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  Queen

  Karen Lynch

  Copyright @ 2022 Karen Lynch

  Smashwords Edition

  All Rights Reserved

  ISBN: 978-1-948392-38-9

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

  This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. Any reproduction or other unauthorized use of the material or artwork herein is prohibited.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Disclaimer: The persons, places, things mentioned in this novel are figments of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to anything or anyone living (or dead) is unintentional.

  Cover Designer: The Illustrated Author

  For Alex

  About Queen

  Jesse recovered the missing ke’tain to keep her parents safe, but it came at a high price. In the weeks after her brush with death, she struggles to adapt to her new life, while burdened with the terrible secret she learned about her brother Caleb.

  On her first visit to Faerie, Jesse faces new challenges and perils amid the splendor of the Unseelie court. Her relationship with Lukas grows stronger, but her happiness is overshadowed by a threat to both worlds. She might be the only one who can save them if she is willing to risk her own future to do it.

  Together with an old friend, Jesse takes on the most dangerous job of her life. She discovers an inner strength she never knew she possessed; one she will need when she confronts her greatest enemy. Secrets are revealed and lives are changed forever. Jesse will make her last play, but will it be enough for her to survive the final showdown of this lethal game?

  Acknowledgements

  Thank you to my family and friends for your love and support. Amber Shepherd for everything you do, my beta readers (Amber, Irina, April and Sarah), my editor, Kelly, my cover designer, Melissa, and all the readers who make this possible.

  Chapter 1

  I STARED AT my father, waiting for him to say something after the bombshell he’d dropped on me. The torment in his eyes was too much to bear, and it was almost a relief when he turned his head away.

  My mind whirled as I tried to think of a response to his declaration that the Seelie crown prince was my brother. My brother, who had died twenty years ago, when he was two months old. The only plausible explanation was that the stress of my near-death had caused Dad to have a mental setback.

  Guilt pressed down on me. The doctors had warned me this could happen if he didn’t take it slowly. I needed to call them. The possibility of Dad having to go back to the treatment facility gutted me, but we couldn’t risk his health. Fifty percent of recovering goren addicts went back to using within the first year, and my father would not be one of them.

  I laid my hand over his. “Dad, you look pale. Maybe you should lie down for a few minutes.”

  “I don’t need to lie down. I’ve slept enough in the last four months.”

  “But –”

  He swung his gaze back to me. “I’m okay, Jesse. It’s a shock and a lot to take in, but it’s not a delusion.”

  I stared into his clear eyes. His tone was rational, and he didn’t look like someone on the verge of a mental breakdown. But his claim that a faerie prince was his dead son was the kind of thing that got people admitted to a psych ward. All I could think of to do was hear him out and see where it went.

  “Can you tell me about it?”

  Dad drew in a shaky breath. “I don’t know where to start.”

  I reached over to take his hand. “Why do you think Prince Rhys is Caleb? Did someone tell you that?”

  “No. Your mom recognized the prince when she saw Tennin’s photos of him. She said the hair is different, but the prince has my eyes, and he looks like I did when I was twenty.” Dad let out a weak laugh. “I know how that sounds because I thought the same thing at first.”

  “Why didn’t Tennin tell me this?”

  Dad shook his head. “He didn’t know. Your mother didn’t tell me until we were back in the car. I thought she was imagining the resemblance until she pulled out an old photo of me she keeps under the visor.”

  I realized I was holding my breath. “And?”

  “If my hair was blond, I could have been Prince Rhys’s twin when I was his age.”

  I had to see this for myself. Standing, I went to the cabinet where Mom kept all the photo albums. They were labeled by year, and I pulled out the one for my parents’ late teens. My heart thudded as I carried the album back to the couch and sat beside Dad. I stared down at the cover, afraid of what I would see when I opened it.

  “Do you want me to do it?” Dad asked when I made no move to look inside.

  “No.” I lifted the cover. The first few pages were of Mom with her high school girlfriends, followed by an 8x10 photo of her in her cap and gown. I turned the page slowly to reveal Dad’s graduation picture, and it was as if someone had punched all the air from my lungs.

  “Oh, my God,” I whispered. Whipping out my phone, I brought up one of the thousands of online pictures of the Seelie crown prince. I laid the phone beside Dad’s photo, and my world tilted on its axis. It wasn’t only the eyes that were the same. Prince Rhys and the eighteen-year-old version of my father had identical smiles and the same tiny cleft in their chins. The prince had more refined features, like a marble statue with all its imperfections polished away, but Dad was right. They could have been twins.

  I looked at Dad, who was watching me expectantly. Twenty-three years had passed since that photo was taken, and his face was leaner now with crow’s feet near his eyes and lines around his mouth. When I looked past those things, all I could see was the young man smiling up at me from the album.

