Battle Royal Page 5

  The overgrown Goth princess and a stuttering social climber with all the poise and sophistication of a golden retriever.

  Charming.

  A page-long summary of Rose’s past romances and flings followed, basically an illustrated guide to the art of slut-shaming.

  Did the editors of the Daily Spin actually advertise for their writers or just draw symbols on the ground and summon them from the underworld?

  Sylvie zeroed in on the column she was interested in. At least twelve fashion houses had been mooted for the gown. Only one name in connection with the cake. Even the tabloids considered this a done deal.

  If Dominic had also seen the breaking news, he was probably out there right now, putting the finishing touches on a sketch for an exquisitely rendered snooze of a fruitcake.

  Zack read her mind. “I suppose De Vere’s is doing the cake. First royal wedding in years. Dominic’s probably a shoo-in. His grandad had the honor in the past. De Vere Senior was the king’s pet baker. His Majesty was very fond of their Battenberg.” Mariana looked at him, and he shrugged. “Fact of the day on the Royal Stans blog.”

  Mariana’s attention returned to Sylvie. She was observing her cannily. “Is that just the slightest touch of scheming criminal mastermind I see?”

  Zack made a noise like an overexcited chicken. “Are you going after the royal wedding contract? Literally the cake of the year?” He hauled Sylvie’s chair around and leaned close. She widened her eyes at him innocently, and he clapped his hands together, a booming slap that made her jump. “Oh, hells yeah. Judge versus judge. Neighbor pitted against neighbor. The kitten taking on the lion.” Sylvie’s eyes narrowed again. Zack gave another wriggly little hop. “I do love me some drama. Bring it on, dollface.”

  Kitten, her arse. This was for her people’s future job security. And it was a bake that would be preserved in perpetuity, a part of history. She’d probably have phrased it differently, but—what the hell.

  Bring it on, dollface.

  Chapter Four

  October

  De Vere’s

  Favored establishment of His Majesty the King and his fondness for Battenberg.

  Status: As expected, invited to submit a tender for the royal wedding cake.

  “Literally the cake of the year.”

  —Zack Romero, underpaid Operation Cake makeup artist

  With a flick of his fingers, Dominic sent the fifth and final tier of the cake spinning onto the upper dowels. Each layer was a clean, crisp white. Marzipan over rich Vienna cream icing, edged with sugar lace, a delicate spidery web of lines, the perfect allusion of the bobbin lace that Princess Rose liked to weave. Or at least claimed she wove as a useful anecdote. His notes stated that she gave biannual speeches as patron of the City of London Arts and Crafts Guild.

  Flowers wound up the side of the cake, the blooming vine of a fairy tale.

  He studied the effect with distaste.

  A tap of the leftmost flower, and the petals changed color from an iridescent pink to a deep, brooding blood purple, almost black in tone. He swept his hand in front of the cake. One after another, the edges of the peony poppies bled, the dark color leaching over the celestial pink. Still fairy tale, but with the inevitable malevolent element.

  Better.

  Also better suited to a dungeon or coffin than a reception table, but from the impression he got of the bride, the Tim Burton vibe was strongly in her wheelhouse.

  With a stylus pen, he touched the dark petals with the faintest dusting of gold.

  “Roses would have been the obvious choice,” Liam Boateng commented. Dominic’s friend and sous-chef stood at his side, arms folded, studying the screen.

  Frowning, Dominic spun the projected image around on the tablet, tilting the angle to better see the intricate lacework on the upper tier, draped in smooth folds around both the royal and Marchmont family crests. He pulled a cluster of the poppies and moved them to the base layer, so the cake appeared to be rising from a frothing profusion of flowers.

  “Most other tenders will work with that cliché.” He stepped back to cast another critical eye over the design. “And Daciano will ignore the flower brief completely; he’s an anthophobic. Won’t have so much as a petal in his salon.”

  “He’s also totally overrated and increasingly unreliable.”

  Dominic made another crisp adjustment and a short sound of agreement. “The embargo on this contract will be ironclad. One drink at his local and he’d be shooting his mouth off about every last detail. He failed as credible competition before Marchmont even popped the question.”

