Coffee in the Rain
The rain came down in sheets, a gray curtain that muted the colors of the capital and turned the cobblestones of Alderidge into a slick, treacherous mosaic. Inside the Crown’s End Coffee House, the air was thick with the scent of roasted beans, and the hiss of the steam machine was a steady counterpoint to the drumming water against the leaded windows. Marcus Thorne, Crown Prince and head of the Royal Trade Commission, sat in the corner booth, a position that gave him a clear view of the door and the street beyond.
It was not a habit born of paranoia, but of practice. His father had taught him that a man who did not know his exits was a man who had already been cornered. Marcus’s gaze drifted over the room’s occupants—a pair of clerks arguing over a ledger, an elderly woman knitting by the fire, a young mother struggling to settle the hood of her son’s coat. His attention snagged on the latter, on the way she moved with a quiet, efficient grace that felt out of place in the cozy clutter of the shop.
She turned, and the world stopped.
Vivian Prescott.
Seven years. Seven years since she had vanished from his life, leaving behind nothing but the lingering scent of lavender in his chambers and a note that had shattered him. A note that claimed she could not abide the life of the court, that she was not the woman for him. The words were seared into his memory, each one a clean, sharp cut. Forged? He had wondered, in the beginning, in the desperate, drunken nights before the numbness set in. But he had sent his men, and they had found nothing. No trail. No answer. Only silence.
Now, she was here. The same chestnut hair, pulled back in a hasty knot from which several strands had escaped. The same lips, pressed together in that familiar line of quiet resolve. The same grey eyes he had once sworn he would never forget. They were currently fixed on the boy in front of her, who was tugging at the sleeve of her damp coat, a small, earnest face upturned.
It was at that precise moment the boy turned his head, seeking his mother’s attention. A flash of pale skin behind his ear. A small, crescent-shaped birthmark, a perfect echo of the one that graced Marcus’s own neck.
The air in the room left his lungs. All sound receded into the roar of his own blood. He was on his feet, the chair scraping against the wooden floor in a harsh shriek that silenced the room. The clerks looked up, the old woman’s needles paused, and Vivian, startled by the noise, looked directly at him.
The coffee in his hand was a forgotten weight. The elegant china cup tipped, spilling a dark, bitter stream across the polished tabletop, but he didn’t feel it. His entire world had narrowed to the two figures before him. For a second, a single, suspended second, their eyes met across the smoky room. There was no joy in her gaze. Only a stark, primal terror that he had never seen on her face before.
Without a sound, Vivian’s arm shot out, grabbing the boy’s hand. She turned, knocking over a small display of oatcakes as she bolted for the door. The pastries scattered across the floor, a cascade of crumbs and broken biscuits. She yanked the door open, letting a gust of cold wind and rain whip into the shop, and fled out into the storm, dragging the boy with her.
“Vivian!” The name ripped from his throat, raw and hoarse.
He didn’t wait for the bill. He didn’t apologize. He threw a handful of silver coins on the table and surged after her, the wet cobblestones immediately slicking beneath his boots. The boy was stumbling, his small legs struggling to keep pace with his mother’s frantic stride. She was heading for the hackney stand at the corner of Thornbury Lane, her boots splashing through puddles, her coat plastered to her back.
“Viv, stop!”
She glanced back, her face pale and desperate, pulling the boy closer. She was talking to him, a frantic, hushed tone Marcus couldn’t make out above the hammering rain. She didn’t slow. She reached the line of waiting black sedan chairs and hackney carriages, her hand grappling for the door handle of the first one.
The driver was slow, hunched against the rain on his high seat. He fumbled to unbuckle the strap securing the door.
Marcus pushed himself harder, his long legs eating up the distance. This was not the measured, regal stride of a prince; this was the blind, angry pursuit of a man betrayed. He closed the final few feet just as Vivian, one hand on the door, one hand wrapped around the boy’s wrist, tried to pull it open. He reached out and caught her other sleeve, his grip tight enough to hold her but not to hurt.
“Let go of me, Marcus… please,” she gasped. The words were barely a whisper, almost lost in the downpour.
“Not another step,” he said, his voice flat, cold, a gale-force wind compared to her whisper. He tore his gaze from her pleading eyes and looked down at the boy. He was soaking wet, dark strands of hair plastered to his forehead. Water dripped from his chin. But it was the boy’s eyes that held him. They were grey. A perfect, precise match to his mother’s. And there, behind his left ear, the rain-wet skin was home to the same crescent-moon mark that Marcus knew was on his own neck.
The boy looked up at him, his expression a mixture of confusion and dull fear. “Mama,” he asked, his voice a small, piping sound that cut right through the gale, “why is the Prince angry?”
The question hung in the rain-lashed air between them. It was a question of a child who had only ever known the serene figure in the royal portraits, the man with the placid smile and the distant, kindly eyes. This man, standing before them, was something else entirely—a stranger drenched in fury.
Vivian trembled, a violent, bone-deep shudder that had nothing to do with the cold. She pulled the boy to her side, using her own body as a shield. “He’s not angry, sweetheart. We just have to go.”