  “How did I not see it? The first time I talked to Prince Rhys, I felt like I’d met him before, but I thought that was because his face was everywhere.” I shook my head. “What about Bruce, Maurice, and your other friends who knew you back then? None of them saw a resemblance between you and the most famous faerie in the world?”

  Dad shrugged. “I doubt they would remember exactly what I looked like back then without seeing a photo. That happens when you age together. As for everyone else, people don’t always see what is in front of them, especially when they aren’t looking for it. Who would think to make a connection between me and the Seelie prince? You didn’t.”

  I looked down at the two photos. I knew from personal experience how easy it was not to see something that was right in front of your eyes. I still wondered how I hadn’t realized who Lukas was until Rogin Havas had let it slip.

  I pursed my lips as I searched for the right words to phrase what had to be said. “Prince Rhys looks like you, but that doesn’t mean he’s Caleb. I mean…Caleb died. You and Mom saw him, and there was an autopsy and a funeral.”

  I flinched internally and saw an answering expression on Dad’s face. He and Mom never liked to talk about that time, but there was no way around it now.

  He shifted position and glanced away before meeting my eyes again. “The medical examiner said Caleb died from pulmonary atresia, which is almost always diagnosed soon after the baby is born. Caleb was two months old, and he didn’t have any of the symptoms. He looked like a normal, healthy baby. Your mom…” He swallowed. “She didn’t believe the dead baby she found in the crib was ours. She said a mother knows her own child, and that someone had switched her baby for a dead one.”

  Dad’s voice cracked on the last wor
d. Tears pricked my eyes, and I blinked them away.

  “The baby looked like Caleb, and the M.E. said there was nothing suspicious about his death. I explained that to your mom, but she was too distraught to believe it. Nothing would convince her Caleb was dead.”

  “What did you do?” I asked around the rock lodged in my throat. I had always seen the sadness in Mom’s eyes when Caleb’s name came up, but my parents had never gone into detail about his death, other than the cause.

  He cleared his throat. “I thought she would come to accept it after a few days, but she refused to even make the funeral arrangements. And then she started going up to strangers with babies to check that their baby wasn’t Caleb.” Dad paused, his face etched in pain. “It was bad for the first year. After a while, she started to be more like her old self, but I don’t think she was happy again until we found out she was pregnant with you.”

  “You guys never told me any of this,” I said hoarsely.

  “Your mom didn’t want you to know. It was a very dark time in our lives, and she was ashamed of how she behaved.” His face twisted in agony. “No one believed her when she said the baby wasn’t Caleb – not even me. And all this time, she was right.”

  Needing to do something, I laid the album on the coffee table and got up to walk around the room. It hurt too much to think about what my parents had suffered back then, so I focused on their disappearance.

  “What happened the night you disappeared, Dad?”

  He straightened his shoulders as if he was shaking off the pain. “Your mom wanted to see the prince in person. We called one of our contacts at the Ralston and found out he was doing a photo shoot in the small ballroom on the sixth floor. The odds of getting near him were slim, but we had to try.” Dad stared past me as he remembered the events of that night. “The moment we stepped off the elevator, I knew your mom was right. Prince Rhys is Caleb.”

  A new wave of shock rolled through me. “You saw him?”

  “Not the prince. The ballroom door was open and a group was leaving. There were two male faeries in front, and as soon as they saw us, they came to intercept us. They knew who we were before we could even show them our IDs. One of them said he knew they should have killed us twenty years ago when they took the boy.

  I pressed a hand to my mouth as he continued. “They restrained us and told the prince’s guard to take him to his suite while they dealt with the problem. The next thing I knew, we were in the ballroom and they were calling Rogin Havas to dispose of us. They didn’t want the death of two well-known bounty hunters to draw any attention to Prince Rhys and risk reporters making a connection between him and us. They had no idea Rogin’s sister would intercept the call and save us.”

  “You remember seeing her?” I’d told him that Raisa had been the one who gave them the goren to keep them alive. Until now, he had no memory of her part in it.

  “Yes. I woke up in her house. She said she would do whatever she could to keep us alive. After that, all my memories are foggy. I can’t tell the real ones from the goren dreams.”

  I continued pacing. I couldn’t think about the possibility that my brother was alive or about everything my parents had been through. It was too much for my brain to process all at once. Instead, I focused on the person at the root of it all, the one who had caused my family so much pain.

  “What I don’t get is why? Why would Queen Anwyn steal a human baby, convert him, and raise him as her son? Her heir? One thing I know about Fae politics is that they only want the bluest blood in the royal line. I can’t believe any Seelie faerie with an ounce of royal blood would be okay with someone who isn’t even Fae-born being their king someday.”

  “They would if they don’t know he isn’t Fae-born.”

  “That’s it!” I whipped my head toward my father. “That’s why her guard tried to have you and Mom killed, and why they don’t want you to remember. I thought they were worried you knew about them stealing the ke’tain, but all along it was about Prince Rhys…Caleb…”

  My voice trailed off, and a knife twisted in my gut at the fresh pain in Dad’s eyes. I couldn’t imagine what he was going through. His son had been ripped from him and raised as a faerie with no knowledge of his real parents. Even if Prince Rhys somehow learned the truth and wanted to know his family, we could never get back the life that had been stolen from us.

