How to Catch a Queen (Runaway Royals #1) - Alyssa Cole Page 0,8
dream, no matter the cost? The drive to achieve her goal had become all-consuming. Hobbies weren’t for fun, but to make sure she was well-rounded. School was to make sure she was as smart as any world leader. Friends? Eventually old friends found her goal childish and snobby, and she had no time to make new ones.
You will be a queen, she’d written in her journal every morning, for years and years. You will make your mark and change the world for the better.
She’d been half-right.
Three months after her life’s calling had finally stopped leaving her on read, and with one month remaining in her marriage trial, she sat on a shoddy back bench in the gilded room that hosted Njaza’s Royal Council advisory session, feeling nothing like those queens she so revered.
She was a queen, but she somehow did less for the world than when she’d been a commoner. Back home, she hadn’t just sat around waiting for a royal husband; that wasn’t what queens did. She’d volunteered with countless associations and had been on the board of three of them, helping them to grow from ideas to full-fledged and well-respected organizations that helped many. She was one of the University of Thesolo’s most valued students, having completed degrees and certifications in multiple disciplines to prepare for the eventuality of taking a throne—and, truth be told, for the slim possibility that she wouldn’t, because a queen always has a contingency plan. She could dance everything from ballroom to the latest dance crazes that swept the continent, and she knew how to hold it down in a kitchen whether it was pan-African, French, or American cuisine. Shanti was exceptional. She had made herself exceptional—a woman like her had to be to even get a toe in the door, after all.
Yet in Njaza she was treated both as too incompetent to be useful and too high status to be competent. Too much of a stuck-up know-it-all because she was from Thesolo, which also somehow made her too ignorant. The only thing she’d made her mark on since arriving in the kingdom, besides her newfound nocturnal proclivities, had been the dusty papers she scanned in the royal archives, tedious busywork assigned so she’d stop asking for things to do.
Shanti had never felt truly foolish—she hadn’t thought she was capable of feeling that—until she stopped and reviewed the hours leading up to her marriage.
When she’d received the Urgent Arrangement Request notification in her RoyalMatch.com app, she’d understood that it was a one-in-a-billion stroke of luck to be plucked from the commoner tier, populated by countless royal fanatics willing to drop everything to marry a royal suitor. She’d known that after all those rejections, when she’d improbably made it into the same room as royalty to begin with, it was likely her final chance at a crown, and certainly her only chance at helming an absolute monarchy, since they were rare in this day and age.
She’d taken it.
Her main worry had been being thrust into close quarters with a spouse she’d bypass the courtship stage with. She laughed at her naivety now; the marriage trial was three-fourths complete and she’d barely seen her husband. She’d certainly never again encountered the man she’d met in the royal receiving room—the one who’d made her heart beat quickly as he stalked around all massively muscular, with a frown marring a face so handsome it made her believe in the Njazan myth that the blood of a warrior god ran in the veins of the king.
The man she’d married was cold. Distant. The fire in his dark eyes at their first meeting had cooled during their wedding ceremony—a rushed, dour affair beside the dying king’s bed, attended by her parents, the council, and Lumu. When next she’d seen him, a week later at their wedding celebration and his official coronation, his eyes had been hard as dead coals. Their joyless union had been witnessed by the citizens of the kingdom and ambassadors from a few curious nations, but it’d been sandwiched between the funeral commemoration and the official mourning period for Sanyu I.
Afterward, she’d been hidden away in the queen’s wing, the farthest point from her husband’s quarters in the entire Central Palace. When she’d tried to see him for the first two months, to offer support to him during his time of loss, she’d been blocked by the palace guard and advisors tasked with ensuring that Sanyu followed the strict traditions of mourning. After the official mourning