Of Princes and Promises

by Sandhya Menon

  Somehow, he managed to make the tux look ill-fitting, even though Oliver had tailored it (at record speed; he was such a lovely person) to suit him. The makeup did accentuate his strong jawline, but his hair refused to cooperate, no matter how much she’d fiddled with it. And it was clear he had no confidence. He kept rubbing his palms on his trousers, though she’d warned him not to about a thousand times so far.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, rubbing his palms on his trousers again. Caterina stifled a sigh. “I know it isn’t working, but I’m not sure why. Should I stand up straighter?” He adjusted his shoulders, and she could see the reflection of his back in the floor-length mirror behind him. He had a playful whorl in the middle of his head that she hadn’t noticed before; it showed a pale scalp. Not to mention, “playful” was all wrong for the gala.

  “No, that won’t help,” she said, rounding the sharp edge out of her voice. It wasn’t his fault this wasn’t working. She should’ve known it was too much to ask of him. And now it was too late to call in a backup. All the suitable ones would already be at the gala with other dates.

  A sort of numbness took over Caterina then, forcing the nervousness away. Alaric would see her fall tonight, spectacularly, with all the cameras flashing. He’d get plastered all over the magazine pages with Lizel Falk, his supermodel, and Caterina would get photographed with Rahul, with a snide caption something along the lines of “Millionaire Heiress Caterina LaValle Seems to Lag in the Rebound.” Alaric would really enjoy that. He’d probably frame the page.

  Rahul was staring at her desperately, as if he were upset. And maybe he was, Caterina realized. He wasn’t like any of the guys she’d dated. He probably really did care how this night went for her, without much thought about how it would affect him.

  Caterina forced a small smile. “Let me just fix your hair a bit.” There was no need to suck him into her vortex of unhappiness and dissatisfaction. He’d done nothing wrong. In fact, he’d made a valiant effort to help her achieve her goals. She walked around behind him and tried to get a strand of hair to lay over his whorl, but it kept snapping back into place.

  “Oh,” Rahul said suddenly, turning around to look at her. “We forgot. The hair gel, remember?”

  She hadn’t forgotten. Yesterday, at Oliver’s shop, she’d been overcome by the possibilities of what Rahul could become. She’d been swept up in Oliver’s vision and optimism, sure that they could make something of Rahul together. But tonight, seeing him in all of the Oliver-sanctioned finery, Caterina had to admit she’d been a tad overzealous. And so she hadn’t bothered putting the gel into Rahul’s hair. What good would it do now, honestly?

  But he was looking at her with a mix of hope and desperation, and she couldn’t dash that. “Oh yes.” She walked over to the bed and grabbed the pouch that contained Rahul’s makeup. Pulling the pot of gel out of the bag, she held it in her palm for a moment, noticing that the glass had an iridescent shimmer she hadn’t noticed before. It caught the light and winked at her. “Let’s try it.”

  Caterina walked back over to Rahul and opened the jar, holding it out to him in the flat of her hand. He peeked in at the milky white substance. “Do I just… take some in my fingers and put it in my hair?”

  “Yes,” she said. “And kind of style your hair as you go.”

  “Style it…” Rahul looked as though she’d asked him to open a wormhole in the hotel room.

  “Just run it through your hair,” she said, not able to edge out the touch of impatience this time. “It really doesn’t matter.” His face fell. God. It was like kicking a puppy. She added, “It’ll look good no matter how you do it.”

  Looking happier, Rahul reached his fingertips into the jar and came away with far more than she would’ve advised. “Whoa,” he said, bringing it to his nose. “It smells weird. Like lilies and metal and almonds. And dirt.”

  Dirt? Caterina tried not to let her irritation show. “Just put it into your hair. I’m sure it’ll fade once it’s in there.” She sighed and began to fiddle with her jewelry. This was hopeless. They were going to fool exactly no one at the gala, and worse, she was about to become a laughingstock. Dammit. Why had she ever thought this was a good idea?

  “Um… Caterina?”

  “Yes, what?” She blinked and refocused on him. He was turned away from her now, looking into the mirror in front of him. From this angle, she couldn’t see his face anymore. “What is it?”

