“You spent all those months in Professor Clair’s art history lectures, and the only thing you have to say about the Mona Lisa is that it should be bigger? How very Texan of you.”

  “In my defense, Professor Clair always talked about scale.” Connor smiled. “People make such a fuss over the Mona Lisa, and I don’t really get it. What makes it so much better than, say, that portrait of Lady Eaton we looked at in the MFA?”

  A warm glow unfurled in Beatrice’s stomach at the reference to that night. That was when her relationship with Connor had begun to shift: when he’d stopped being so withdrawn and taciturn and had shown her a glimpse of his real self, the part of him that was warm and lighthearted. The part of him that made jokes at the world’s expense, then invited Beatrice to share them.

  “The Mona Lisa is famous because it’s the Mona Lisa,” Beatrice said helplessly. Famous for the sake of being famous—maybe she and this portrait had something in common.

  Connor chuckled. “That’s a circular argument, but this time I’ll let it slide.”

  Beatrice recalled what Louise had said. “What would you say she’s thinking about?”

  Connor’s answer was automatic. “Someone she loves.”

  Beatrice blinked, surprised. He kept staring at the painting as he continued. “Look how soft and wistful her smile is; she’s daydreaming about someone.”

  “Princess Louise said the same thing. That the woman in the painting had a forbidden lover,” Beatrice replied, and instantly flushed. It felt oddly daring, saying that to Connor. As if she’d been standing on the edge of a cliff and had tossed a pebble over the edge to test the depth.

  Connor held himself very still for a moment, something dark and unreadable in his gaze. Then he shrugged.

  “Maybe she did,” he said easily, as if those words—forbidden lover—had no significance to him at all.

  He held out an arm, fully professional once more. Beatrice had the nagging, maddening sense that she’d been holding something precious in her hands only to have it torn from her grasp.

  “Now come on, Bee, don’t you think you should get back to your adoring fans?”

  2

  daphne

  “Jefferson. There you are.” Daphne tried to ignore the party buzzing around them as she placed a proprietary hand on the prince’s forearm.

  It wasn’t fair, she thought darkly. Other people cheated all the time. They cheated on their diets and their high school exams and, yes, even on their boyfriends. And those people didn’t lose everything.

  But then, their boyfriends weren’t the Prince of America.

  Daphne had worked for years to become Jefferson’s girlfriend. She’d been excruciatingly careful about her appearance, her behavior, the way she spoke to paparazzi. She’d done such a convincing job that practically everyone in America thought she and Jefferson belonged together.

  And now it would all come crashing down around her because of one mistake.

  “Hey, Daphne. Are you having fun?” Jefferson asked halfheartedly. He retreated a step, gently tugging his arm from her grip. Daphne quickly reached up and tucked her hair behind one ear to cover the slight.

  “This might be your best party yet,” she said too brightly. “Though you should keep an eye on Praveen and Dev Murthy. They’re currently playing ring of fire with that ceremonial goblet from the bookcase—the engraved one with double handles that was given to your grandfather by the King of Germany.”

  Jefferson nodded distractedly. “Actually—I’m going to get a drink. I’ll catch up with you later.”

  “Okay,” Daphne replied, over the hammering of her heart.

  The prince must have realized how brusque he’d sounded, because he hesitated. “Can I get you something?”

  “Thanks, but I’m fine.” Her smile came out shaky and flustered, but at least it was a smile.

  Things were usually so different. At parties Jefferson stayed near Daphne, and when they got separated, he shot her glances across the room, his eyes dancing with amusement or full of heat. Tonight, though, his eyes slid away, determinedly looking anywhere except at her.

  Daphne could feel their breakup on the horizon, like the rumbling pressure of a summer storm. It had been brewing for some time now. Jefferson had been acting distant for weeks, long before the colossal lapse in judgment that had led her to sleep with his best friend, Ethan Beckett.

