“Surely you cannot be so naive,” Orion said, and the fact that his tone was gentle kept her still.
So still it prevented her from snapping at him, or even getting her back up in the first place. Both of which she would have preferred, because the alternative was staring back at him, feeling awfully close to stricken.
“Every time I escort a woman to an event, it is like a feeding frenzy,” he told her in the same way. Kind enough. Gentle, too. But certain all the same. “No matter how many times I tell them that the women in question are my poor cousins, the result is the same. A complete and utter circus.”
She knew all about that circus. She’d seen enough of it without even looking for it—on the television, in all the newsagents. She’d even known, the way everyone did, that if Orion had ever dated, he’d managed to keep it quiet.
She’d known all of that in the way she knew what month Christmas was. Or that snow was cold, little though it fell in Idylla. It wasn’t anything personal, it was just a fact.
Her heart squeezed tight in her chest, then began to beat like a drum.
He continued to eye her with that mix of pity and patience. “But I have never before arrived at one of the holiday balls with a woman I was not related to, Calista. You should prepare yourself, at the very least, for the reaction the crowd will have when you exit the car.”
“But... But I...”
But Orion wasn’t finished. And worse, he seemed inclined to keep sounding kind, which was the last thing Calista wanted. It made everything so much harder.
It made her feel so much weaker.
“All of that will pale in comparison to the fervor that will grip the nation, the press, and a good part of the world once we announce that our engagement is finally going ahead tonight, all these years after my father arranged it.” His voice was as grave as his expression, then. And the small gleam she saw in his eyes had nothing to do with amusement, she was sure. “I do hope you know what you’ve gotten yourself into.”
For a moment she didn’t know what he meant. Then she remembered. Blackmail. Her vile, grasping father and this thing she’d become to counter him. To fight him—all while appearing to have surrendered to him long ago. All to save her sister no matter the cost to herself.
Her throat was so dry she thought it might catch fire.
“I’ll be fine,” she replied, though her lips still felt stung and stained from his. Her pulse had taken on a hectic life of its own, and the noise from outside the car as it began to slow in its final approach to the opera house seemed to batter against her.
Like real blows.
Orion reached over and took her hand. For a moment her heart seemed to seize inside her chest. But instead of lacing his fingers with hers or caressing her in some way—which she assured herself she would have shaken off at once—he fiddled with the ring he’d put there instead. It was the ring of the Queens of Idylla, after all. Every school-aged child knew that and could identify it on sight.
What they didn’t, couldn’t know was that the ring itself was warm against her skin. Or that the stones caught the light from the street outside, sending fragments and patches of illumination dancing about in a shimmering splendor.
The light caught his profile, too. The same profile that would soon grace the Idyllian currency, slowly taking his father’s place. He looked like precisely what and who he was, the product of centuries of royal blood. As if the throne of Idylla was superimposed on his skin.
That should have horrified her, surely.
But it didn’t.
And when he didn’t speak, his fingers on that ring as if that was all the statement necessary, Calista felt as if the bottom of the car fell out from underneath her. As if she was suddenly tossed out into the cobbled streets, unable to gain purchase or find her feet or even breathe.
The chanting and cheering outside grew louder. And she knew no one could see her inside the car, with its tinted, no doubt armored windows. But even so, she couldn’t seem to make her lungs work the way they were supposed to. And she felt dizzy all over again, but this time it was from nothing so pleasant as a kiss.
Because it hadn’t occurred to her until this very moment that as fake as she wanted to treat their engagement, or even their marriage, that was the private reality. That was what was between them because they knew the truth of things.
But there was going to be a huge public reality she couldn’t control.
Calista had been so busy focusing on how best to ignore the whole marriage thing while she pursued her own ends that she’d neglected to think about what it was going to mean to announce herself engaged or even adjacent to...Orion Augustus Pax. The bloody king.
Her attitude in that private salon the day she’d first met him struck her, then, as hilariously idiotic. If not actively suicidal.
