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“If I were you,” Saviero had interrupted him, icily, “I would take great care in how I finished that sentence.”

The man fell silent, exhibiting great wisdom on his part.

And Saviero wasn’t entirely certain how it was that he escaped that meeting some while later without knocking the heads of all of those idiot old men together.

But he dismissed them from his notice once he was striding through the palace again, looking for Cesca and not managing to find her.

His pulse picked up in a way he didn’t like.

Saviero doubted that the cabinet had noticed how hard Lord Frick’s words had landed on her, but he hadn’t. He knew her better now. He could read her from across the room, and he’d seen it. The way that gleam in her dark hazel eyes had dimmed. The way she had shifted in her seat, and gone cold.

Not chasing after her the moment she’d stood up and walked out had felt like torture, but he’d known he couldn’t. It would have drawn too much attention to the fact that she was leaving, and Saviero knew that the last thing those sad old men deserved was the satisfaction of thinking they’d gotten under her skin.

But he was regretting that choice when he couldn’t find her. She wasn’t in the monarch’s office suite that she had slowly been taking over this past week. Her staff gave conflicting reports about which meeting she was meant to be attending, but when he looked in on each of them, she wasn’t there.

It should have been easy to find the Queen, as her every movement was meant to be tracked and guarded, but Saviero quickly realized that Cesca had managed to slip away. Something she’d had a lifetime of practice doing, the better to avoid palace politics and family drama.

She’d been famous for disappearing in plain sight—one moment in the ballroom where the Princess had been expected to appear and the next tucked up on a yacht in the Mediterranean, having slipped out with no one the wiser.

This little hobby of hers had both irritated and amused her brother for years.

It turned out that it made Saviero himself…uneasy.

But she was the Queen now. That meant that she couldn’t simply swan off to a foreign country. Nor exit the palace grounds without comment, Saviero thought, because of the security implications.

That gave him a place to start. He looked for her in their wing of the palace. He ran up and down the spiral stair, down to that lower observation deck and all the way back up to the roof and the secret entrance to the battlements that he hadn’t even shown her yet.

He looked in all the supplemental buildings in the palace complex, wishing that he could call in the Royal Guard, but he knew that would be a step she would not appreciate him taking. It would cause too much commotion, and what if it turned out that she was merely wandering through the public gardens again?

Though she wasn’t. He confirmed it himself.

Cesca wasn’t anywhere he could think to look for her.

Saviero felt as close to frantic as he ever had in his life. It felt too much like loss, when he’d thought he’d avoided that here. When he’d truly believed he’d made sure to maintain fierce parameters around too much intimacy, too many feelings…

Yet his own panic was undeniable and it rang a kind of alarm, deep inside him.

Because he didn’t panic.

He was famous for never, ever panicking, not even when he and his friends had gotten themselves into all manner of scrapes when they were at university.

Saviero had not even been frantic when Vesuvius had called him in early that morning on Christmas Eve. He had been concerned, certainly. He had agreed that Vesuvius deserved more than the misery that awaited him with Sintia, but he hadn’t known how things would play out. How a dramatic shift from King to Queen would affect the kingdom or even how Cesca would react to having such a solemn duty thrust upon her.

But that had been concern. It had involved some troubleshooting. It was not this.

He hadn’t felt his heart beating so hard in his own chest like this, so intensely that he wondered if he was having a cardiac event. Or his breath going short when he prided himself on keeping in shape.

Because it was suddenly occurring to him that Cesca was the one loss he might not survive. That she had somehow snuck in past his defenses when he’d been so certain that was impossible. That he had set himself up for the unimaginable.

For a loss greater than all those that had come before, and there was only one reason he would—or could—feel that way.

Only one, and he had long ago decided it was impossible.

Yet his heart beat at him as if it knew things he did not.

He didn’t know what made him go outside again, through the public gardens despite the bite in the winter air and down to the art gallery that sat on one end of those pathways that he and Cesca had explored after their wedding.

The Royal Gallery that Vesuvius had turned into an international phenomenon, the better to honor his mother.