  She focused on her breathing, in and out, in and out, as Jefferson crossed the room toward the bar. He kept stopping to greet someone, to let a friend fist-bump him or slap him good-naturedly on the back. She desperately needed to fix their relationship, get things back to the way they had been.

  But first she would deal with the ticking time bomb that could ruin everything.

  Daphne glanced at her best friend, Himari Mariko, who was visible among the crowds in her vivid emerald-green dress. How typically Himari to choose a loud, vibrant color, thereby reminding everyone that she was only a rising senior. The students in Jefferson’s year had all come straight from their St. Ursula’s or Forsythe graduation dinner, the girls still in the white dresses they had worn beneath their caps and gowns, the boys in coat and tie—though those coats and ties were now scattered haphazardly on the furniture or looped over the scrollwork of antique sconces.

  The room was packed with people. Someone had set up beer pong tables near the enormous portrait of the prince’s namesake, Lord Thomas Jefferson, which hung on the far wall. There was something deeply amusing about the contrast between the solemnity of Lord Jefferson’s portrait and the crowd of drunk teenagers tossing Ping-Pong balls beneath.

  Himari looked up, feeling Daphne’s gaze, and their eyes locked.

  For a moment they stared at each other like a pair of queens before battle: not the delicate scarf-waving queens you saw in medieval tapestries, who sent knights to fight on their behalf, but queens from a fantasy novel, who got down in the trenches and waged war. Queens militant.

  It hurt more than Daphne would ever admit. For years, she and Himari had been each other’s fiercest champions. They had guarded each other’s backs through the treacherous dangers of high school and court functions, had shared secrets that they told to no one else.

  Everything had changed last week, when Himari saw Daphne and Ethan together. She’d confronted Daphne about it, threatening to tell Jefferson unless Daphne told him first. To Himari, their friendship wasn’t worth whatever social capital she could gain by taking Daphne down. She’d apparently only ever seen Daphne as a means to an end.

  Now Himari would eviscerate her unless Daphne found a way to defeat her first.

  I have no choice. I have no choice. The words echoed through her head over and over—a litany, a prayer—as she walked to the table of drinks. She reached for a bottle of sauvignon blanc, because Himari was too responsible to drink hard liquor, and poured a splash into a red plastic cup. Then she grabbed a small lipstick tube from her purse and unscrewed the top, though there was no lipstick inside.

  Daphne held the tube over the cup, tipping a small amount of white powder into the sauvignon blanc. She’d ground up the sleeping pills herself after checking and rechecking the dosage on various medical websites.

  Despite everything that had happened, she had no desire to actually hurt Himari. She just wanted to bring her down a peg—to find something she could hold over Himari’s head, the way Himari was holding Ethan over hers. And Himari was always so careful and controlled that Daphne knew the only way she’d catch her off guard was to weaken her defenses.

  Heart pounding, Daphne held the drink and scanned the room. When she saw Lara Jacobs, she pasted a smile on her face and started forward.

  “Lara! Have you seen Himari? Jefferson just opened this bottle for her,” she said brightly. It was easy to pretend that things were normal between her and Jefferson—that he wasn’t blatantly ignoring her. “I was on my way to the bathroom,” Daphne went on, “but if you wouldn’t mind…”

  Lara jumped at the chance to do Daphne a favor. “I can take that to Himari,” she hurried to offer.

  Himari wouldn’t turn down a drink if she thought it came from the prince himself. And it was a plausible lie, after all: Jefferson loved playing bartender, opening wines and making cocktails, always using those red plastic cups as if he were a normal teenager and not third in line for the throne.

  Daphne watched from across the room as Lara delivered the wine to Himari, who accepted it with obvious pleasure and lifted it to her lips.

  It was done.

  Whatever frantic energy Daphne’s body had been running on, adrenaline or fear or sheer willpower, rushed out of her at once. She went cold all the way down to her bones—like that time she’d fallen through ice at the Washingtons’ ski house and had to take a thirty-minute steam shower before she stopped shivering. She stared at her hands, half expecting them to be blue with cold, but they looked normal around her pale pink fingernails. The rest of the room felt dizzyingly distant.