  Rahul turned around slowly, to face her once more.

  And Caterina found herself staring.

  Something was happening. Something very strange was happening.

  RAHUL

  Something was happening. Something highly unusual and that Rahul was fairly sure defied every law of physics he’d ever read up on in his free time.

  The flabbergasted, suspicious, alarmed look on Caterina’s face mirrored his. Well, except that he wasn’t sure his face was… his anymore.

  Rahul turned slowly back around to face the mirror. Caterina took a step to her left so she was beside him, also looking at him in the mirror. “Is that…,” Rahul began, not sure how to finish that sentence. Is that real? Is that a hallucination? Is that magic? Ridiculous. That last one was absolutely ridiculous. “Is that… me?”

  “I think it is,” Caterina said faintly, her fingers reaching forward to the mirror, then settling back down again. “It’s you.”

  Except it wasn’t. Not as he’d previously existed anyway. None of his atoms or molecules had ever arranged themselves to look like this. This was not his genetic code. This was someone else’s phenotypical expression of superior DNA. He didn’t look like himself at all, but maybe a distant cousin who modeled in his spare time. Not Pritam—he looked way better than Pritam had ever looked in his best pictures.

  Somehow, Rahul’s face had taken on a chiseled quality it had never had before. His skin looked clearer, his hair thicker and lusher and shinier. Even his shoulders were broader, though he couldn’t tell if that was simply because he was naturally standing straighter because he felt more confident looking like this. Casually he stuck one hand in his pocket, the way he’d seen Grey and Leo do before. He looked like a freaking GQ model. How was this possible?

  “How is this possible?” Caterina frowned. “Am I dreaming?” She tugged on a lock of her hair, her expression unchanging, and then slowly put it back with the others where it belonged. “No. That hurt. I’m awake.”

  “It—it has to be a shared delusion. A folie à deux. It’s a well-documented phenomenon in the psychological literature. People begin to believe the same things, and—”

  “But why? Why would we suddenly begin believing you look like Tom Holland?”

  Unable to stop a grin—a confident, easy, graceful grin!—from spreading across his face at the comparison, Rahul turned to Caterina. “The smell. The smell that wafted off the gel. What did Oliver say was in here?”

  “I don’t remember; some plant.”

  “Wolfsbane. Maybe it causes hallucinations in its essential form. I’m not aware of that ever happening before, but… Or maybe there’s something else in here, that when inhaled or ingested in some fashion—say, through the roots of your hair—causes hallucinations.”

  Caterina shook her head and stepped away from him, looking effortlessly like an A-list celebrity headed to an awards ceremony in her midnight-blue gown. “It sounds really far-fetched. I don’t know. And does that mean when they take your picture tonight for the pages, you’ll look like you? Since the people can’t smell the gel through the pages of a magazine? What about people who are too far away to smell the fumes?”

  Rahul pinched the bridge of his nose. These were all excellent questions, ones he had no answers to yet. “I don’t know. I guess we’ll just have to go out and see how this goes.”

  Caterina’s eyes ran over every part of his face and body in a way that wasn’t at all unpleasant. “Yes,” she said thoughtfully, folding her hands on the silky skirt of her dress. “I suppose we should.�
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  CATERINA

  What the hell was going on with Rahul? Was it the gel? Was it wishful thinking? Or the folie-whatever Rahul had called it, a psychological phenomenon? But something inside Caterina told her that this was real. This new Rahul was a flesh-and-blood person standing in front of her. Neither she nor Rahul was prone to hysteria. So why would tonight be different? Caterina had been in many far more stressful situations before, and she’d never lost her cool. She was sure that what she was seeing was really happening.

  Rahul was… handsome. Actually, literally quite gorgeous. He was the kind of man Caterina would flirt with at any event, and she’d let him dance with her and hold her close all night.

  As she studied Rahul looking at himself from every angle in the hotel mirror, her gaze traced his broad shoulders, his narrow waist, the large hands that suddenly looked graceful and strong. Had he always looked like this? Was it just covered up under bad clothes and no grooming whatsoever? Had he been a diamond in the rough, just waiting to be mined?