  I went back to pacing. “It still doesn’t explain why she would take a human baby and pass him off as her own. What could she gain from that?”

  “I don’t know.” Dad stared down at his hands. “But she went through a lot of trouble to do it and to cover it up.”

  He was right. Her guards had done a lot more than steal Caleb. They’d switched him with a changeling made to look like my brother, which required a lot of magic. They also would have had to glamour the medical examiner to make sure the autopsy report confirmed the dead baby was Caleb and that he’d died of a heart defect.

  After all of that, the guards couldn’t bring a human baby to Faerie. Their magic wasn’t strong enough to do a conversion, which meant Queen Anwyn had secretly come to our realm to perform it herself.

  But why Caleb? Of the millions of male babies in the world, why had they chosen my brother? Had they been looking for something specific, or were we the first family they found with a baby boy? We’d probably never know the answer to that, and I feared it would haunt my parents for the rest of their lives.

  Helpless anger flared inside me. The Seelie queen had done nothing but bring pain to the people I loved, and she was virtually untouchable. Not that we had evidence of her crime. The prince’s resemblance to Dad could be passed off as coincidence, and we had no proof of his real identity. Once a human became Fae, none of our human DNA remained. It was one of the things I’d been struggling with this past week.

  There was the body Mom and Dad had buried, but it would take a lot more than a crazy story about changelings to get the authorities to exhume it. And something like that would not go unnoticed. My family would be dead before the ink was dry on the order.

  A soft whistle drew my attention to Finch, who stood at the end of the hallway. His eyes were wide and worried as he signed, Is Dad okay?

  I followed his gaze to where Dad sat with his head in his hands, and then I signed back, Yes. He’s just figuring out something.

  Okay. He turned and disappeared again.

  Dad moved his head from side to side. “It’s my fault. I should have kept him safe.”

  “How can you say that?” I went to sit beside him. “No human is a match for the Seelie royal guard. You know that better than anyone.”

  “You don’t understand. I had the apartment warded, but only against the kinds of faeries we hunted. I never thought to protect us from Court faeries. If I had, they wouldn’t have gotten in and taken Caleb.”

  “You can’t blame yourself for that. No one would have thought to ward against the royal guard.” I laid my head against his shoulder, lost as to how to comfort the strongest man I’d ever known. My father was a protector, and he’d carry this guilt on his shoulders forever. It was one more reason for me to despise the Seelie queen.

  Neither of us spoke for a long moment, and it was Dad who broke the silence. “We need to make a plan.”

  “A plan for what?” I straightened. Surely, he wasn’t going to suggest we tell Prince Rhys who he really was. As much as I wanted my parents to be happy, I was terrified of what the queen would do to them.

  “To protect our family. If Queen Anwyn learns the prince has been here and met me, she’s not going to take it well. And if her guards find out I have my memories back, they –”

  “No.” Fear sent me to my feet. “We can’t tell anyone about this. The Seelie guard will come after you and Mom, and I can’t lose you again. I can’t.”

  “Jesse.” Dad stood and put his hands on my trembling shoulders. “I’m not talking about going public with this. But if the prince keeps showing interest in us, the queen will take n
otice, and her guard will come snooping around. We need to prepare for that.”

  “How?”

  He pressed his lips together, and his grip on my shoulders tightened a fraction. “The first thing we have to do is tell Lukas.”

  “No.” I shook my head so hard it almost gave me whiplash.

  Dad stopped me when I would have pulled away from him. “Listen to me. I know you’re still angry at him, but he cares about you. He’ll protect you.”

  I had no idea what I felt for Lukas anymore. At first, I’d been furious at him because he’d made me Fae without giving me a choice, even though there had been no way I could have made that decision. Then I’d hated myself for being unfair to the person who had saved my life. I’d spent the last week alternating between hoping he would come assure me everything would be okay and not wanting to see him. Not that he had tried to see me – or talk to me. The others had been taking turns calling to check on me, but I hadn’t heard a word from him since the day he brought me home.

  There was one thing I did know. If we told him about Caleb and what Queen Anwyn had done, he wouldn’t let me stay here. He’d most likely send me to Unseelie to keep me safe, and it could be months or years before I saw my family again. After everything I’d gone through to get them back, I wasn’t letting anyone separate us.

  I shared my fears with Dad and waited for several long minutes while he paced the room deep in thought. His face was still pale, but he looked more like himself as he worked out things in his head.

  He stopped walking midstride and turned to me. “We’ll tell people the doctor said our memories are gone for good. That usually only happens with long-term goren addiction, but we were given high doses and put into comas, so it will be believable. If the guard is watching, they’ll get wind of it.”