Page 1 of Solstice

Prologue

LEX

NOW

It was a sham wedding.

Everyone knew it.

I knew it. Ivy knew it.

Four years of faking it, and here we were, staring down a night that would live in infamy for all the wrong reasons. The public wanted the glitz and the glam. They wanted the star-studded event with the free booze and the photo ops. But that wasn’t us anymore. That hadn’t been us for a long time. Not since Ireland. Not since Samhain and the changeling child, Poppy, and the mess in the woods with the king and the queen two years ago.

We’d be lucky to make it out of this alive.

We’d be lucky if this so-called wedding didn’t end in bloodshed.

“You look pissed,” Ivy’s brother, Jon, said, fixing my tie. Like his sister, he had steel-gray eyes and thick ginger hair. We’d been friends since we were little, and though he reminded me of my bullheaded wife, he’d become more of an adopted brother to me over the years. “You need to fix your scowl before photo time.”

Fuck.

Today, the crease between my eyebrows had more to do with the shit about to go wrong than my resting bitch face.I lit a cigarette and took a deep inhale, relishing the nicotine buzz as I looked in the mirror. The clothes were right. The hair was right. Everything about today had been planned down to the minute.

But I itched for reasons I couldn’t tell anyone.

Am I really going to go through with this?

Twenty-six years, all leading up to this moment.

I looked out the window at the crowd gathering below—fifteen hundred of America’s finest sycophants, here to suck the life out of what little remained of my soul. I’d grown up around them, so I could handle the pressure. But after what happened to Ivy and Miri, after how the world had reacted, these blue-blood fuckers didn’t deserve to share the happiest fucking day of my life with me.

This is going to draw him out.This is a bright, shiny beacon.

Everyone I’d ever known and loved was here, well…almosteveryone. But this was my plan, wasn’t it? I cracked my neck and took another draw on my cigarette.

This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever done on a long list of stupid.

Ivy had been right. What the hell was I thinking?

Visions of Samhain danced in my head—thick fogs of smoke, a dark, maniacal laugh, thistle bushes twenty feet tall. Getting out of Faerie had been hell both times, and I didn’t want to bring that chaos here.

Too late.All of it. All of this. Just…too late.

Someone knocked on the door, and my mother appeared when it opened, followed by my father.

“Malysh! Malysh!”She walked closer with her arms out, tears in her eyes, and cupped my face, leaning in to give me a kiss that didn’t touch my cheek. “You look so handsome. Such a beautiful day. So long in the making.”

“Yes, yes,” said my father, the current president of the United States, swirling a glass of whiskey in his hand and forcing a smile. “You’re doing the right thing, Alexei.”

He kept his attention on the guests outside, the sounds of the pre-wedding music echoing from the string band.

It was all so fucking pretentious,this circus and the way my mother blubbered over me, as if I chose this, as if it were my decision. She’d broken a promise to me years ago, one I hadn’t forgotten about, one I could never forgive her for.

“I know you weren’t thrilled about this at the beginning.” Father shifted his gaze to me. “But my ratings are through the roof. Despite the scandal, people still love you both.”

Despite the scandal.

There it was again, that judgmental look in his eyes, the one that reminded me the wrong son had died nearly a decade ago.

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