Masked Prince - Nikolai Andrew
Chapter 1
Randal
I don’t remember the exact year I realized I was a bastard, or what that meant.
One thing I knew at thirty-four years old…
I didn’t give a shit.
It barely crossed my mind anymore. I knew it crossed the mind of the queen—my father’s wife, which I guess made her my stepmother. Even the thought of that word would make bile rise into my throat, as I knew my presence did for her every time she looked at me, but I’d come to enjoy making her suffer in some passive way.
It seemed a bit of divine justice.
Cloaked but unmasked, I pounded back my cider outside the village tavern before heading for the market square. It was the first decent day of spring. People were everywhere. It had been a long, shitty winter—the worst of my father’s reign, without a doubt.
As I moved among the townspeople, nobody paid me any attention. As far as they knew, I was a journeyman carpenter who made a habit of passing through Aramoor and its surrounding lands. True, I stood three heads taller than all of them, and my shoulders were at least twice as wide, but nobody gave me more than a glance anymore. The feeling of being nobody important was fucking priceless.
Inside the castle, my life was an endless goddamned battle. Out here, it was easy. Nobody expected a thing from me; nobody knew me well enough to love me or hate me. They’d just seen me around so much that my appearance didn’t shock them anymore. And they were smart enough to get the fuck out of my way when they saw me coming.
Even my scars were of no interest. Though I always covered myself with my cloak, nobody commented on my face. My appearance was as familiar as the leather smith’s limp or the apothecary’s lazy eye. Nobody looked at me like a monster, which is what I fucking knew I was. The people of Aramoor were like the inhabitants of any castle city—they were all damaged, all fucked up in one way or another. I fit right in.
Way above the village loomed the massive stone walls of Ironhaven Castle. From each window, the washer women hung new royal standards, showing my father’s crest, a crescent moon with three stars, representing the three children born to the stolen princess a few generations ago, who went on to found kingdoms of their own.
I’d been forced by my tutor to learn the story as a child, though I believed little of the old tale. As I watched one of the standards flap in the breeze, I reminded myself yet again that it was also my crest. But no matter how many fucking times I saw the image, it never felt like mine.
Through the streets I went, past the grain seller with his barrels of wheat, past the butcher with his rows of hogs’ heads. The closer I got to the dairy stall, the faster I walked. If I was lucky, there was a chance I might catch one glimpse, one fucking glimpse of…
A man’s scream busted up my fantasy. I was the kind of guy that went toward trouble, so I took off running. Down a nearby alley, a pair of muggers had pinned an old man up against a wall. One of them held a small knife at his throat, drawing a trickle of blood that darkened his collar. The other patted him down, and a jingle of coins echoed around the alleyway.
Not a fucking chance was I going to let that happen.
With a few long strides I was on them, moving fast but quietly up behind the muggers’ backs. I might be big, but I knew how to be stealthy. I grabbed the one with the knife by the back of his neck, the way wolves grab their pups. The mugger let out a pathetically girly squeal as I seized him.
“What the fuck!?” He howled.
“Exactly,” I said, gripping him hard. “What the fuck are you doing?”
“Let go of me. You’re going to snap my neck!”
Unlikely, but possible.
“Let’s give it a fucking try,” I said, lifting him up higher so that his feet dangled off the cobblestones. As soon as I raised him as high as I could, his partner hit me with a punch to the sternum. It was a horseshit dirty move, and it pissed me the fuck off. Worse still, it made me lose my grip on the girly squealer’s neck. The two muggers set off running, with coins jangling as