by Millie Adams
And yet she would. Because she knew what true hell was. Having nothing. Having no one. Feeling nothing.
Not even knowing what to dream for, so you had to dream of what you might do for your country, and nothing else.
For thinking that the only reason you might matter was to serve the greater good, and not to simply be.
But in his arms, she could be.
In his arms, the years of deprivation, the years of nothing, melted away.
And when she shattered, she was the stars again. Every starry night she hadn’t been allowed to see, as the dungeon ceiling had been her view. She became all she had lost.
When it was over, she lay with him. Let him hold her. Until the sounds of their hearts beating quieted. Until she could breathe again.
“No more prisons,” she whispered.
“I do not seek to put you in a prison,” he said.
“You may not seek to,” she said, tracing a finger over his forearm, “but the end result is the same. By denying me... It is the same.” She breathed out slowly. “It is not the same. I know it is not. But sometimes I feel full to bursting with these emotions... I don’t ever want to go back. To being nothing and feeling nothing. When I saw my parents... My brother.”
He tightened his hold on her. “How did you escape?”
She spread her hands. “I didn’t escape, eh?”
His lips curved upward. Only barely. “You lived.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “I lived. They made sure that I saw the executions of my family.” She shook her head, sadness building inside of her. “It is the deepest of sorrows. To have lost them that way. To know that everything in my country would change as well. That it was not just I who lost, but everyone. All of Aillette. And I could do nothing to stop it.”
“That’s why you kept going.”
She nodded. “It was easier that way at first. To think only of my people. To think only of the things that they had suffered, because the things that I suffered...”
“Do not tell me what you suffered,” he said. “Tell me of how they lived, not how they died.”
She was choked with gratitude. For no one had ever asked for that. No one had given her the opportunity to speak of it. She had denied herself the gift of remembering for too long. Because it was easier. Because it felt simpler to focus only on the fact they were gone, rather than remembering how sweet it was when they were there.
“My older brother liked to tease me. He also gave me sweets. Always. When he and my father would travel together, he would always bring me back something nice. To commemorate the other country. A fruit candy, or a chocolate. Pastries. Cakes.” She smiled. “Perhaps that is why I liked eating dessert first so much at dinner those nights ago. It reminded me of him. Of Marcus. He was a good brother.”
“And your father?”
“Fair and strong. And very traditional. A man who did not believe in progress for the sake of it. But I admired him greatly. He was very kind. To everyone who worked in the palace. He was fair, even though he could be strict. He was never cruel. He taught me to dance,” she said, her voice breaking. “Standing on his feet. I did dance. I lied to you. But it was an easy lie, eh? These truths hurt. These memories.”
“He sounds like a good man.”
“You would never have had to assassinate him.” She laughed. “Though in the end he was, I suppose. His goodness did not save him. It was a terrible lesson. Knowing that being strong and good could not keep you safe. I hated that lesson.”
The time it took him to respond spoke volumes of how he listened. It was such a wonderful, strange thing. To share with another person like this.
Yes, she had made friends with her staff at the palace, but they worked for her. It was not the same as this.
“The world is a broken place,” he said. “Good people die.”
The words were heavy and fragile all at once. And she knew she had been trusted with a truth that resided deep within his soul.
“I know well. My mother, she was... She was beautiful. Tall and elegant. And her hair always looked perfect. She smelled like lilacs and sunshine. A particular perfume, but I do not know it. All memory of my family was eradicated from here. None of their things were kept if they did not have value. Value to them. But what had value to them is different than what would’ve had value to me and...”
“Of course.”
“All I have are memories. I remember one time we all went on a picnic. We sat by the lake, and we were happy. We were so happy. Happy to eat together and be together. I will not forget that. It was a gift. It was not long before the coup. I think that is what strikes me now as so desperately unfair. My father was a King. My brother was the heir. My mother was a Queen. But they were just my family. And if we had just been a family they would never have been killed.”
“All too often innocents are caught in the cross fire.” He shifted, holding her more tightly. “It is a fact of this world that I despise, and one I have fought for years. It does not do good to dwell on the things that you cannot change. Or to ask what if. For I have done that. I have done it exhaustively. I have asked why many times and was never met with an answer. Sometimes things simply are.”
“Yes. But it is hard not to wonder. How things could be different.”
“But that is the path to insanity. Or at least revenge.”
“Is that the path you’ve been on?”
“Yes,” he said.
“What happened? I spoke of my family to you... I gave myself to you. Tell me. What is it?”
“My story is not of help to anyone.”
“Well,” she said, “I don’t know that my story is particularly helpful to anyone either. But someone should remember my family. And only I remember them in this way. It is an honor to their memory to speak of them, isn’t it?” She waited. Only for a beat. “Maybe you should speak of the woman you lost.”
There was a breath. Then her name.
“Stella.”
“Stella,” she said, testing the name.
