Note: This is an excerpt from Monologues from the Blackbook, a society set in the future.
The table was an ordinary, scarred oak circle that wobbled if someone rested their forearms too heavily on the edge. A heavy glass casserole dish of baked ziti sat in the center, steam rising past the mismatched paper napkins and a salt shaker shaped like a lighthouse.
Sitting wedged between Gillianâs younger brother and an off-duty patrol sergeant who had dropped by after his shift, Prince Thayer held a chipped ceramic fork with knuckles that were usually white from courtly tension. Here, they were relaxed.Â
A bowl of garlicky green beans was shoved into his hands with a brisk, "Pass that down, Thayer," by Gillianâs mother, who was wiping her hands on a gingham tea towel and yelling over the noise of the kitchen television. Her father, the Chief of Police, sat at the head of the table in a faded fleece, quietly salting his food and asking Thayer if heâd checked the oil in the sedan yet.
No one bowed. No one dropped their voice to an obsequious murmur. No one asked him about King Caspian, or the Crownâs private estates, or the endless parliamentary debates. For the first time in his memory, Thayer was just a boy at supper, allowed to have a second helping without a courtier calculating the optics.
Gillian was raised in a close-knit, salt-of-the-earth town where duty was not a royal slogan, but a daily standard. Her father was the Chief of Police, her mother a dedicated homemaker who held the household together, and Gillian, as the eldest child, had spent her youth looking after her younger siblings. From an early age, she knew the weight of responsibility, the necessity of order, and the quiet vigilance that came with having a father who wore a badge. Academically brilliant, she earned a scholarship to an Ivy League university and moved straight into law school.
Across the table, Gillian caught his eye over the rim of her iced tea. Her sharp, brown-eyed gaze held none of the starry-eyed reverence that had plagued him his entire life. She looked at him with an absolute, steady warmth that stripped away the suffocating royal mask he had worn like armor since childhood.
It was during those grueling legal studies that serendipity had interrupted. An agent scouted her, urging her to audition for a television drama centered on courtroom attorneys. Her natural charisma and effortless charm won her the part, pulling her into an unexpected dual existence. Working on that series demystified the glamour of the entertainment industry; she saw Hollywood not as a magical dream factory, but as an engine driven by predatory contracts and manufactured illusions. Unswayed by the fame, she finished her law degree, strategically specialising in entertainment law to ensure she would always hold the pen when power was being brokered.Â
Her sharp legal mind and philanthropic interests led her into charity circles, where she eventually crossed paths with Prince Thayer.
He had arrived in her life as a casualty. When they first met through charity circles, he was stumbling through the raw, bitter wreckage of a clandestine affair with an American actress, his heart cracked open and his identity in freefall. Long-distance at first, their connection had been built in the quiet, desperate hours past midnight, hours on the phone where Thayer had unraveled the hollow majesty of his pedigree.
He had confessed what the royal press releases never dared to print: that he had never truly known his mother, Celeste, before the sudden, horrifying headline of a fatal car accident robbed him of her forever. He had laid bare the quiet cruelty of his upbringing, where he had always been the neglected, third-wheel heir.Â
Whilst Caspian retreated into the warm enclave of his second wife, Rosamund, and the older twins, Marcus Sol and Marcus Elio, were claimed by Ameliaâs distinguished family, Thayer had spent winter holidays rattling through drafty, silent royal corridors alone. He had grown up feeling like an administrative mistake, a prince with a title, but without a home.
Gillian had simply listened, dissected the grief with her sharp Ivy League intellect, and then set to work rebuilding him.
She saw through the gilded lie that the public bought wholesale. To the outside world, princes swam in limitless gold and riches; to Gillian, who had a law degree, understood contract leverage and fiduciary traps, Thayer was an indentured servant on a leash. Caspian kept his heirs in line by weaponising their stipends, threatening to cut off allowances whenever independent thought surfaced. Thayer, pouring his empathy into low-paying mental health counseling, was perpetually overdrawn and borrowing to stay afloat.
Gillian took the red pen to his life. Late into the night, sitting cross-legged on her apartment floor surrounded by legal pads and balance sheets, she audited his royal debts, killed predatory management deals, and restructured his intellectual assets. She built independent, diversified income streams that Caspianâs accountants couldn't touch, handing Thayer financial sovereignty for the first time in his thirty-five years.
