures and raccoons have at him.

But I got my head on straight again. How we treated his body in death wasn’t about him at all. It was about Sara. My Sara. And so, for her sake, for her peace of mind, I set to work digging a shallow grave in a clearing beneath a stand of poplars.

Once it was done, we set off again for the castle, now with Sara on Angelica’s mare and me behind her on my stallion, so that I never had to take my eyes off of her.

Our progress, already slow, was made even slower because word had begun to spread about the deaths of five soldiers from Clan Johnston, and that they were on a mission to rescue the stolen princess.

The lie didn’t matter, if I was found with her they wouldn’t ask questions. In every village and town, banners and posters bearing the star and moon of her birthmark were to be seen, and the people gossiped.

As we made our slow progress through one particularly busy village, bustling with market day, I heard snatches of gossip about how she looked; her age, her hair color, her eye color, even her first name.

Thankfully, the news was tangled by distance, and confused rumor made for confusing details. Some said red hair, some chestnut, some jet black. Some swore that the returning princess had been raised by dragons and her name was unutterable by men’s tongues. But even so, I knew it was only a matter of time before the details got straightened out.

We left the King’s Highway and wound our way through the countryside, taking side roads and forest trails. But it was impossible to avoid people completely, and the closer we got to the castle, the more I worried that someone with more than a passing interest would spot Sara and our identities would be revealed.

I clicked my tongue twice for her attention, and she turned to face me. I ordered my stallion to hold and came up alongside her. She wore a simple gray cloak with the hood drawn up over her head to cover that beautiful hair, but it wasn’t enough. Pretending to adjust her bridle, I bent low between us and told her softly, “We need to cover your face.”