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attendance, even the life peers, even their spouses.
    White-gloved waiters brushed past with flutes of champagne, and a string quartet played jazz music in the background. Swaths of holiday greenery were draped throughout the room, decorated with poinsettias and enormous red velvet bows. In one corner stood the palace’s official Christmas tree, its branches laden with old-fashioned garlands of popcorn and cherries, the way the royal family had decorated trees for a hundred years.
    Sam caught sight of Jeff outside. The French doors had been thrown open, courtiers spilling out on the colonnaded terrace to cluster beneath spidery heat lamps. Several of the twins’ friends were already out there. Jeff met her gaze, his eyes flashing with unmistakable warning, just as an arm closed around Samantha’s elbow like a vise.
    “Samantha. We need to talk.” Queen Adelaide looked coolly elegant in a strapless black dress, her glossy hair pinned back with antique diamond clips—the ones that George II had famously won from the French King Louis XVI in a game of cards. The Louisiana Gamble, people called that bet, since it had resulted in France ceding the Louisiana Territory to America.
    “Hi, Mom,” Sam said cheerfully, though she knew it was useless.
    “That isn’t the gown I laid out for you.” Adelaide had the unique ability to scowl and smile at once, which Sam had always found terrifying, and also a little impressive.
    “I know.” Sam had ignored the dress her mom had selected, choosing instead a one-shouldered gown covered in silver sequins: far too edgy and inappropriate for an event this formal, but Sam didn’t care. Her riotous dark hair was loose and messy, as if she’d just tumbled out of bed. She’d also borrowed her grandmother’s choker from the Crown Jewels collection, made of enormous cabochon rubies interspersed with diamonds—but instead of fastening it around her throat, she’d wound it around her wrist in a chunky tangle, making the elegant stones into something almost sexy.
    Sam had long ago resolved that if she couldn’t be beautiful, she should at the very least be interesting. And she wasn’t beautiful, not in the traditional sense—her forehead was too wide and sloping, her brows too heavy, her features too starkly hewn, like those of her distant Hanoverian cousins.
    But people tended to forget all that the moment Samantha began talking. There was a nebulous, infectious energy to her, as if she were somehow more alive than everyone else. As if all her nerves were sparking at once, just below the surface.
    The queen steered her daughter firmly to one side of the ballroom, far from any eavesdropping ears.
    “Your father and I are disappointed in you,” Adelaide began.
    What else is new. “I’m sorry,” Sam said wearily. She knew the script, knew it was easier to just tell her mom what she wanted to hear. She’d managed to avoid her parents when she landed late last night, and they had been too busy with preparations for the ball to confront her today. But she’d known she couldn’t put them off forever.
    “Sorry?” the queen hissed. “That’s all you have to say for yourself after running away from your security officers? Samantha, that kind of behavior is inexcusable! Those officers put their lives at risk for you every day. Their job is, literally, to step between you and a bullet. The least you could do is show them some respect!”
    “Did you already give this speech to Jeff?” Sam asked, as if she didn’t know the answer. Jeff always emerged from trouble completely unscathed.
    It wasn’t fair. Despite how progressive America claimed to be, there was still a sexist double standard quietly underpinning everything. She and Jeff were proof of it, like in those scientific studies where they treated twin babies the same except for one key variable, then tracked how it affected them.
    The variable here was that Jeff was a boy and Sam was a girl, and even when they did the exact