In the silence that followed only the fire continued to crackle, one of the logs snapping and spitting, and Jamie could feel it deep in his stomach, a furious blaze. There was no going back now. ‘Lottie Pumpkin,’ Jamie began. ‘It’s not a pseudonym the princess is using. It’s her real name. She’s Eleanor’s Portman.’

The faces staring at him were almost comical. Like melting wax, their expressions couldn’t seem to settle, mouths parting and jaws going slack, as if they were not able to contain the millions of mixed feelings. Haru looked particularly adrift, his gaze resting in the middle distance while he tried to make sense of his folly. Ingrid and Claude were the only ones who seemed to know exactly how they felt about this information. Ingrid’s eyes went wide at the cold hard slap of humiliation, while Claude showed no hint of shock or embarrassment. For him it seemed as if everything were falling into place. Fingers swirling in his beard, he looked at Jamie once more, a hungry smile pulling at the corner of his mouth.

‘So who is the real princess?’

Jamie’s glance flicked over to Haru and he watched as his eyes widened in understanding.

Haru laughed, although the sound was more shocked than amused. ‘Ellie. The bad influence.’

‘You mean this whole time, some common little urchin has been causing me all this trouble?’ Ingrid looked ready to rip out the throat of the girl she’d been continually bested by.

This was exactly why Jamie had come here. He turned to Claude. ‘Lottie is a good person who has been dragged into all this. The real princess, Ellie Wolf, has brought nothing but trouble on her shoulders since the day they met.’ Jamie couldn’t believe he was saying these words, that it had taken him so long to see the truth. He felt a twinge of guilt. But he’d been denied his identity for his whole life; it was time for Ellie’s identity to be revealed.

Something passed over Claude’s face then, a spark in his emerald eyes that felt like, for a split second, he’d looked right inside him, down into the very depths of his most private thoughts until he was lying exposed. It made him shudder, but not from fear, but because he knew there was nothing he could hide from this man. They were the same.

‘What do you need from us, Jamie?’ Claude asked, but Jamie could tell his father had already guessed.

Looking around the room, he focused on each of them individually. They were his pack now.

‘My conditions for joining you are simple.’ He leaned back into his seat, mirroring his father. ‘You are going to help me save Lottie from the Maravish royal family.’

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