Take the Key and Lock Her Up (Embassy Row #3)(27)

I look back out the window. When I speak, my breath fogs against the glass.

“So … someone is trying to kill me. And Jamie. They want—no, they need—us dead. We’re a threat. And as long as we live … as long as our entire bloodline lives, we will always be a threat.”

“But, Grace …” Rosie stumbles over her words, she seems so confused, so lost, as she asks, “Do you want to be a princess?”

That this is a question people now seriously ask me is something I can’t quite comprehend.

“No, Ro, I most certainly do not want to be a princess.”

“Well, maybe if you explain that to everyone,” Rosie says. “Maybe if you just tell them, then maybe …”

I’m just starting to speak, to protest, to try to explain that no one has ever taken my word about anything, when Megan beats me to it.

“It doesn’t work that way,” she says.

“Yeah. They’re never going to believe me,” I say, but Megan is shaking her head.

“No, Grace. You don’t understand. Adrian law won’t allow it.”

Megan reaches into her bag for her laptop. In a flash, it’s open and connecting to the train’s Wi-Fi. We all sit in silence as her perfectly manicured fingers fly over the keys. Then Megan is spinning the laptop around.

“I’m talking about this.”

It’s a website devoted to Adrian history, specifically the history of the government.

“After the War of the Fortnight, all kinds of people still believed that Amelia was alive,” Megan says. “Or maybe they just hoped she was. Anyway, it was a rumor for a long time.”

“Okay,” Noah says, as if it’s not okay and he doesn’t understand at all. He’s not the only one.

“Think about it,” Megan tells us. “The country had just been through a war. A bloody, bitter revolution. Adria was fractured and broken. And they needed to move on. They brokered the peace treaty under the condition that the dead king’s brother would assume the throne but that there would also be a new parliament. Peace depended upon that. But there were still all these whispers—all these theories—that Amelia was alive, and as much as half the country wanted the war to be over, the other half didn’t want Amelia’s throne taken away from her if she was still alive—that if she really did survive, they owed it to her to keep her throne intact.”

“So?” Leave it to Rosie to cut right to the heart of the matter. “Amelia never was put on the throne. And then, presumably, she died. Unless she became a vampire. Did she become a vampire?”

“No,” Megan says quite simply. “But they wrote the constitution as if someday she might come back, and”—Megan turns to the laptop and then begins to read—“‘In the event that our lost Amelia should be found, she or her heirs shall return to the throne of the country that is rightfully theirs.’”

Megan’s words are still echoing around the train car, but my thoughts are racing by as quickly as the landscape outside.

“Don’t you see?” Megan sounds like she’s losing patience with us. “If Amelia had returned—if her heirs return—then it all goes away. The prime minister. Parliament. Not to mention the current king. All gone. Amelia’s heirs—that’s you, Grace. That’s Jamie—would reclaim the throne and then Adria would, by law, revert to the government it had before the coup.”

“That can’t be right.” I’m shaking my head, retreating farther and farther back in my seat as if it can also send me back in time. “They wouldn’t have written the constitution to a country like that. Not to pacify some crazy conspiracy theorists.”

“But they weren’t crazy, were they?” Noah asks.

And that, of course, is the problem.

“It’s in the constitution,” I say, suddenly defeated.

“I’m not saying the Society is right, Grace,” Megan goes on. “But, according to this, Jamie doesn’t have a choice.”

I’m sixteen years old and short for my age—too thin and unstable for my own good. But I’ve never felt truly powerless before. Even strapped to a bed, medications and guilt pounding in my veins, I had the power to keep yelling about the Scarred Man. I had a mission, a cause. A vigilante’s surety that someday the world would see that I was right.

But that day has come and gone, and now I know that there is absolutely nothing I can do to change it.

“Grace?”

The window is so black now. How is that possible? Outside, there aren’t even any lights. No distant towns or lone farmhouses. It’s like this train has carried us far, far out to sea.

Maybe that is why it feels like I am drowning.





You should probably wear a hat or something.”

It’s easy to forget—with all my crazy and my drama—that Alexei is still a wanted man. They still think he killed that cadet in Adria. There’s still a price on his head. And now he’s come back to Europe—to the belly of the beast.

Because of me.

And, suddenly, it scares me.

“You need to go back, Alexei.”

“I need to go back?”

The train car is empty. It’s supposed to be the café, but it’s too late. There is no one working behind the tiny bar. If a person wanted to buy a stale sandwich or bag of greasy chips, they’d be out of luck. Alexei and I are all alone.