  She stumbled back, only to collide with a broad, warm chest. A chest that she knew quite intimately.

  “Daphne, are you okay?” Ethan braced his hands on her shoulders to steady her. She could feel the heat of his palms through her silken cap-sleeved top.

  Of course it was Ethan. It should have been Jefferson, her boyfriend, helping her in a moment of weakness, but then, Jefferson didn’t know her well enough to see that she needed help at all. Jefferson had never seen past the picture-perfect veneer that Daphne showed the world.

  Leave me alone! she should have shouted at Ethan. Haven’t you done enough? Yet she said nothing.

  “Do you need to sit down?” he asked, still touching her. “You look dizzy.”

  Daphne retreated a step, forcing Ethan to lower his hands. She smiled in case anyone was watching—because of course someone was watching: this was the palace, and she was dating the prince. There were always eyes on her.

  As she and Ethan had discovered to their detriment when they’d hooked up the first time.

  The only time, Daphne amended. It certainly couldn’t happen again.

  Yet some irrational, traitorous part of her wanted to grab Ethan’s hands and put them back on her shoulders, where they belonged. She wanted to lean into him, let those hands skim lazily downward, over her waist, to lift the hem of her dress and tug it over her head. The way he had that night.

  She and Ethan had withdrawn to one side of the room, their body language deceptively friendly. No one who glanced over would think twice about the fact that they were talking; they had known each other for years, ever since the fateful night Daphne had come to a party at the palace and set her sights on Jefferson.

  A tiny, stubborn corner of her heart wondered how things would be different if she’d chosen Ethan that night instead. What if she’d let herself chase this feeling—the delicious molten sensation she’d always felt around Ethan—instead of deciding that she would become a princess?

  “Everything is fine,” Daphne said briskly. “You don’t have to worry about me.”

  She tore her eyes from Ethan’s face and looked over at Himari, who was telling a story with uncharacteristically sloppy gestures. Already her eyes were glassy, her cheeks flushed as if she’d had a bottle of wine instead of a single glass.

  “Daphne,” Ethan said slowly, following her gaze, “what have you done?”

  Daphne realized with a sharp sense of relief that she could talk about this with Ethan. She’d suggested the plan to him yesterday, and when he’d refused to help her, she’d pretended to back down—though of course she hadn’t abandoned it. She couldn’t afford to, not when her entire future was on the line.

  Ethan would understand what she’d done. He wouldn’t judge her; he was just as hungry and ambitious as she was, and besides, this mess was half his fault. They had both betrayed Jefferson when they’d slept together that night.

  “She’s fine. It’s just an over-the-counter sleeping pill, and I gave her a child’s dose because she’s so tiny,” Daphne said urgently.

  Ethan shook his head. “I can’t believe you. Do you realize how dangerous this is?”

  “She’s going to be fine. At most she’ll say something inappropriate, flirt with someone she never meant to—do something embarrassing that I can use against her. Her pride will be a little bruised, but she’ll survive that. I really am watching her,” Daphne added plaintively. “I have everything under control.”

  “If this is what ‘under control’ looks like to you, I don’t want to see things when they’re out of control,” Ethan countered.

  “I love Himari! I would never hurt her! Even if she doesn’t feel the same way about me,” Daphne insisted, her voice breaking.

  At that, Ethan softened. “Himari loves you, Daphne. You’re her best friend.”

  “I don’t know if that’s true anymore.”

  What did it really mean to be someone’s best friend? She and Ethan and Himari had all made monumental mistakes in that department lately.