  Liam scoffed. “Please. Like there’s any credible competition.”

  Dominic shot him a warning glance. “Confidence is warranted. Certainty is not. We’ve lost contracts before. We’ve lost contracts across the road before.”

  Which was still irritating.

  His eyes went briefly to the silhouette portrait he’d tucked into the edge of a photo frame on the desk, to keep Pet’s work intact. The outline of Sylvie’s face seemed to change in mood daily. Right now, he could almost hear her laughter.

  “Noted.” Liam plucked a peony poppy of the non-digital variety from a vase. “Are we sure these are the groom’s favorite flower?” He was obviously skeptical. “Do men even have a favorite flower?”

  “Ooh.” The exclamation came from the doorway. Pet was leaning against the frame, fanning her face. “What was that I just walked into? A sudden puff of toxic masculinity? How doubly disappointing from the blokes who can turn all that gorgeous lace and pearls into three-dimensional, edible reality.” She joined them at the table, eyeing both the smaller image on the tablet and the life-sized version on the adjacent projector screen. “And since you ask so obnoxiously, only person who still owes me a tenner for the staff lunch”—she held out her hand, and Liam immediately reached for his wallet—“yes, we are sure.”

  She pocketed the ten-pound note he gave her and tapped the side of her nose. “I have my sources,” she added in a spot-on James Bond voice, Connery-style. “And amongst my vast wealth of knowledge—believe me, I know what men like.”

  One wink at Liam and the usually levelheaded sous-chef shuffled his feet and coughed several times.

  Dominic sent the final images to the printer. It would be faster and easier to submit digitally, but apparently a royal wedding was smothered in enough secrecy and paranoia to stymie a Bletchley Park operative. The staff at St. Giles Palace had requested everything in hard copy, delivered by a private courier. At this point, he was surprised the instructions hadn’t included a self-destructing scroll and an invisibility cloak. “If you wouldn’t mind horrifying me on your own time, did you finalize the paperwork for the new apprenticeship?”

  “Yes, boss.” Pet sketched an absentminded salute. She was reading through the assembled proposal on the table, with blithe disregard for the CONFIDENTIAL markings stamped across the heading. She frowned. “You’re going with fruitcake?”

  Heavy, unmistakeable undertone of ew.

  Dominic slotted the latest printouts into the folder. “Thanks for the heads-up on the flower selection, but we’re dealing with the royal household. There’s still a hefty amount of protocol, and even if the bride and groom look like they’ve respectively stepped out of The Nightmare Before Christmas and an Archie comic, the royal tradition is—”

  “The brandy-soaked, raisin-spotted, intestine-clogging brick known as fruitcake,” Pet interrupted. “Will look and taste the same whether it was made yesterday or two decades ago. And at no time during its lengthy existence will anyone want to eat it. I’ve told you, the bride likes chocolate cake. Specifically and vitally, she apparently likes your Death by Chocolate fudge cake. Very little about this couple conforms to royal standards, which is half the reason the bookies are already taking revolting odds on how long the marriage will last, or if they’ll actually make it to the altar. Rose is infamously a strong personality and a massive pain in her family’s arse. I guarantee t
hat however far she has to bend to tradition, she’ll wrangle final say over details like the inside of her cake. You should be pitching chocolate.”

  Dominic waited for the rolling stream of words to come to an end. “Again, I appreciate your contribution to the proposal, Pet, but—”

  “But your judgment is infallible, right?” The words were low. “No regrets, no mistakes for you.” Her lips momentarily pinched together, then she turned away.

  Liam shot an uncomfortable glance from her departing back to Dominic’s taut expression. He drummed his fingers against the folder. “So . . . should we send samples of Death by Chocolate, as well, or . . . ?”

  There was something cold and dark between Dominic’s ribs. With each passing day of his sister’s presence here, it sliced deeper. “Get the proposal sealed and delivered, please. And take the samples of the fruitcake.”

  “And—”

  “You’ve had the instructions. Do your job.”

  In deliberate mimicry of Pet, Liam snapped him a salute. His manner was ironic, and his eyes were a little too knowing.