  She couldn’t wait to take him to the gala. Because if her instincts were right and he really did look like this to everyone, then… then it would change everything for her. This could be her comeback, not just with Alaric but with her entire social circle. Showing up with this Rahul on her arm would tell everyone that she had truly landed on her feet, as Cats do.

  Caterina picked up her clutch. “Are you ready to be the belle of the ball, Rahul?”

  He turned to her, smiling a dashing smile that, if she were being completely honest, made her heart skip a beat. “Let’s go.”

  RAHUL

  If having a near anxiety attack in that claustrophobic dressing room of Oliver’s shop had been bad, this right here in Caterina’s private limo was a veritable tsunami of pain.

  Trying to calm himself, Rahul attempted to talk to Caterina like she was a normal girl with a normal boy on a normal date. “I… uh, I really like your ring.”

  Caterina smiled and leaned back against the cushioned leather limo seat as she gazed down at her gold, sapphire-encrusted ring. “Thank you. It’s an antique—Victorian era. My father gave it to me on my eighteenth birthday. It used to belong to my great-great-grandmother.”

  Rahul nodded in what he hoped was a casual way, though his mouth felt parched. “It goes well with your dress, too. You’re just really good with all the fashion.” All the fashion? God. He couldn’t even string together a sentence right. How was he supposed to survive the night surrounded by well-bred socialites?

  Caterina shrugged as the limo rocked them gently back and forth. “Thank you; it’s a passion of mine. I think I might minor in Victorian-era fashion in college, actually. With a major in business, of course.”

  “Of course.” As Rahul sipped his Acqua di Cristallo Tributo a Modigliani water from a crystal flute (the water was stored in an actual 24-karat gold bottle in a mini-fridge; as if he needed any more reminders how little he really belonged here), the limo began to slow. He stared out the tinted windows at the rows and rows of journalists and other media personalities who were standing around with mics and cameras, thrusting said mics and cameras into people’s faces. Some of whom he recognized. He was pretty sure the tall dude with the dazzling smile was Vanya Petrovic, a friend of Alaric’s. And that short-haired blond girl over there, showing off her one-shouldered dress to a reporter, was Caterina’s friend Heather.

  He was beginning to realize he’d made a very serious mistake. It was easy (or at least, it wasn’t panic-inducing) to be confident and suave in a hotel room when it was just him and Caterina, who wanted this to work as much as he did. It was an entirely different matter to be here, at the actual gala, and see the sheer scope of the thing. These were not his people. This was not his place. And all of this going through without so much as a tiny wrinkle hinged on his ability to be a handsome, debonair prince. Rahul Chopra was an avid collector of facts, and this one fact he knew to be unassailably true: he was no prince.

  “We’re here. Ready?” Caterina asked as their limo inched along to the pull-off point. There, they’d get out and walk along an actual, literal red carpet to stand in front of the Hindman Foundation logo-plastered wall to get their pictures taken. She turned to look at him, her brow furrowed, when he didn’t answer. “Are you all right?”

  “Fine,” Rahul said, his voice stronger than usual. He perked up. Wearing the outfit, it seemed, was bringing out a side of him he didn’t know he had. Maybe he could just fake it all night. Just pretend he was someone who swanned around drinking $60,000 bottles of water in limousines. “I’ll be fine. I am fine.”

  “Good.” Caterina ran her gaze over his face. “Because it’s our turn now. Come on.”

  The chauffeur was opening the door on her side then, and she was climbing out, immediately waving at someone and smiling her put-together, modelesque, Caterina smile. Rahul scooted out after her as she’d trained him, acting confident and graceful, feeling like he might throw up a little. Would they even notice? They were all probably staring at Caterina, anyway. He would, if he were them. She was radiant tonight, as she was every night. They should host an entire gala just for her.

  And then he was following her on feet that felt like they were wrapped in cotton and numbing agent to the wall with the Hindman logos, smiling, smiling, smiling, without showing his teeth, as he’d been instructed. His hand had found its way back into the pocket of his trousers, and as far as he could tell, he was standing up straight.

  But was he fooling them?

  Rahul squinted a bit, trying to make out the expressions on the faces of the journalists and the camera people and other gala attendees, but it was hard to see anything, standing under the barrage of lights trained on him and Caterina.