  Despite everything that had happened, Daphne missed her best friend. She missed the Himari who used to sneak off campus with her for frozen yogurt, who drove Daphne to school in her cherry-red car, defiantly parking in the senior lot when they were running late. She missed the Himari who used to curl up with her in sweatpants and watch celebrity awards shows, both of them offering commentary on the actresses’ outfits, making each other double over in laughter. That was before Daphne started getting invited to those sorts of events herself—before she became one of the people that fashion bloggers regularly covered, before her face started appearing in the tabloids.

  Before Daphne slept with Ethan, and Himari used it as blackmail.

  “Daphne, would it really be so bad if you just…stopped?” Ethan ran a hand through his hair, causing it to stick up in unruly spikes. He looked unusually young in that moment, almost boyish. “Himari is going to tell Jeff about us eventually. What if you went to him first, explained what happened? You really want to do all this”—he jerked his chin toward Himari—“so that you can marry into the royal family?”

  “I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”

  Ethan made a halfhearted attempt at a smile. “You know Jeff isn’t the heir. If you were going to be Queen Daphne someday, I might get it, but this? It seems like a lot of trouble to go to, just to become princess.”

  “You have a point. Queen Daphne has a nice ring to it.” She strove for a lighthearted tone, but Ethan’s smile faltered.

  They were both well aware that a title was one thing Ethan could never give her.

  “I just hope you know what you’re doing,” he said at last.

  Daphne tossed her curtain of red-gold hair over one shoulder. She tried to seem stately and imperious, but the hand that held tight to her clutch was trembling.

  “What are you going to do, tell on me? Or can I count on you to help?”

  “If I’m not with you, I must be against you?” Ethan said drily.

  “Exactly.”

  He sighed. “You’re terrifying, Daphne. You know that, right?”

  “Terrifyingly brilliant,” Daphne quipped, which elicited a reluctant chuckle.

  “Remind me never to get on your bad side.”

  “Please. I think you know better than to ever try.”

  Ethan’s gaze lingered on her as if he were searching her face for something. Whatever he saw, he finally nodded. “Of course I’m on your side. I’m always on your side, no matter what you do.”

  The words should have been heartening, but they came out oddly resigned. Defeatist, even.

  Daphne realized, in that moment, that Ethan loved her.

  He loved her even if he didn’t want to, even if it caused him pain. And the most confusing and troubling part was, she just might—

  No. There was no reason to think about things that would never happen.

  Her and Ethan, together…it was an idea too intoxicating, too dangerous. To give it oxygen would let it balloon into something Daphne couldn’t control.

  She quickly stifled that thought and stashed it back in a dark corner of her heart where it belonged.

  3

  nina

  Nina Gonzalez glanced at her reflection in the ladies’ room at Washington Palace, listening with distinct amusement to the conversations that frothed up around her.

  There were so many reasons that she didn’t fit in with this crowd. The superficial reasons: these girls were all in the twirly white dresses they’d worn beneath their graduation robes, designer bracelets sliding up and down their arms, while Nina had shown up in a black spaghetti-strap dress that, she now realized, might actually be a swimsuit cover-up.

  Then there were the other, perhaps greater, reasons she wasn’t like these teenagers: their titles, their casual references to private jets and ski houses and family estates. All Nina had inherited from her family was her mom’s hustle, her mamá’s sheer stubbornness, and the love of reading she’d absorbed from them both.

  Nina might not belong here, but here she was nonetheless, because she and Princess Samantha had been best friends since they were seven.

  The door to one of the stalls swung open, and girls trading lipsticks and gossip all fell silent as Daphne Deighton walked up to the row of sinks. If Nina was invisible to these people, then Daphne was drawn in Technicolor, the focal point of their envy or longing or eagerness to belong.

  Flashing her usual polite smile, Daphne glided to the mirror—that was the only word for it; she glided like a ballerina, her heels making dainty little clicks on the floor—and set her gold clutch on the counter, then reached inside it for her lip gloss.

  Nina couldn’t help noticing that there was something tremulous about Daphne tonight. Something off. As if the block of snow she’d been carved from was melting, and now cracks were showing in her perfect surface.

 

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