  Sugar Fair

  Favored establishment of Instagram.

  As expected, not invited to submit a tender for the royal wedding cake.

  Doing it anyway.

  Beneath an encompassing, unflattering net, Sylvie’s hair was plastered stickily to her head. To her left, Mabel stood at an oiled marble slab, constantly pulling and stretching a molten sugar mass with her bare hands. The bulging muscles in her otherwise thin arms shifted with the rhythm of her movements, but she never paused. Most of the staff disliked blowing and sculpting sugar, for reasons of both tedium and pain. Mabel was in her element. Humming the Beach Boys of all things, she tested a satiny, pliable piece of the mass between her fingers. It was a finicky, often frustrating process for the uncertain or unskilled—one pull too many, an alteration too far in temperature, and a perfectly workable sculpting medium became a rock-hard, crystallized mess in the bin.

  With a satisfied grunt, Mabel grabbed a machete. She gave it a slightly disturbing, almost maternal stroke before she whacked off a long length of deep sapphire-blue sugar and passed it to Sylvie.

  “Thanks,” Sylvie half sang as she dropped the sugar onto her own workstation under the heating lamps and finished stirring a pot with her other hand. The busier they were, and the more intense the pressure, a vocal tic kicked in and she sounded like an escapee from Cabaret, incapable of just speaking at a normal pitch like a normal person. Mabel’s continuous loop of “Barbara Ann” wasn’t helping. “Time?”

  Mabel whipped another pot of boiling syrup solution off the stove and plunged it into a sink full of ice to flash cool. “Exactly three hours until six polite little drawings of fruitcakes and rosebuds toddle along to St. Giles Palace.” She waited a few seconds before pouring the syrup into a waiting mold. “And our fuckin’ masterpiece storms the gates.”

  Or, more accurately, tiptoed in the back, via Jay’s contact in the inner sanctum of St. Giles. This would either go to plan, or they’d be blacklisted from any future event even remotely associated with the royals. Probably down to and including lunches around the corner at the Prince of Wales pub.

  The butterflies in her stomach were muttering derisively.

  With a deep breath to steady herself, Sylvie finished rolling the blue sugar mass into a ball. A quick blast with a blowtorch before she inserted a heated metal pump, closed the edges of the sugar around it, and released the air valve. As the sugar inflated, blowing out like a balloon, the sides becoming glossy and ever so slightly transparent, she studied the reference photo pinned on the board. In an unconscious gesture carried over from years in art studios, her eyes briefly closed and her free palm hovered and shaped in the air above and around the sugar as if it were clay. She could see the photographic form in her mind, and with no further hesitation, she set her fingers to the expanding sugar work, pulling, twisting, and coaxing that image into physical being.

  Mabel was cutting the remaining blue sugar solution into dozens of small squares. She pinched and rippled each one into the shape of a scale with such skill that even the apprentices edged closer to watch, and most of them had genuinely been known to hide behind the fridges when they heard Mabel’s footsteps.

  Sylvie bent, ignoring an ache in her lower back as she continued to blow air into the growing sculpture. On the work surface, two wings sat waiting, each a vivid iridescent purple. She nodded to a hovering assistant, who licked her lips nervously before picking up the blowtorch and holding it to the edge of the first wing.

  “Christ, she’s going to incinerate it,” Mabel remarked with great interest and no apparent concern. She kept adding to the stack of scales, tossing them toward Sylvie with the ease of a child plucking a pile of daisies.

  “Pull back a little.” Sylvie stopped the pump and carefully adjusted the younger girl’s uncertain fingers around the blowtorch. “Yes. Good.”

  Together, they sealed the first wing to the side of the foot-long sugar dragon. He was currently bald and lopsided, but about to be magnificent.

  And hopefully win over a princess.

  Efficiently, Sylvie attached the second wing, this one unfurling in preparation for flight, and with the aplomb of John Wayne twirling a pistol, Mabel whipped out her own blowtorch to start layering on the scales. She’d customized the handle with purple stripes and diamantés, and really shouldn’t be carrying it around in a holster like that. It unsettled the customers.