The truth was, she wasn’t a public person. Her father was notorious, and that was about as much public attention as she’d ever wanted. It had led to snide comments at school. The odd sharp word. But mostly, the many people her father offended went after him, not her.
Unlike many of her peers, Calista wasn’t the sort who constantly had her picture in the society pages. Nor did she parade about Europe, from yacht to club to charity ball. She had always been too busy working. And the irony wasn’t lost on her that her life’s work was in a media company that existed almost entirely because it procured pictures of others and made them public whether they wanted those moments shared or not.
Maybe because of the things Skyros Media had done, Calista had always preferred to stay behind the scenes.
She felt herself begin to sweat as the car rolled to a stop.
Outside, there was a loud, endless roll of noise, like the wall-sized swells at sea. She tried to make herself breathe, but she couldn’t seem to get any air much deeper than the back of her throat.
“Is it always like this?” she managed to ask.
Faintly.
“I am the king,” Orion replied, mildly enough, though she had the feeling those grave hazel eyes saw far too much of her internal battle. “Better they should greet me with expressions of joy than the howls of hatred they used to greet my father. Don’t you think?”
“I was never the sort of person who chased around after the royal motorcade,” she made herself say in a sharper sort of voice, though she was still but a shadow of her usual self. “So I can’t say I ever paid much attention to the cacophony one way or another.”
He only looked at her. Until she couldn’t tell whether the noise outside was the crowd or if it was inside her, somehow. As if it was part of that singing thing that seemed to connect them, heating as it sang, until she felt scalded straight through. Or maybe she had already been scalded, her skin stripped away so she felt too much, despite her best efforts. Maybe one royal kiss had rewired her brain—by burning it up into ash and need and noise.
Or maybe you need to get a hold of yourself, she told herself sharply. This whole thing is nothing but a distraction.
“Isn’t this where you tell me I don’t have to do this if I don’t want to?” she asked before she thought better of it.
His mouth firmed then, forming a hard, stern line. And she couldn’t decide if she found that comforting or insulting, but it didn’t matter.
Because the look in his eyes matched the shape of his mouth and pinned her to her seat.
“But that is the rub, is it not? You do have to do this. As do I. That is the nature of blackmail, I think you’ll find. So tawdry and revolting. One is ever forced to do detestable things.”
Pull yourself together now, Calista ordered herself. It’s only a crowd. And he’s only a man. A very powerful, very pampered man.
Though this close to Orion, Calista couldn’t help but think he didn’t feel like only anything.
Maybe it was nerves that kept her mouth going. “At the very least I
would have thought you’d have sage advice to offer. That I should imagine them all naked, or something.”
“I can’t imagine I would find the prospect of a heaving mass of nudity particularly comforting,” King Orion said, his voice dark and sardonic. And possibly satisfied, too. “But if that helps you, Calista, then by all means. Imagine whatever sea of flesh you think will make you calm.”
She stared out the window for another moment, still feeling stricken and breathless. And hopelessly out of her depth. Then she blinked. “You’re right. That’s not better at all.”
Orion fixed her with another long, dark stare. He didn’t say another word, but still, she could feel the weight of the way he regarded her. As if it had its own heft and heavy, booted feet.
He rapped on his window, and a moment later, the door was opened. The roar from outside shoved in, even louder and wilder. He flicked Calista a look, indicating that she should slide after him to exit behind him.
Then he stepped out—into the noise, the lights, and the howls as they greeted him—with an innate athleticism that made her blink.
This was a fine moment indeed to rethink her choices. A fine moment to ask herself why she hadn’t pushed back a bit harder against her father. It was hard to remember why she’d chosen to go along with all this nonsense as she sat here in the back of a royal vehicle, her last moments as a private citizen spiraling away from her. It was hard to remember anything, really—much less all the reasons she’d had for allowing her father to think he was still in control of her.
The one very good reason in particular.
