Page 91 of Falling Princess

Raina and I exchanged glances. I could tell she was upset, but I didn’t dare to ask about the specifics. Did she awaken during the night and find me in Lorcan’s arms? I can’t ask, and I hate keeping secrets from a close friend. After a minute, she pushed off the couch and went out back to find Bashir. When they came back half an hour later, they both had red-rimmed eyes.

The past few days have thrown everyone off-kilter. Raina could be upset about Bashir or suspect Lorcan and me. Not that anything’s happened, really, I argued to myself. A whispered vow. A few hours lying in one another’s arms.

It’s more than Raina ever had.

Lorcan and I aren’t dating. At most, we have a vague understanding. Nothing but a forbidden—apparently mutual?—attraction.

I still don’t trust Lorcan’s motives. I believe he’ll keep me alive against threats that are more than fables, but there’s no reason to think he likes me as anything other than a princess. I’m forbidden, for many reasons, which makes us both want it more than we should.

I wonder how much Cata already knows. She’s loyal to my father, first and foremost, yet she adores Lorcan. She’d never let him be sent to the Colosseum to be publicly tortured to death.

Honestly, I don’t think she’d fight as hard for me. It hurts my heart to know that Zosia the person—not the princess—always comes last, even with people I love most. I’m never anyone’s first priority, except in the sense that I have to stay alive long enough to continue the line.

Me? I’m nothing.

I’ll never have children if this is the best life I can promise them. I’ll be as good a queen as I can when the time comes, but I’ll be its last hereditary matriarch.

We returned to campus and resumed life as though nothing extraordinary had happened. My father canceled all of my press events for the remainder of the year, to my relief. The class load I signed up for in a bid to finish my degree was exhausting before the miasma of incipient danger descended.

I tried as best I could to resume our normal patterns back on campus. Lorcan and I cagily avoided one another. For my part, I lived in fear and anticipation that one casual touch might light a conflagration we couldn’t—or wouldn’t—put out.

I no longer had the luxury of pretending that there was nothing between us. And as much as I wanted to try, well, everything, Lorcan felt like too much, too soon. Romantically, my entire goal in coming to Scotland had been to find someone Ididn’tcare about, not to tumble headlong into a forbidden romance with my own bodyguard.

Not that thisislove—it can’t be.

Had I been less watched, and marginally more experienced, I like to think I would’ve found a more appropriate subject. Lorcan is rather to blame for that. If not for him, I’d have hooked up with any number of men by now.

To get away from Bashir and his noxious drug habit, Lorcan, Raina and I decamped to Cata’s house during the week of finals.

In exchange for letting us escape from campus, we did chores. Lorcan and I divided up class reading—he took poli sci and religion; I handled science and economics. It would have worked out swimmingly if his notes hadn’t been a useless mess. I had to do all the readings anyway.

“What is this supposed to mean?” I asked, showing him a page of scrawl that supposedly showed the history of Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism in a timeline. There were numbers, but the alignment made no sense. It was as though he had scribbled a series of dates and simply trusted himself to remember what they meant.

Lorcan squinted. “It’s a chart. This is the...okay, I see why you’re confused.”

“Oh, so it’s my fault?” I folded my arms one atop the other. “How do you do it, Lorcan?”

“Do what?”

“Remember everything from class without reviewing it, like a normal person.”

He shrugged. “Dunno. Always have. Things I read stick with me. Things I see, too. It’s like my mind takes a photo and files it away until I need it again.”

I wonder what it must have been like for him to return from the bustle of The Walled City to a sleepy town like Tenáho, after his father’s death. Clearly, school posed no challenge. He no longer had the physical outlet of serving as a page for the royal guards, as I know he did when his father was in service to the crown. That was how he met Raina.

“So, you do have an eidetic memory. I had wondered.”

“A what?”

“Photographic memory. You see something once, and remember it.”

“Sort of?” He frowned. “It’s not like I remember an image of it. I just remember the significance.”

In any event, I had a marginally better understanding of why he left his hometown and how he bested me so easily in school, where by diligence alone I should have had the upper hand. It did nothing to help the fact that I now had to cram a ton of reading into a very short period of time. He certainly got the best of that trade.

Does he remember the faces of everyone he’s killed?

If so, I shudder to imagine his nightmares.

---