  By the time Jay pushed open the kitchen door and walked in with an air of tangible anxiety and even longer hair, the whole team had temporarily left their own jobs to watch the finishing touches. Sylvie flickered her brush over the dragon, leaving a line of glittering pigment on the spiked tail. The edible paint had an oil-slick effect, shimmering from blue to pink to purple to black under the light.

  “What time do I have to—” Jay began.

  “Shhh,” hissed about fifteen voices at once, as Sylvie picked up the dragon and set it on the lowest tier of the cake.

  Three layers of rich chocolate cake, covered in mirror glaze icing, marbled blue, purple, and black, with gold paint etched and feathered to replicate the appearance of the sugar dragon’s scales. She wound the tail upward, adjusting the long curve to swoop neatly around the top tier, the very tip coming to rest protectively on the sculpted couple who sat on the edge, their legs dangling, tiny sugar ankles entwined.

  One totally edible princess with long black hair and thick eyeliner. Her endearingly fluffy blond love. And Caractacus, the dragon sentinel from the video game I, Slayer, over which the royal couple had apparently bonded, turning an excruciating first private date into an all-nighter. From curt questions and stammering answers to a beer-drinking, ogre-bashing bonk-fest.

  Just like all good fairy tales. The Brothers Grimm would be proud.

  There was a moment of silence as they all stood and surveyed it from top to bottom.

  And then Jay, after weeks of verbal hand-wringing and increasingly unnerving doubt, stood between Sylvie and Mabel and extended both his fists.

  Without a word spoken, they touched their knuckles to his.

  INTERNAL MEMO FROM THE DESK OF THE HONORABLE EDWARD LANCIER

  Private Secretary to Her Royal Highness, Princess Rose of Albany

  HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL

  Re: Project C

  By request of HRH Princess Rose and Mr. John Marchmont, an initial consultation with each of the prospective parties is to be arranged on the afternoon of the eleventh of October, in the Captain’s Suite, St. Giles Palace, London SW1A 2BQ.

  Each party will be allocated a period of thirty minutes, commencing 4:25 p.m.

  Attendees will arrive at separate locations and be transported by private cars to the north entrance.

  Communicate directly with the following persons of interest:

  Mr. Dominic De Vere of De Vere’s, 8 Magnolia

  Lane, Notting Hill, London W11 2DZ

  &

>   Ms. Sylvie Fairchild of Sugar Fair, 11 Magnolia

  Lane, Notting Hill, London W11 2DZ

  Chapter Five

  October the Eleventh

  Hartwell Studios

  10:35 a.m.

  Fortunately for those hoping to “crush a few dreams and cash their check” as soon as possible, the studio still hasn’t burnt down, despite the best efforts of certain Operation Cake contestants.

  Two hours into filming, and Sylvie could already guess who would be going home tomorrow. It was a shame, because Byron, their youngest contestant, had charming manners and a nice smile. The Birmingham student obviously meant well. And he’d already had a challenging year, having recently spent three days trapped in a haunted house at a defunct carnival. He’d been flattened by a rusty statue of a demonic clown, and his mates had been too drunk to remember they’d left him there. As he’d told the cameras and a flatly staring Dominic, it had been in the papers and everything.

  Unfortunately, well-intentioned, cautionary-tale Byron could probably screw up a Betty Crocker box mix.

  For the sake of both his feelings and the lens zooming in on her expression, Sylvie gamely took another bite of his scone. As expected, that mouthful was also going to sit in her intestines like a rock. It was hard to believe he’d created this . . . object out of unassuming flour and butter.

  “It’s a lovely color,” she offered after a pause, and he cheered up fractionally.

  He already looked a teeny bit like a basset hound, and as his eyes tugged irresistibly to her left, the lugubrious lines of his youthful face drooped further.

  Doom was approaching, in a very snazzy shirt and tie.

  Dominic joined her at the tabletop, keeping a regimental distance between their bodies. She could just faintly smell the oud in his aftershave over the prevailing scent of burnt butter. Poor Byron took a visible breath and swallowed, his floury fingers clenching on the edge of the workstation.