Mirth: Princess Euphrosyne

[I just realized I hadn’t shared this illustration here, and I need it for the Extras and Freebies page 😁][it is also in the limited-edition eBook of Mirth, Part One].

CONTENT NOTE: language

The door to the suite opens. Anne hustles in. She’s wearing a light-gold full-length wrap-style silk dress. She pauses just inside the door, blinking at me, then taking in Sully, then Bolan.

“Oh,” she finally says. “Good. Sully. You’ll help Mirth get into her dress? Mimi and Tavi have been roped into service by the Mertons. Apparently, our lack of ability to house all the staff they would have preferred to bring is … irksome.”

No titles in private. No formalities.

Unless I impose them.

But only after I explicitly lift those protocols in the first place.

That was Sully’s point. About protocol.

“Yes, of course.” Sully grins widely and wickedly. “Why else would I be in Her Royal Highness’s suite?”

Anne huffs, playfully pleased. “I have your father waiting to escort you,” she says to me.

“Escort me?” I echo, abruptly displeased.

“We’ll go straight through to dinner,” Anne says, ignoring my tone. “The rest of the guests will start arriving around nine for the ball.”

“Of course,” I say. I did know that already, but apparently I’m still having issues with holding everything in my head all at once. As if new information is at constant war with the continual grief and the continual state of overwhelm.

Anne casts a look over all three of us again, then smirks. “Ten minutes. Or I’ll send in the twins.”

Sully raises his hands in surrender.

Anne steps back the way she came, snagging the door closed.

“Well, this is going to be a blast,” Bolan says sarcastically.

“It will be awful to do sober,” Sully says blithely over his shoulder.

“Fuck you, asshole.”

“Not today. But I do like it when you beg.”

I huff, spinning away from them both.

Sully attempts to follow me, but stops instantly at my snapped, “No!”

Bolan’s laughter follows me back through to my bedroom, then beyond the door that I slam in my wake.

I put on the decadently voluminous silk ballgown skirt and the beaded bustier. Then I carefully slip a diamond-crusted platinum coronet into my perfectly coiffed hair.

Because if they want a fucking princess, I’ll give them a fucking princess.

– Grand Romantic Delusions and the Madness of Mirth, Part One