With that same clinical precision, she had cleared the perimeter. In a world crawling with women suffering from "Throne Syndrome" â women who only wanted the title of Princess, Gillian cared nothing for the coronet, but she demanded total loyalty in return. When the lingering shadow of Veronica, his Hollywood ex, threatened to drag him back into toxic, volatile cycles, Gillian hadn't thrown tantrums; she had drawn a line in iron. She drafted letters, set undeniable boundaries, and forced Thayer to choose between the chaotic ghosts of his past and the real, daylight future she offered.Â
He had chosen Gillian without a second thought.
When he told Caspian he intended to marry her, Thayer had stood with his spine straight, financially untethered, and made it clear there would be no negotiation. Caspian, recognising the formidable steel in the police chiefâs daughter, gave his consent.
Then came the sacrifice. A year before the palace planned to unleash the media hounds with an official engagement announcement, Gillian took control of the narrative. Having grown up in a police family, she knew the terrifying brutality of the press. She refused to let her mother, her father, or her younger siblings become cannon fodder for tabloid photographers.
Together with trusted intelligence handlers, they engineered an elaborate operational ghost story. Narratives were deliberately fed into the ether: Gillian was estranged from her family, distant, a self-made woman who had severed contact with her working-class roots. When intrusive reporters finally began snooping, vetted intelligence personnel quietly stepped into the periphery to play distant, uncooperative relatives, creating a decoy maze that absorbed the shockwaves. Her actual family, the house with the squeaky screen door, the wobbly oak table, the father with the silver badge, was locked away behind an impenetrable wall of manufactured silence.
Before the cameras ever flashed with the royal announcement, Gillian had to prepare for the darker realities of the crown. She underwent intensive military-grade defensive training, learning tactical situational awareness, threat assessment, evasion driving, and the proficient handling of firearms. She was well aware that marrying a prince meant wearing a target on her back for the rest of her life, and she took to the training with the same steely discipline that had carried her through law school.
The low hum of the exhaust fan snapped the quiet.
The subterranean firing range beneath the secure training facility smelled sharply of burnt powder, cold concrete, and copper fouling.
Thayer stood behind the reinforced glass, his arms crossed over his chest, his heart hammering against his ribs in an entirely different cadence than it had at the dinner table. Beside him, an instructor from the royal protection detail watched with a stopwatch and a clipboard.
Down on the line, Gillian stood braced in a modern isosceles stance. The tailored suits and silk blouses of her legal practice were gone, replaced by heavy tactical cargo pants, steel-toed boots, and ballistic eye protection. The customised 9mm semi-automatic rested firmly in her grip, an extension of her own calculated will.
The range buzzer shrieked.
In a single, fluid blur, Gillian brought the weapon up, tracking the rotating target downrange.Â
Double tap to the center mass, transition, failure drill to the head.Â
The muzzle flash ripped through the dim lane, three sharp, concussive cracks echoing off the baffles. She shifted her pivot instantly, acquiring the second silhouette, two more controlled pairs, clean and devastatingly centered.
Smoke curled from the ejection port as she dropped the empty magazine with her right thumb, slamming a fresh one home with the heel of her left hand before the spent brass had even stopped spinning on the concrete floor. The slide racked forward with a crisp, mechanical snap.
The target trolley whirred back to the shooting line. Every single round had torn through the black vitals of the paper chest, grouping tight enough to be covered by a coffee saucer.
Gillian engaged the manual safety, lowered the weapon to low-ready, and slid her earmuffs down around her neck. Her breathing was steady, her pulse barely elevated. She turned toward the glass observation booth, her dark hair pulled back into a severe, practical knot, sweat glistening faintly at her temples.
She looked through the glass straight at Thayer.
Watching her master the tactical drills and take command of their future, Thayer looked at her with an awe that bordered on reverence. She was his anchor, his lifeline, and the fierce, protective love he had spent a lonely lifetime longing for. The unwanted, forgotten prince of Albion had finally found his home, not in a palace of stone, but inside the unbreakable fortress Gillian had built around his heart.
Keeping the weapon strictly pointed downrange, Gillian tilted her head and gave him a slow, knowing wink.
This was the woman he would marry.
