Just wanted to introduce you to one of the two main characters in The Madness Project, if you haven’t met him yet!
Prince Tarik Trabinis, meet readers. Readers, meet Prince Tarik.
Here’s a little glimpse of him from the first time Hayli meets him. Hayli is a total tomboy who’s dressed in boy’s clothes, so the guards assume that’s what she is. Tarik knows better.
One of the guards came sprinting up and saluted, not at Zagger, but at the boy. I jutted my lower lip and frowned.
“Your Highness?” the guard asked. “Shall I arrest him?”
Your Highness? I bit my tongue on a cry of surprise. I felt my face turn white, then red, and I’m sure my eyes bugged as big as the headlamps on the motorcar.
Zagger must have seen it, because he kind of smirked at me when he thought I wasn’t watching. The prince didn’t move at all. He stood turned a little aside, so I only saw his profile. All quiet lines and tanned skin, like he’d been born somewhere that actually saw the sun once in a while.
“Just send her off,” he said finally. A second hitched past and his eyes drifted back toward me. “She won’t be back.”
“No, wait!” I cried. “Wait, please! I have to be here. You don’t get it! I have to—”
I screwed my mouth shut. Babbling like a moonbrained idiot, and the Crown Prince not five steps away from me. The prince. I’d seen his picture in the papers before, of course. I don’t know why I didn’t recognize him from the beginning. Maybe because the pictures always had him look dashing in sport gear or three-piece suits, with that sweet mischievous smile and studied laziness — not mucked up with rain and mud and his cheeks all ruddy from the wind.