She felt a surge of jealousy, and she felt also that it was unfair. She didn’t know why she should have it either. He was in her bed, and that was enough. She didn’t need anything more.
She only needed to listen. As he had done for her.
As they built a web of intimacy together.
“I fell in love with Stella when I was very young. I had no aversion to marrying. My parents had a wonderful marriage. Have a wonderful marriage. Long and healthy. Functional. I always thought...I would find the right woman, and I would marry her. Quickly and easily. For love always seemed quick and easy to me. Why wouldn’t it? After all, my parents lived a fantasy. Why wouldn’t I live the very same fantasy? Love came quickly. It came easily. And it was lost just as quickly and easily. And my life... My life was never what I thought it would be.”
“Sorry,” she said, her heart squeezing tight. It was not language barriers that made words ineffectual, not now. It was the fact there were no words for these things. For the deep sadness and unfairness in the world. She hated this. Hated that he had been through so much pain. Why did it feel like this?
She didn’t think she could recall ever feeling quite so sorry for another person’s tragedy. And at the same time she felt...angry. Angry because part of her wished that she could have been loved half so dearly as this Stella woman had been. But Stella was gone, and Annick lived.
What a very strange thing. Everyone who had ever loved Annick was gone. And this man loved a woman who was not here. It left behind a broken Annick. A broken Maximus. How much more right the world would have been if Annick were gone and Stella were here.
But Annick wanted to be here. Wanted to be in Maximus’s arms, in his bed. Annick wanted to be the one who was here, breathing next to him, touching him.
Yes, that was what she wanted. Even if it meant the worl
d remained broken and out of sorts.
She was sorry, though. That a man so beautiful should be so haunted.
She wondered if anyone felt so sorry for her. If anyone looked at her and thought it sad that someone so young had been robbed of so much life.
She didn’t know that they did. But either way, she cared for him. Cared for his brokenness. Even if no one much minded her own.
Even if he didn’t.
“What happened?”
“My father is not quite the self-made businessman he appears to be. Oh, he is responsible for the way that his life has gone, but he’s done things...”
“What things?”
“He engaged in a host of shady business practices initially. My father is a good man in many ways. You have to understand that. As a boy, Dante was living on the streets, tried to rob my father and kill him. And rather than extracting punishment from him, my father sent Dante to a school where he was educated. Took care of him. Introduced him to me. Gave me a lifelong friend who is truly more like a brother. My father also promised my sister to a King in return for aid to his business. And he made bad bargains with the wrong people. And those people sought their revenge when my father thought he could outrun them. When he thought he could cheat them. My father is a family man. He has never been unfaithful to my mother. He raised us well. But he waded into dark waters to create his fortune. And those things have a way of coming back to haunt you. And they did. They did. There was a man sent to punish my father. Sent to kill his son.”
“Maximus...”
“But the assassin’s bullet did not hit his son.” The word broke, along with his voice.
“It hit Stella. I didn’t protect her. I couldn’t protect her. I didn’t know. I was naive. Ignorant. Innocent in a way. I believed that my father was a good man. I believed that he would never do anything to put his children in harm’s way. But he did. And worst of all, we didn’t know it. Because I didn’t know it, I didn’t know that Stella was ever in danger by being with me. Her murder remains listed as unsolved. Because the man was an international hit man. And she was just... She was just a girl. A young, beautiful girl who had the misfortune to fall in love with the wrong man, who was connected to the wrong people. She deserved more. She deserved better. She sure as hell deserved to live.”
“And all this is for her. All of this,” Annick said. “Even protecting me.”
“I could see her face when you told me about your plight. She would’ve been angry with me for abandoning you. She was a good person.”
“And you loved her.”
“Yes. Of course, then I thought... I thought that love was simple. And that people were exactly who they appeared to be. That love was easy and life was charmed. That my father’s legend was real. None of it was real.”
“You have a family,” she said. “A family who loves you.”
He nodded slowly. “That’s the truth of it. I do. I have a family—you don’t. It must be difficult to have lost your family. Though in some ways I felt that day that I lost mine. At least, my illusion of what it was.”
“Me,” she said, “I would rather have an illusion than nothing. Than a life spent in the dungeon. I’m not saying it is easy, this. This thing that happened to you. This thing that you learned about your father. But I know what it is to be left with no one. No one to care about your pain. Did your father at least care?”
“He was broken by it. I’ve never seen a man weep like he did, not even me. Not even me when she died. But he made me swear that I wouldn’t tell. Not my mother. Not Min or Violet. And not Dante.”
“So they could keep the family they always thought they had.”
“My kindness was not for him. But for them.”
“It makes sense, this. But then, you’re all alone. Maximus King to them. They don’t know you. They don’t know who you are.”
“No. They don’t.”
“You are in a dungeon. One that you have fashioned for yourself from the stone blocks of your secrets. Maximus King, you fill me with great sadness.”
