Page 50 of Sky’s Edge

Tanyn was far from done.

“Prior to that, even if he deserved it, you didn’t lay into your father like he did to you, saving me, and more importantly your mother from having to watch you and your father go at each other. You answered a comm I could tell you didn’t want to answer, but you did it because you obviously wanted to put someone’s mind at ease. I talked to Lex about you, and he tells me Laura is utterly devoted to you, like you shared the same womb. You don’t earn devotion like that, unless you’re worthy of it.”

I was holding my breath as he bent toward me and concluded his speech.

“So, yes, my beautiful Catla, you are very, very bad at pretending to be something you’re not to put me off. I see you. Maybe those males didn’t. Or maybe you didn’t want them to, and you were better at putting them off. I don’t give a fuck why they were so stupid they let you slip through their fingers. I’m grateful for it. Because now, you’re mine.”

While I tried to get my lungs restarted, he pushed away from the table and started toward the door, still speaking.

“The tour will be inside. But I would change those slacks before we go to see the lynx.” He turned in the door. “Manny tells me there are kits. So you’ll see babies.”

I really shouldn’t have let my face light up.

But baby lynx?

I couldn’t stop it from happening.

Tanyn examined me then shook his head like he couldn’t quite believe me, but even so, he enjoyed what he didn’t believe, and he left the room.

Hurley got up, and after shooting me a happy doggie look, he jogged out behind Tanyn.

I stared into my bowl, realizing I wasn’t screwed.

I’d screwed myself.

“Gods damn it,” I mumbled.

And then, with nothing for it, I finished my porridge.

Chapter 6

Lynx

I was holding on by a very slim thread.

This was because the tour of the livable parts of the citadel went very fast because there were not very many livable parts.

The lounge we’d spent time in. The dining room, ditto with the time. A small family room with a slouchy sectional and the only screen in the place. An even smaller study where Tanyn told me he’d had his lessons via holo before he’d turned sixteen and was sent off to a military academy. His bedroom and bath, his mother’s bedroom and bath. An archaic kitchen that had archaic apparatus in it that I supposed you used to cook or store food (the only things I recognized were the outmoded Cook-Companion, Chill-Cabinet, Bev-Buddy and the four-seater kitchen table in the middle).

And we didn’t tour them, but Tanyn told me Mangold and Zyra had a set of rooms where they lived.

The rest of it, and there was a lot of the rest of it, was shut off. Bone-cold. Dark. Dusty. Derelict. The furniture and paintings on the walls covered in white sheets or left standing to petrify in the deep freeze.

Tanyn had shared the structure was sound. All the rooms had been wired for electricity and tech.

But there were vast areas of this stately castle that were unused, and the areas that were, weren’t many.

I understood I was privileged to grow up in a mansion and have the means from even a young age to explore widely, not only the city, but the entire planet, on holidays with my parents, then my friends, then on my own.

I could not imagine having essentially six rooms and a frozen tundra being the extent of my world.

A prince and supposed-to-be-then-was future king?

Outrageous.

I was furious his father put him and his mother through this. His father, who lived in a palatial castle and wore the crown that owned numerous other properties, all of them opulent.

I knew their treasury was healthy, mostly because the media of Sky’s Edge made such a big deal about how Arnaud was squandering it.