Prince of my Panties (Royal Package 2)

But while I have great affection for The General, it’s Jeffrey the Man that I love.

I love him so much I’ve done my best to ignore the feeling of foreboding that’s burdened my shoulders since the moment I woke up in the visitor’s center parking lot. But by the time we’ve set up the tent and unloaded our supplies, the prickling, restless worry claws at my stomach, making it impossible to eat more than a bite or two of the large sandwich Jeffrey makes for us to share.

It’s a lovely sandwich—brie cheese, fig jam, and apple slices providing bursts of flavor with every bite—but each morsel lands in my belly like a faulty bomb, primed to explode when I least expect it.

Finally, I set my remaining sandwich on his napkin. “I can’t.”

“I know,” he says, setting his largely uneaten section next to mine and wrapping them both up. “Maybe later. It’s cool. The cheese shouldn’t go bad.”

I stand, untangling my legs from the weathered picnic table at our site.

Jeffrey glances toward the Romani camp, where the last of the family members seated at the long picnic table by the largest tent are rising to take their plates to the dishwashing station and then drifting toward the fire-in-progress. “I thought we could bring them some wine. Wine always makes introductions easier.”

“That’s a good idea.” I press a hand to my roiling stomach, breath rushing out. “Let’s do it.”

“Are you sure?” He swings his legs over the bench and stands. “We can wait until later. Or tomorrow morning. They don’t seem to be going anywhere anytime soon.”

“No,” I say, my fingers curling and uncurling at my sides. “It’s time. Putting it off isn’t going to make things any easier.”

“All right.” Jeffrey opens the cooler on the ground by the table and pulls out a bottle of white wine, wiping the water off with the edge of his dark blue tee shirt before wrapping his fingers around the neck and holding it up between us. “Think this will do?”

I nod. “That’s perfect.”

The wine is a white blend from a winery called The Fairy Queen, and fireflies and fairies dance together on the label. As we start across the grass toward the Roma camp, in a moment of skin-tingling synchronicity, fireflies begin to flash in the shadows beneath the trees.

I haven’t seen this many at once since I was a girl. They aren’t so common in the south anymore, but in my childhood, my sisters and I would run through hundreds of flashing lights on our way back to the castle after a movie night at Chamomile’s cottage.

Sometime between that memory and last summer, when Sabrina had lamented how much she missed our summer bug friends, they all but disappeared.

Vanished.

Like an act of dark magic.

It isn’t magic, of course. Sabrina says it’s likely a mixture of light pollution, habitat destruction as the village expands, and chemicals used in agriculture and lawn maintenance that are killing the larvae before they can hatch.

Killed before they can hatch…

The thought echoes in my head as we near the edge of the camp.

How much of me was killed before it could hatch, and who would I have been if Kaula Young hadn’t taken me from that playground? I haven’t been angry with her for a long time, and I’m not angry now, I’m just…full and getting more so with every step.

By the time one of the men arranging wood in the fire pit turns to greet us, it feels like my chest is going to explode, like I’m about to burst from the confines of my skin and fly off into the pink and purple-streaked sky like one of the fairies on the bottle.

For years, I’ve been so torn, uncertain what was real and what a product of my imagination. But now, looking past the man with the friendly smile crinkling the edges of his eyes, I finally know the truth.

My gaze locks on a slim older woman sitting in a lawn chair with a blanket over her legs on the other side of the pit, and I know.

It’s her.

The woman who took me.

26

Elizabeth

It’s her. Kaula. Her face is thinner and more heavily lined, and her salt-and-pepper hair is now completely gray, but it’s her, beyond a shadow of a doubt. Her big, dark eyes and the crooked squiggle of her mouth are exactly the same.

Which means it happened.

It really happened.

I was taken.

My heart punches at my ribs.

Jeffrey says something to the man, who responds in turn, but I can’t hear anything over the blood rushing in my head. I wait, breath held and the fullness in my chest dragging at my lungs as I will her to glance my way.

I need her to see me, to know me, to realize the wreckage she left behind after she dropped me back on that playground a different girl than I was before.