Marcus’s gaze was locked on the birthmark. He felt a profound, hollowed-out sensation in his chest. He counted the years. He counted the months. His mind, trained for trade negotiations and tariff analyses, did the math with a brutal, unyielding exactitude. This boy—this child with Jamie’s mark and Vivian’s eyes—he was roughly six, maybe seven years old.
“Seven years,” he said, his voice a low, grinding thing. “Is this why you left? To hide this from me?”
Vivian’s face crumpled, a hundred emotions warring in her eyes—guilt, fear, love, and something else, something that looked like a plea for a mercy she didn’t think she deserved. “You don’t understand. You never did. The court, the people around you… they poisoned everything. There were letters—you think they were real?” Her words tumbled out in a broken torrent. “They told me you were done with me. That you had chosen Lady Ashworth, that our time was simply a… a diversion.”
“Letters?” Marcus’s mind reeled, trying to process her words. Letters? He had received letters too, letters in a script that was almost, but not quite, hers, telling him she couldn’t bear the burden of his world, that she was leaving. He had been so young, so wounded, so proud. He had believed them without question. He had let her go.
“They said you had no need for me,” she continued, the words spilling out faster now. “And I was already… I found out I was with child. I was terrified. I was told I was losing you. I couldn’t lose this, too. I was a fool. I was young.” She shook her head, rain spraying from the tips of her hair. “I was frightened of what they would do to him. They would have used him, Marcus. They would have turned him into a pawn. Please, just let us go. Pretend you never saw us.”
The words “pretend you never saw us” were like a slap. A cold, shocking certainty settled in his bones. They were not just hiding a secret; they were hiding a piece of him. This small, damp boy in a too-large coat was his blood, his heir, his son.
From the corner of his eye, he saw a familiar silhouette detach itself from the doorway of a nearby tobacconist shop. Flynn, his security chief, a man who could move through a crowd like a shadow, had been trailing him at a discreet distance, as he always did. Marcus gave a barely perceptible shake of his head, a silent order to hold his position.
Flynn stopped, melting back into the recess of the awning, but his eyes, sharp and assessing, scanned the scene. He took in the tableau—the prince’s strained posture, the woman’s terrified face, the child shivering between them. His gaze flickered to the boy’s face, then to the birthmark, and Marcus saw the precise moment the calculations clicked in his head. Flynn was a man of facts, and the fact of a boy’s age, of his features, was damning.
Vivian, seeing Marcus’s gaze shift, seized the moment of distraction. She shoved the boy into the hackney cab, scrambling in after him. “Driver! Driver, go!”
The driver, shaken from his lethargy, cracked his whip. The carriage lurched forward, splashing muddy water onto Marcus’s polished boots.
He didn’t move. He stood frozen, watching the black carriage rock and sway as it pulled away, its wheels slicing through the puddles. The rain continued to fall, a relentless curtain that obscured the world, swallowing the carriage and its precious cargo into a gray, amorphous haze.
He remembered the way she had kissed him. The way she had laughed with her whole body. The way he had begun to draft a dual announcement to the court of their engagement. He had even gotten as far as dispatching a courier to commission a ring from the royal goldsmith. From there, the memory turned to ash. The first forged letter had arrived three days later. The note, elegant and vindictive, allegedly from her, telling him she had a need for freedom, not chains and crowns.
The scent of her perfume still haunted the guest room where she’d stayed. The ink was fresh on the page, the handwriting a perfect forgery of her valedictorian script, every curve and slant identical to her own. He had seen it and believed. He’d been so sure. A prince. A fool. It had been a simple, classic courtly poison, and he had drunk it without a second thought.
He’d had men search for her for months afterwards, mostly to assuage his own vanity, telling himself he needed answers. But she was gone. Like smoke from a chimney. And he had let her go, filing the incident under “treachery” in his own heart.
Now, the harsh truth was more bitter than the cold rain that soaked his clothes. They’d played their game, and he had let them. The Pembertons. Reid and his smirking whelp, Beckett. They had wanted him isolated, a bachelor king with no distractions, and Vivian had been their first sacrifice. They had orchestrated it all, and his own rage and pride had sealed it.
He had been so blind. So blind to the poison in his own house.
“Your Highness?” Flynn’s voice was low, wary. He had approached, finally, standing just behind Marcus’s shoulder. “The boy. His age.”
Flynn didn’t phrase it as a question. He didn’t need to. He was a man whose professional life was built on the precise observation of facts, from a man’s stance to the subtle shift of a hand into a pocket. He had seen the boy’s face, had counted the years in his head, and had come to the only possible conclusion.
Marcus finally turned. The carriage was gone, a sliver of black receding into the curtain of grey, carrying his son away from him. The rain dripped from the brim of his hat, tracing cold paths down his temples, but he felt nothing but a fire in his gut. The icy calm of the negotiator hardened into the ruthless clarity of a man with a singular goal.
The past was a lie. The present was a damnation. But the future… the future was a small boy with a birthmark he hadn’t known he had given him. And he was not going to let another second of it be stolen.
“Flynn,” Marcus said, eyes fixed on the sedan vanishing into the storm, “I don’t need to count the months he’s been gone—that boy is mine, and someone has kept him from me for far too long.”