  “Caterina!” a woman in a yellow pantsuit holding a microphone called. “Who are you wearing?”

  “This is a custom Balenciaga,” she said, smiling, doing a little twirl. The cameras went nuts.

  “Ms. LaValle!” someone else shouted. Rahul couldn’t even see who it was. “What size do you wear?”

  Caterina looked coldly into the teeming crowd and waited, silently, for the next question. It came soon after, and then another one after it, and another one, like a series of popping corn, pop-pop-pop. “Is indigo blue your favorite color? Is that why you chose that dress?” “Are you excited for your fifth time at the Hindman Gala?” “Which charities are you enthused to support this year?” “Will your father be joining you?” And finally, Rahul heard, “Who is that handsome young man beside you?”

  There was a brief, infinitesimal moment when he and Caterina turned to each other, their eyes meeting, their eyebrows just slightly raised. Just a moment of, Oh my God, is it working? where Rahul felt, just like last year at the winter formal, that he and Caterina were in on something together, just the two of them. And then Caterina turned back to the crowd and said, into a bouquet of different microphones, “This is my dear friend, and he’s here to escort me tonight.”

  “And does Prince Charming have a name?” someone called out, and the crowd laughed.

  And then all the microphones were suddenly under Rahul’s nose. Right. A name. Rahul Chopra was out of the question. Why hadn’t he and Caterina practiced a name?? But obviously they hadn’t. They’d expected Rahul to fade into the background, as he usually did.

  He opened his mouth, afraid his voice was going to crack and wheeze and deflate and humiliate the goddess next to him. Instead, he heard that confident, tux-wearing part of him take over again. A smooth, mellifluous voice said with a surety that silenced the teeming crowd for an instant, “You may call me RC. I am the crown prince of the district of Anandgarh in Rajasthan.”

  That was total horseshit, of course. There was no “district of Anandgarh” in Rajasthan. And he was definitely, definitely not a crown prince. But the reporter sharks seemed to eat it up. He guessed none of them were serious political reporters and probably wouldn’t know how to spell “Anandgarh,” let alone fact-check it
later.

  “How did you two meet?” “Are you officially dating?” “What does Alaric think?” “Will you accompany Caterina to other events in the future?”

  But Caterina held up a hand. She was doing her faint smile thing, but Rahul could tell she was brimming with pleasure at the interest. “Please,” she said. “We’re going to be late.”

  Then she grabbed Rahul’s hand in her soft, cool one and tugged him around the side and up the stairs of the Four Seasons Hotel.

  CATERINA

  That had gone better than she could’ve ever hoped. They swept up the stone stairs and into the quiet, cool interior of the hotel, where a much quieter crowd milled. Everyone was dressed in their glittering, bespoke best, and the hairdos on the women were more elaborate than some sculptures at the Louvre.

  Caterina glanced sideways at Rahul. He looked… like he belonged. Not a hair out of place, no feverishly tapping hands or feet, no nervous tongue darting out to lick his dry lips. His lips, in fact, looked very well moisturized. Very… shapely. And soft.

  “Hmm?” he asked, looking at her as if he’d heard her thoughts.

  Caterina blinked and looked away as they walked up to a woman in a black suit who was checking guests off a list as they approached her. “You did well,” she said, inclining her head at Rahul. At RC. She had to get in the habit of calling him that tonight. “The name was—”

  “Impulsive,” he said quietly. “Sorry. We didn’t discuss it before, and—”

  “No, I like it.” She smiled a little.

  “Really?” He seemed inordinately pleased by this fact.

  “Yes. RC is… modern. It’s chic. And it’s just mysterious enough to keep them guessing.” She nodded once, firmly. “I really like it.”

  “Caterina!”

  They turned to see a girl catapulting herself at them. She was dressed in a black dress with a tulle-skirt overlay, and it took Caterina about 2.2 seconds to place her. “Bella!” she said, remembering just as the girl reached her and leaned in for an air-kiss. Bella Livingstone was dating Jason Ypez, whose father was one of Caterina’s father’s old business partners. “It’s so nice to see you again! You must tell me where you got that handbag. Allow me to introduce RC, my date for tonight.”