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When Cesca only stared back at him, the sensation that she was being strangled and choked even more extreme, his expression grew even more grim.

She would have said it was impossible.

“You are the Queen of Liandero,” he told her, and she had never heard his voice so gravelly before. “Twice over. You have been the Queen since the cabinet accepted your brother’s abdication, but you were presumed to be too off your head to round up. Then the plane crash created a far greater crisis. A crisis that has yet to break in public but will do so. Likely soon. And will thus require the steadying presence of the reigning monarch if the kingdom is to weather this disaster.”

She understood the words he was saying in and of themselves, but she could not seem to make the meaning take hold. She could not connect what he was saying to Vesuvius, much less to herself. All she could seem to do was hang there, in the speeding vehicle, caught somewhere in all of that judgmental blue like it was a vise.

He frowned, and that made the judgment even more pointed. “I’m afraid, Your Majesty, that for the first time in your privileged, pampered, and overindulged life, you will have to step up and accept some responsibility.”

His words hung there. She could feel them like knives, slicing into her skin.

But nothing he’d said made sense. None of it was possible. Her brother was invulnerable. Vesuvius was larger than life. He was incandescent and powerful and alive.

He was also the only family she had left.

There was no possible way that he could be dead.

And there was no way he would ever abdicate. The throne meant too much to him—if it didn’t, he would have broken his betrothal to the avaricious and self-obsessed Sintia the first time she’d sold a story to the press. Meaning, about five minutes after she turned eighteen.

Cesca swallowed, hard, and shook her head at Saviero. “You must have gotten into the eggnog, Sav,” she said, and she even laughed. “I think you’re drunk.”

And the way he looked at her then was a cold fury threaded through with what she was terribly afraid was contempt.

He looked straight ahead then, as if he could not bear to keep his eyes on her, and that was not any better.

Cesca looked out at the city instead as the motorcade climbed the hill and it sparkled below her. The fairy-tale setting that was her home. The kingdom where she had been born a princess, but had been destined to remain forever in her brother’s shadow.

She hadn’t minded. Not really. She’d always preferred the sorts of things a person could get up to at night.

Now it was morning, though the sun would not rise for some time yet. It was coming up on a wintry-cold Christmas day that already smelled like more snow would fall. Even in the dark, Cesca could see that there was snow packed on the mountains that rose high in all directions, and knew that there would be plenty more where that came from.

Liandero was always a winter wonderland.

The kingdom was nestled between Italy and Liechtenstein, a relatively minor valley that had held on to its sovereignty for centuries—likely because it was easily overlooked, Cesca had often thought. Or possibly because it really did look like it belonged in a storybook. As the motorcade approached the palace, Cesca found herself staring at the grand old building, lit up so brightly against the December dark. It was a collection of modernizations built up in and around the ancient buildings that some enterprising old king had called a castle back in the mists of time. These days it was old and new at once, making what her brother liked to call the palace past and present.

She could not accept that Vesuvius was gone.

It lodged inside her like a terrible sob, or perhaps a tumor, and she could not acknowledge it. She refused. It could not be true.

The motorcade pulled through the palace gates and continued speeding along until they pulled up under the protected entrance and finally came to a stop.

Cesca found that she already missed being inside the car, where it was dark and there was only the typical glare from Saviero to contend with. She missed it before the door was flung open, the cold rushed in again, and the palace guard stood there at attention.

Demanding she do something about it, like get out.

The truth was, she didn’t want to get out of the car. She didn’t want to hear what else these people were going to tell her. She didn’t want to participate in whatever bullshit story this was they were trying to sell her, and maybe if she stayed right here, right where she was—

But then Saviero appeared before her, filling up the wedge of open space at her door with his disconcertingly large body. His blue eyes seemed to tear straight through her.

She felt more than heard herself let out a long, ragged sort of breath.

If he had been anyone else, Cesca would have been certain that the expression she almost saw move over his face was something like compassion. But he wasn’t someone else. This man, for all that he was remarkably good-looking, might as well have been a plank of wood.

In order to have compassion, he would have to be human. So there was no possibility that was what she’d seen.

Nevertheless, when Saviero held out his hand, his expression impassive yet somehow stern, she took it.

And she only realized that she was cold when his fingers wrapped around hers, because he was so hot he might as well have been a fire. In the club, she realized, she’d been so hot herself from all that dancing that she hadn’t understood what his grip was telling her.