How to Catch a Queen (Runaway Royals #1) - Alyssa Cole Page 0,2

every day, too, paraded before the people to receive adulation he didn’t deserve, and he would have to pretend to love it.

No.

The need to escape ballooned, filling the hollow place inside him that should have been the reservoir of his royal strength.

All he had to do was make his way through the fence and into the bustling streets of the capital, and then to the airport or, if there was a search, across the border by land or sea. The latter was more perilous in a kingdom bordered by rivers, lakes, and mountains, not to mention the moors of Njaza, which were nearly impossible to pass through without a guide. And then there were the land mines.

Njaza wasn’t a kingdom one escaped easily.

But once he was gone, he’d live the simple life that had always appealed to him, traveling and working in places where no one knew who he was or cared how often he smiled, laughed, or showed that he was anything other than a marionette forged from iron.

Maybe he’d go lie low in Druk—he hadn’t returned texts from Anzam Khandrol for months, but the prince was an amazingly forgiving guy. It was a requirement of the job when part of your extremely long title was “heir to the sun throne, most benevolent amongst humans, full of grace and peace.”

“Prince Sanyu?” a familiar voice reached through the darkness and pulled him up by the scruff of the neck. “There you are.”

Sanyu’s plans for the future retracted painfully, drawn back into the tight fist of the life that had been planned for him since he was born.

Several bobbing circles of light landed on him as he turned, blinking against the dazzling brightness. Before his vision cleared, he imagined seeing the outline of a scorpion with its stinger poised to strike, an image that resolved itself into the man who stood at the center of the retinue of palace guards who followed him everywhere.

Musoke, co-liberator of Njaza, Sanyu’s lifelong guardian, and the man who’d, over the last few years, generously taken it upon himself to shore up the king’s failing strength—and decision-making—with his own.

He was short and wiry, clad in the ankle-length, waist-cinched robe of purple and gold wax print that denoted his importance to the kingdom as head of the Royal Council. It was a position that could be held only by a man touched by Amageez, the god of wisdom, strategy, and logic. Musoke smiled, though his eyes were unreadable as always. Sanyu had studied Musoke’s every tic for his entire life and was still unable to guess what the man was thinking when he watched him like this, though judging by Musoke’s actions, it was usually some variation of You’re a disappointment, but we’ll make do with you.

Musoke’s words were clipped, the usual cadence of elders born during the occupation who were forced to speak Liechtienbourgish instead of Njazan in every aspect of life outside the home. “Where are you off to, my boy?”

Musoke still called him “boy,” even though Sanyu was thirty-two and strong enough to break the advisor’s slim walking stick and the man himself in two with minimal effort. Sure, he’d been caught absconding like a sulking child with a cloth sack hung on a stick, but he was still an adult, dammit.

“I’m taking a walk to clear my head and offer prayers for my father, king most noble and exalted, slayer of colonizers, he who forged chains into fists,” Sanyu said calmly, as if fear and grief didn’t have an anaconda’s grip around the barrel of his chest.

“How odd,” Musoke said, fixing his gaze on Sanyu in that way that felt as if he was scanning and cataloging every fault. “One usually prays at the temple of Omakuumi the Fierce for such things.”

Sanyu resisted the urge to shift from foot to foot, as he had when he was a boy and found himself the center of attention, usually because he had done something wrong. Something weak. He remembered what his father had told him once, after he’d humiliated himself by crying while getting dressed down by Musoke during combat training.

“The true king does not feel weakness or fear, so if you do, simply pretend to be someone stronger who is never afraid. Imagine how they would act, channel their power.”

“Is that what you do?” young Sanyu had asked, looking up at his father, a big strong man who, indeed, was never afraid.

“I am the king. I don’t need to pretend. But if I had