He told me everything. It took two hours, not one.

He had come to the city two years ago on what his family called a "private residency" — a period of living outside the palace, outside the protocols, outside the managed existence of being a crown prince. His father had allowed it. His advisors had not been told. He had been given a security detail he had never seen, operating at a distance, and a cover identity that was clean and simple and entirely ordinary.

He had not planned to fall in love. He had planned to live quietly for a year, experience a normal life, and return. He had met me at a coffee shop when I spilled my drink on his jacket and he had helped me clean it up and we had talked for three hours and he had come back the next day.

He had told himself it was temporary. That he would leave before it became real. He had not left. It had become real.

The people who had taken me were from a faction within his country's political opposition — a group that had been trying to destabilize the royal family for years and had recently discovered that the Crown Prince had a wife. A foreign wife. A wife who had no idea what she was married into.