Page 3 of Regal Feather
Unlike my choices, the clothes Jaime had picked out were soft, too. Sergio got back to his usual hyperexcited self when he touched the material.
My parents had been begging me to update my wardrobe for years now. They wouldn’t bat an eye at the charges on the card they monitored more closely than anyone would be comfortable with.
“You still can cometo my place, right?” Now that I was back in the clothes I entered the store with, that background sense of wrongness hit again. I tried to ignore it, but I’d never quite mastered the art of it. “I know we took longer shopping than I’d thought.”
“Yeah, of course.” Danny looked comical while carrying most of the bags he’d insisted on taking himself. Very chivalrous, butI didn’t dare to tease him about it out loud, so I just snickered to myself as he pretended that he could handle all the bulkiness, and that he wasn’t glaring at everyone who spent more than two seconds staring at him. “León is in a monthly meeting thing with Carlos and other vets.”
I nodded.
I had to set a reminder to reach out to Carlos about those meetings. I was closer to Danny, but I didn’t know if I could share about Santos with just anyone. Doing it with Carlos made sense. He’d left the military and had struggled with adjusting to civilian life. He’d understand on a level that Danny might not.
It felt less intrusive, too, even if it would make it more of a challenge.
“I don’t know where Tony is,” Jaime huffed, “and I don’t care. Not all of us are obsessed with being dicked down.”
“You sure about that?” Danny winked.
There was some more bantering as we walked to the row of taxis I knew of a couple of blocks down. I didn’t check in on Sergio, but he was always game for any plan, and he’d been going on and on about wanting to see my place, and how low-key offensive it was that I hadn’t invited him yet, so…
“I’m shotgun,” Danny announced as I checked that the first taxi on the row was taking passengers.
Sometimes they were on a break, or about to leave because someone called, and they got so offended because I hadn’t had a way to read their mind ahead of time.
“Okay.”
The taxi driver looked more menacing than I’d expected, scowling at all of us equally, and with the kind of build that meant he could do some damage if he wanted to. Or maybe I was just easily spooked because of all the clothes we were carrying. He opened the truck for us and didn’t comment about the brand or any of the lace that peeked out from one of the bags, and evenapologized for the dirt on the floor of the passenger’s seats that he hadn’t had time to clean up. So…yeah. I’d been in my head.
He didn’t say anything when I gave him the address, either. No, that was all Sergio and Jaime.
They’d sandwiched me between the two of them and were now drilling holes into my skull with how hard they were staring.
“Isn’t that where like, the princesses live or something?”
“No?” I squeaked. I couldn’t have this conversation here. “I mean, they have a vacation home, but they never really visit.”
I knew because I was in charge of managing it. I sometimes doubted they even knew it was here, and they could vacation in it or whatever they wanted to do, but that didn’t mean the Royal House would allow one single picture of it filtered where it didn’t look absolutely pristine.
“You have seen them, though?” Sergio tested how much give the seat belt had as he repositioned himself. “I mean, not in a royalist way. Like, all about the republic here, but they seem cool. That’s all.”
Everyone made some kind of amused sound at that, the taxi driver included. If he had said that with any of the assigned drivers I was supposed to be using but never did unless my parents were in town, he would’ve been kicked out already. It was a good thing that the anti-royalty sentiment was so widespread across the country, and it kept rising.
A bit scary for reasons, but…
I just had to survive the car ride. Then, after the three of them pretended not to awe with various degrees of success at the large expanse of perfectly manufactured grass that opened up once I’d unlocked the gates to the small villa I lived in, I could come clean about the thing Erika and Tony had been bugging me about for years now. The thing that had almost gotten me in trouble at Plumas when I wasn’t the most discerning, and the thing I kept feeling guilty about, because these people were my friends, andthe longer I went on without telling them, the harder it felt to come clean.
The harder it felt to convince them that I trusted them, that it wasn’t about them, or whether or not I thought they could keep things under wraps. I didn’t even doubt Sergio, and he was the one with zero filters.
“No butler?” Sergio quipped.
“There’s a cleaning service that comes twice a week.” A blush spread across my cheeks at the confession while we walked past the hall, and I led them to the main living room. “And when my parents are here, there’s a personal chef, too.”
Sometimes they brought their own butler, too, but I didn’t say that out loud. One thing at a time.
“Uh, you can grab blankets from the wardrobe there if you want.”
That wardrobe had initially stored a bunch of old and very expensive glasses and dishes, but I got inspired by Plumas and how they had blankets for aftercare in wardrobes spread over the different theme rooms. Now I had all the blankets, and no intrusive thoughts about destroying all those glasses by just breathing wrong around them.
“You have a chimney, too!” Sergio pointed to the gigantic thing as if anyone could’ve missed it.
