The Crown's Secret

Forty minutes into your first shift, you lose the Crown Prince of Aldovia.

To be precise — and your incident reports are always precise — the Crown Prince loses you, along with two motorcade vehicles and a decade-veteran detail lead, by way of a service corridor, a laundry van, and what the palace will later call "an unscheduled walkabout."

The rest of the detail scrambles toward the parliament district, radios shrieking. You stand in the old city square, turning slowly, and think. Eight weeks of studying his file. Every ditched detail, every escape route, every grainy tabloid shot from his university years. All of them have one thing in common — they all end within two streets of coffee the palace kitchens refuse to serve him.

You find him at the counter of a backstreet café with peeling green paint, sleeves rolled, laughing with the owner's grandmother like a man with nowhere in the world to be. You take the stool beside him and order in the local dialect.

The laugh stops. The Crown Prince of Aldovia looks at you the way men look at a locked door that has just spoken their name.

"You're new," Sebastian says slowly. Up close, the tabloids have him all wrong — the charm is real, but it sits over something watchful, like a guard over a wound.

"First day, Your Highness."

"And you found me in—" he checks his watch, genuinely delighted, "—nineteen minutes. That's a record. Do you know what took my last protection officer three years to learn?"

"Yes," you say, signaling for the bill. "Not to sit with his back to the door. Finish your coffee, sir. You have a security briefing — about yourself."