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“Nicholas! Nicholas, this way, smile now! Look up, lad! Nicholas, over here!”

It was the first inkling I’d had that I was—that we were—different. In the years after, I’d learn just how different my family is. Internationally renowned, instantly recognizable, our everyday activities headlines in the making.

Fame is a strange thing. A powerful thing. Usually it ebbs and flows like a tide. People get swept up in it, swamped by it, but eventually the notoriety recedes, and the former object of its affection is reduced to someone who used to be someone, but isn’t anymore.

That will never happen to me. I was known before I was born and my name will be blazoned in history long after I’m dust in the ground. Infamy is temporary, celebrity is fleeting, but royalty…royalty is forever.

ONE WOULD THINK, as accustomed as I am to being watched, that I wouldn’t be effected by the sensation of someone staring at me while I sleep.

One would be wrong.

My eyes spring open, to see Fergus’s scraggly, crinkled countenance just inches from my face. “Bloody hell!”

It’s not a pleasant view.

His one good eye glares disapprovingly, while the other—the wandering one—that my brother and I always suspected wasn’t lazy at all, but a freakish ability to see everything at once, gazes toward the opposite side of the room.

Every stereotype starts somewhere, with some vague but lingering grain of truth. I’ve long suspected the stereotype of the condescending, cantankerous servant began with Fergus.

God knows the wrinkled bastard is old enough.

He straightens up at my bedside, as much as his hunched, ancient spine will let him. “Took you long enough to wake up. You think I don’t have better things to do? Was just about to kick you. ”

He’s exaggerating. About having better things to do—not the plan to kick me.

I love my bed. It was an eighteenth birthday gift from the King of Genovia. It’s a four-column, gleaming piece of art, hand-carved in the sixteenth century from one massive piece of Brazilian mahogany. My mattress is stuffed with the softest Hungarian goose feathers, my Egyptian cotton sheets have a thread count so high it’s illegal in some parts of the world, and all I want to do is to roll over and bury myself under them like a child determined not to get up for school.

But Fergus’s raspy warning grates like sandpaper on my eardrums.

“You’re supposed to be in the green drawing room in twenty-five minutes. ”

And ducking under the covers is no longer an option. They won’t save you from machete-wielding psychopaths…or a packed schedule.

Sometimes I think I’m schizophrenic. Dissociative. Possibly a split personality. It wouldn’t be unheard of. All sorts of disorders show up in ancient family trees—hemophiliacs, insomniacs, lunatics…gingers. Guess I should feel lucky not to be any of those.

My problem is voices. Not those kinds of voices—more like reactions in my head. Answers to questions that don’t match what actually ends up coming out of my mouth.

I almost never say what I really think. Sometimes I’m so full of shit my eyes could turn brown. And, it might be for the best.