American Prince

“So eager.” He bites the tender flesh right next to my penis, and I cry out. “Usually I have to make you want it.” Another bite. Another whimper from me. “I’ll go get her.”

The bed dips as he shifts his weight to one knee and then moves away. I watch him walk across the room, the shadows tracing the swells of muscle along his back and arms as he walks. Prowls. Even completely naked, he looks in command. Deadly, even.

I don’t stroke myself as I wait, even though I’m so hard there must be no blood left anywhere else in my body. I’m so ready to fuck, so ready to be fucked, and my skin is on fire from waiting—

“She’s not in here.”

Ash’s voice is calm, but it’s a kind of calm I know very well. The same calm he exudes when his chief of staff leans down to whisper bad news in his ear. The same calm he had when the doctors finally diagnosed Jenny’s cancer. The same calm he so easily mustered when bullets started cracking through the trees in Carpathia.

I’m on my feet immediately, going to the bathroom to see for myself. Sure enough, it’s empty, and by the time I turn back around, there’s a pair of drawstring linen pants knotted low on his hips and he has his phone in his hand.

“Her phone isn’t here and the deadbolt isn’t locked from the inside,” Ash says, still calm. “I’m going to check in with Luc. Perhaps she left to use the gym or the pool.”

I doubt it. Greer is many perfect things, but an early riser is not one of them. All those mornings she had to smuggle herself out of the White House in the fuzzy hours near dawn…every single time, I’d walk in with coffee and a newspaper and find her perched on the couch, swaddled in Ash’s giant bathrobe, blinking owlishly at me when I flipped on the light. Ash once told me that most mornings he had to physically pluck her out of bed and carry her into the living room so she wouldn’t fall back asleep, and there’s something so painfully sweet about that image. I looked forward to seeing their morning ritual for myself, maybe even being the one to gather her warm, sleepy body into my arms and cradle her until she woke up.

I don’t say any of that, however. I simply grab my tuxedo pants, still crumpled on the floor from last night, and pull them on. I’ve just fastened them when there’s a knock at the door. I’m closest to it, and I yank it open, expecting to see Greer, ready for relief to come crashing through me, but it’s not Greer. It’s Merlin, looking uncharacteristically tired and disarrayed.

“Greer’s been taken,” he announces quietly.

Twenty minutes later, we are fully dressed in the suite, gathered around the coffee table with Merlin and a Secret Service agent named Bors. Kay—the chief of staff and Ash’s adopted sister—is there in her hotel bathrobe, pacing by the windows as she talks into her phone. Belvedere, Ash’s personal assistant, is off to the side, also on the phone, surrounded by a cluster of grim-looking Secret Service agents.

“Neither Luc nor Lamar answered when it was time to check in,” Bors is explaining to us. “So that’s when I came up from the stairwell post to find them. I found them unconscious and bound at the far end of the hallway, around the corner.”

Ash rubs his hand over his face. “How many agents were attacked in total?”

“Including Luc and Lamar, only five, only the ones they absolutely needed to attack. The people who took Mrs. Colchester were surgical. Silent. They cut out a second story window and seemed to have left through the alley. That’s also where we found the body of a man named Daryl—an employee here at the hotel.”

I can’t sit anymore. I stand up and start pacing behind the sofa where Ash sits, mirroring Kay. “It was Melwas, Ash. You know it was.”

“I know,” he says heavily. “I know.”

“I thought we had prepared for this! The different hotels, the last minute switches!”

“It wasn’t enough,” Merlin admits. “We underestimated him. I underestimated him. I’m so sorry, Maxen. This is my fault, my own lapse in judgment. I should have expected this.”

Ash stands too, putting a gentle hand on Merlin’s shoulder. How can he be so fucking calm right now? So steady? “I don’t blame you, old friend,” he says to his advisor. “We all should have been more guarded, but even so, I don’t know that we could have foreseen this.”

Merlin sighs, his expression troubled. “I should have.” And even though Merlin and I have had our differences in the past, I am able to take a moment aside from my fear and anger to feel a pang of empathy for him. Because I should have done better too. If I had stayed awake or slept lighter, if I had told Greer to wake me before she went anywhere, if I had done literally anything other than fall asleep like a teenage boy after we fucked, maybe she’d still be safe.

And even though it’s not productive to blame myself, the blame feels like an old, familiar cloak. I toss it over my shoulders and feel more settled somehow, more in control. The world makes sense again. It’s my fault.

It’s always my fault.

Ash looks around the room with an even, surveying expression. If I didn’t know him as well as I do, if I hadn’t been by his side as we watched soldiers getting their faces blown off, as we faced freezing nights in the mountains with no food and barely any water, then I would have thought he wasn’t affected by this at all. I would have thought that he was able to close off his feelings while he thought, or maybe even that he wasn’t worried about Greer in the first place.