“Perhaps ‘died’ is the wrong word.” He sits on my bed and cups the side of my face. In his eyes I see something I hoped not to. I don’t know what love is, and I doubt the king does either, but the expression he wears seems awfully near the mark.

“You really want to know?” he asks.

I nod.

He lets out a breath, then making a decision, he says, “All right. I’ll tell you the whole sordid story—it’s a long one.”

This moment strikes me as terribly anticlimactic. King Lazuli, the feared ruler of the entire globe, is about to tell me his biggest and most well kept secret. A secret men have killed and died for. A secret that used to bring goose bumps to my skin.

He presses his mouth to my ear, exhales, and breathes the first line. “But not here—”

The sound of shots ring out.

The king pulls back, and we stare at each other for a moment. Then we’re moving.

Ambushed. Someone knows we’re at this hospital, and we’re being ambushed.

On the other side of the door, I hear Marco’s voice. “Montes, Serenity,” he shouts, dropping our titles, “stay inside.” Then his footfalls move away from us.

He expects us to hide in this room like sitting ducks, but I’ve had too much military training to ever act like a civilian again. Oddly enough, Montes seems to have the same idea. He tries to push me behind him as he approaches the door. Instead I brush past him.

The king catches my hand. “Serenity—”

I turn and look at him. “I know what I’m doing.”

He opens his mouth, then closes it. Montes tugs me to him and kisses me.

“I’ll follow your lead,” he says when he breaks away. “Just don’t get hurt—that’s an order.”

I pull away from him. “I won’t.” I just hope I’m right.

Chapter 21

Chapter 21

Serenity

I crack the door open and peek out. Just as I do so, my guard, who has been stationed at the door, turns toward us.

“Get back inside,” he commands.

“You and I both know we’re outnumbered,” I say. That’s the only way a group would be ballsy enough to infiltrate the hospital. “We need to leave this place.”

The guard hesitates, and in that span of time, a series of shots punctuates the silence.

Now is the perfect time to kill the king or, at the very least, severely injure him. It’s an unpleasant realization that I don’t want him to meet his end here.

“Can you help me get the king out?” I ask.

I can feel Montes press in behind me.