Glasshouse

You don't run. Running makes noise.

You take the service stairs two at a time, cut through the laundry corridor, and come out in the staff car park just as a white delivery van with Vardenhof Linen on the side noses through the back gate. The night guard waves it through without looking. He's waved it through every Tuesday at one a.m. for a year. You read that in the file too, on page two hundred and twelve, in the report of an officer who lasted eight days.

The prince is in the back of that van. Or he was. The tracker dot is already past it, which means he swapped into a car at the bottom of the hill.

Clever.

You take one of the unmarked detail cars, radio the night desk, and tell them in calm, boring language that His Royal Highness is out and you're on him. Nobody sounds surprised. Somebody sounds like they're eating crisps.

The dot stops on Lantern Street in Old Town.

You know before you get there what it'll be.

Glasshouse used to be a greenhouse for the old palace gardens before the city grew around it. Now it's a nightclub with a glass roof, ivy up the iron ribs, and a line down the block of the most beautiful people in Vessaline pretending they aren't freezing. Bass rolls out through the walls like weather.

Across the street, half a dozen photographers lean on their scooters, lenses up, waiting.

You show the doorman your credentials. He looks at them, then at you, and sighs the sigh of a man who has seen eleven of you before. "He's on the floor."

Of course he is.

Inside it's a jungle in the dark. Hanging plants, green and gold light, people moving under the glass roof like it's raining music. You find him by the way the crowd bends. Every face on the dance floor is turned slightly in one direction, like flowers toward a window.

Caspian is in the middle of it, in a black shirt open at the throat, sleeves shoved up, dancing like nobody has ever told him no. His hair has dried into a mess of gold. He's laughing at something the woman in front of him said.

She's stunning. Platinum hair to her waist, red lipstick, a silver dress that looks poured on. Lady Annika Volsted. Page forty: on-again off-again romantic interest, ducal family, cooperative with the press office.

You walk straight across the floor.

Caspian sees you over Annika's shoulder. His smile doesn't drop. It sharpens. "Officer! You found me. How?"

"Linen van. Tuesday. One a.m."

Annika turns and looks you up and down, slow, unimpressed, then impressed. "Oh," she says to Caspian. "This one read the file."

"Your Highness, there are six cameras across the street," you say. "If you walk out the front, you're on every breakfast table in Europe."

"I'm always on every breakfast table in Europe."

"With your shirt like that?"

He glances down at himself. Then back up at you, and there's something unholy in his grin. "What's wrong with my shirt?"

You don't answer that. You turn to Annika. "My lady, is there a car for you?"

"There's always a car for me." She kisses Caspian's cheek, leaving a perfect red print, and pats your chest as she passes. "Good luck, darling. He bites."

You take him out through the kitchen.

He complains the whole way, cheerfully, past steel counters and a dishwasher who drops a tray when he sees who it is. "This is very undignified. I'm the heir to a throne. There's a perfectly good front door."

"There's a perfectly good back door."

"That's what they all say."

You stop at the alley exit, one hand on the bar. "Stay behind me."

"Is that an order?"

"It's a request with very strong feelings."

He laughs, surprised, like the sound got out before he could stop it.

The alley is clear. You get him into the car, take the wheel yourself, and pull out onto the lake road with the headlights off for the first two hundred meters. In the rearview, nobody follows.

Then somebody does.

A single headlight swings out of a side street behind you. A motorbike, rider in black, no plate you can read.

"Seatbelt," you say.

"I don't—"

"Seatbelt, Your Highness."

He puts it on.

You take the next turn hard, then another, down the old fish market lanes where the cobbles are slick with frost. The motorbike keeps pace. You cut through a tram depot, shoot out the far side between two parked trams with inches to spare, and swing up onto the bridge. When you look back, the single light is gone.

Caspian is gripping the door handle. His eyes are bright.

"Paparazzi?" he asks.

"Maybe."

"You don't think so."

"Paparazzi usually want to be seen." You check the mirror again. "That one didn't."

He's quiet for a few seconds. The car fills with the sound of the heater and the tires on wet stone. When he speaks again, his voice has changed, the theater gone out of it.

"I read your file, you know, Ethan."

"I assumed."

"All of it." He turns his head on the seat to look at you. In the dashboard light his eyes are more gold than green. "Page three. Under personal. 'Openly gay since university. No current partner. No vulnerabilities to coercion.'"

You keep your hands steady on the wheel. "That's accurate."

"Just like that."

"Just like what?"

"You just say it." There's something strange in his voice, not mocking. Almost careful. "Most people in my life spend a great deal of time not saying things."

"I spent a long time not saying it too," you say. "Then I got tired."

He looks out at the black lake for a long time.

"Is it going to be a problem, sir?" you ask quietly. "If it is, tell Rennick tomorrow. I'll be on a plane by noon. You'll win your bet early."

"No," he says, too fast. Then, lighter: "No. God, no. It's just efficient. Most of them took a week to stop staring at me. You managed in an hour."

"I haven't stopped staring at you. I'm watching for threats."

"Am I a threat, Officer?"

"To my sleep schedule, absolutely."

That gets a real laugh out of him, the kind that crinkles his eyes. You catch a flash of something in his left cheek and realize, a second too late, that it's a dimple. The file didn't mention a dimple.

You walk him to his door at 2:40 a.m.

The corridor is hushed, carpeted, lined with portraits of dead Aurennes who all look disappointed in someone. Caspian stops with his hand on the door handle and doesn't open it.

"Do you want to know why they quit?" he asks. "The eleven."

"I read the reports."

"The reports are polite." He turns around and leans back against his own door, looking at you from under his lashes. He's close enough that you can smell the club on him, smoke and citrus and expensive soap. "I don't chase anyone away, Ethan. I just figure out what they want."

"And?"

"And I make them want something they can't have."

He holds your eyes for one long, deliberate second.

Then he slips inside and the lock clicks.