“Don’t be so dramatic. I’m not in any kind of prison. I’m here of my own free will. No one has forced me into anything.”
“I did. With chloroform.”
“You are far too proud of your chloroform, Annick. I could have left at any time if I wanted to.”
“Can you? Would you always see bars?”
“See bars?”
“It is reading I did,” she said. “About kittens.”
“And what do kittens have to do with bars?”
“It is what kittens have to do with us, I think. If they are raised in cages, even when they are freed they see the bars before their eyes. They do not truly ever see themselves as free. They know captivity. They exist in it even after the walls are removed. Do we do that? I wonder.”
“People? Or us specifically?”
“You and me.” She put her hand first on her chest, then on his. “Maximus and Annick.”
“I’m just doing what I can to make the imbalance of the world right again. It takes a lot of bad being removed to begin to make up for Stella being gone.”
Annick nodded gravely. “She must’ve been very good, your Stella. To lay claim to your heart once and forever.”
“She was.”
“She is not using your heart, though. And you could maybe use the return of it.”
“It isn’t that simple.”
She shrugged. “Me, I find most things are actually quite simple.”
“Yes, but that simplicity is unique to you, Annick. You act as if you can just say whatever you want. Do whatever you want. Chloroform whoever you want, and it will fix your problems.”
“Ah, my life is not so complicated. I might have felt like I could not be myself, but at least I knew what to do. Survive. That is a very simple life. To survive. It is this wanting that I find complicated, Maximus King.”
“What is it you want?”
There were many things she wanted, but few of them were possible. For now, she would stick with possible. “I think...more pastries. And then I will have some more of your body.”
“Is that so?”
“It is so,” she said, nodding definitively.
She couldn’t fix the past, not for either of them. But for the moment she felt soothed. For the moment she felt like she might even have a real friend. She was sad for him. For all that he had lost. But it made him kindred in a way. In a way that no one else she knew was or could be. He was broken. Missing pieces of himself. And so was she.
“Then that is what you shall have.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THEY WERE TO be married the next day. Neither of them had seen the point in tarrying over the planning of the wedding. It was for security. And it needed to be done. Whatever else she might think about necessity, he knew that she understood that. His family had also arrived. They would be staying for a time after the ceremony, and there really was nothing he could do to persuade them otherwise. Annick, for her part, was pleased. And if he were a different man, he might find it charming.
“It is just that there has not been family in this palace for a very long time,” she explained, when expressing her delight about his family coming to visit. And he found he could not begrudge it to her.
She was so fragile. And yet so determinedly strong all at once. Annick and her chloroform. He had never intended to get himself embroiled in this sort of thing. Had never thought that he would get married. Most especially not after Stella. His love for her had been branded on his soul. Initially. Now what he did was not out of blind grief. It had left him in doubt of eternal love.
Because he didn’t feel that love anymore. He didn’t feel her close to him. That year he had spent loving her could do nothing to close the gap of the sixteen years spent without her. And so, revenge, balancing the scales, that was his qu
est. It was nothing to do with love. And the things he had learned about his father in the aftermath of it all...
It had twisted everything he thought about the world. Losing Stella had been more than simply losing her. It had meant a change to the way that he saw absolutely everything.
Annick made him feel something.
He did not care for it.
He had shared with her, though, and that had... It had moved things onto strange and shaking ground. There was a connection that he felt with her unlike anything he had experienced before, and that had not been the way this was meant to be.
He was supposed to protect her.
He was supposed to be helping her.
He was not supposed to be affected by her.
“Well, this really is quite something.”
He turned where he stood in the entry to the castle, just in time for his sister Violet and her husband, Javier, to walk through the door. Violet was pregnant and looking glowing. It did something strange to him, to see his younger sister grown in this way. He’d been through it already with Minerva, though it had come out later that the child she had come home from a semester abroad with was not actually her child, but the child of a friend who had needed rescuing. As if thinking of her conjured her up, Minerva came in as well, also pregnant. Dante was with her, carrying their adopted daughter in his arms. And behind them came Robert and Elizabeth King, his parents, who looked tan, fit and remarkably well-preserved. As always.
“This is incredible,” Minerva said. “You both live in such splendid palaces.”
“Cara,” Dante said. “Are you disappointed that I have not bought you a palace? Because I could. Would you prefer an atmospheric ruin in the Highlands? One with a very large library...”
“Yes,” she said. “Would you really buy me a castle?”
“And a pony if you so wish.”
His eyes glittered with humor. And Maximus was surprised to discover how pleased he was with that. His friend had been beset by darkness for years. And Minerva seemed to have brought him out of it. He never would’ve thought that. He would have said that Min was too shy. Too bookish. But she had done wonders for him. He didn’t know the Prince that Violet had married, but he had it on good authority that sunny, flashy Violet had done much the same for him.