Solstice (Midsummer #3)

Prologue

LEX

NOW

I t 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… almost everyone. 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.

Standing here today, I’d drown you in the Boston Bay myself if it meant I’d get my son back.

He’d told me that once, but even that was my fault because I’d made him confess. It was the only way I’d ever gotten the truth out of him.

I sighed and shook my head. If only Marcus were here. If only Marcus were the one to marry Ivy instead. If only Marcus had been the one in Ireland, the one at those ruins, gifted with the ability to make anyone tell the truth.

Despite the scandal.

What would Marcus have done if he were me? What would have happened if the golden child had been cursed by fairies and doomed to live a life he didn’t choose?

It doesn’t fucking matter.

Marcus was dead, and I inherited this mess. Even if my father continued to be disappointed I’d lived, neither of us could change that. I stabbed out my cigarette and immediately lit another one.

“Alexei,” my mother said. “I wish you would stop that filthy habit.”

“We’re all wishing a lot of things right now.” I drew a deep, soothing inhale.

My father let out a displeased sigh and scowled. “You’ll never change, will you?”

I shot my gaze to his, horrible things threatening to spill over my lips.

“Still that same petulant boy,” he continued. “Angry at the world for no good reason.”

No good reason.

“Is that what you think?” I blew out smoke. “That I’m angry for no reason?”

“You decided a long time ago you weren’t going to be happy, and you’ve been living to spite me ever since.”

I cleared my throat. Well, it wouldn’t have been my wedding day if my father hadn’t found some way to rip out my guts and eat them in front of me. He had no fucking clue what waited for us out there. He had no idea what monsters lurked in the trees, biding their time for the right opportunity to strike.

This was so trivial, so fucking unimportant. I had a thousand other things to worry about—an evil fairy king, reuniting my family, making sure this realm stayed safe. And this? This is what addles the mind of the president of the United States?

I tried not to laugh. “Thanks for the pep talk.”

“We’re almost ready for you,” Marcia, the wedding planner, said, sticking her head into the room.

“We’ll see you downstairs.” My mother gave me another tearful kiss as my father turned to walk away, barely an acknowledgment for his surviving son.

After they were gone, Jon winced and then sighed. “If it helps, I’m certain things went about as well with my parents in the bridal suite.”

I started to laugh, but as the sound came out of my mouth, a heaviness settled in my gut. Power shifted in the air, magic coalescing on my tongue. It reminded me of…

No. Not yet. It’s not time.

I need to find Ivy.

I raced across the suite to open the door, but Ivy’s sister, Kit, grabbed the handles from the other side and swung them open. She startled back a few steps when she came face-to-face with me.

“Lex, I need your help.” She shifted her icy blue eyes from me to Jon and back again. “It’s Ivy.”

Then she took off down the hallway.