She could hear a strange little sound, high-pitched and plainly terrified, and realized she was panting.
And as she didn’t wish her big moment in the spotlight to coincide with the first time she fainted, she made herself take a deep breath. Then another.
Outside the car, in the wedge between door and vehicle, she could see Orion waving at the crowd. At his subjects. And what was left of her time was ticking away, second by second.
She reminded herself this was a distraction from her plan, not the plan itself.
And she reminded herself that none of this mattered. What mattered was surviving it intact so she could do what she wanted to do. Orion was being blackmailed. Calista was simply doing what was expedient.
Orion turned slightly, extending his hand back into the vehicle.
She didn’t lie and tell herself that wasn’t a sovereign command, because she knew it was.
God help her, but she wasn’t ready. She hadn’t thought this through. It had been one thing to sit in a private room in the palace and shoot off her mouth, but this was something else. This was terrifying.
She was terrified.
Orion waited with a kind of brooding, intense patience, his hand extended.
Calista found herself mute, frozen, and lost all the same in that grave gaze he settled on her.
Every inch of him a king. Her king. There was no doubt that the way he looked at her was an order from on high.
And on some distant level, she was astonished to find that it worked. She couldn’t seem to grasp onto a full thought in her head, but her body obeyed him anyway. She was moving automatically, reaching out to grasp his hand, like a deep, blooming flame when his strong fingers closed around hers.
For an eternity, there was only that. The flame and the bloom of it, eating her whole. His hand in hers. And the way their eyes caught, her still in the shadows of the car and him outside.
Her heart seemed to wallop her inside her own chest, like it was a weapon, and worse, he wielded it.
And then everything sped up.
Orion helped her alight from the car in another smooth, easy show of strength, though Calista rather thought it looked like nothing more than good manners. She tucked that away, because the fact the king was built like a god felt like a burst of sunshine deep inside her.
There was a smile on his face as he greeted her, though perhaps only she could see it didn’t match the intensity of the way he looked at her.
“Optics, my lady,” he murmured near her ear as he brushed a cool kiss across her cheek, and then he turned.
Presenting her to the crowd.
And sealing her fate, which felt a lot like drowning.
For a long while, possibly an intertwined string of forevers, there was nothing but the endless noise. Bright lights, popping flashbulbs, disorienting and overwhelming.
But Orion never let go of her. And Calista held on to her smile and his strong hand as if her life depended on it.
She rather thought it did.
And by the time they made it up the red-carpeted aisle to the ornate front doors of the Royal Opera House, where the inaugural holiday ball was always held, Calista felt as if she’d run back-to-back marathons. She, who had never deliberately run more than a few feet in her life.
If this was what it felt like, panicked and distraught down to her very bones, she had no plans to start.
Inside the first vestibule of the opera house, it was shockingly quiet. So quiet that it almost hurt.
Except, of course, for the ragged sound of her breathing.
“Try not to hyperventilate,” Orion advised her, in that same mild way of his that was simultaneously enraging and comforting. “This is the opera, I grant you. But even so, best to avoid the fainting couch. It will only raise unfortunate questions.”
“I’m perfectly fine,” she managed to say, though she wasn’t. She really, really wasn’t. But as she didn’t plan to collapse on the floor and cry, what was the point of saying so?
“I’m delighted to hear it.”
Orion nodded past her. That was when it occurred to Calista to look around, too. Beneath the dramatic gargoyles up high and statuary littered about the marble foyer, there were liveried servants standing at the ready.
And she realized what she should already have known. Most people did not get a moment to collect themselves before entering the ball proper. This was an indulgence granted the king, no doubt so he could make an appropriately pageant-like entrance.
So that they could make an entrance, she corrected herself. Together.
Because this was what she’d signed up for. Or her father had signed her up for, which amounted to the same thing. And it was no one’s fault but hers that she’d failed to think it through.
Calista blew out a breath, found her smile again, and took the arm he offered her.
And then, like it or not, she allowed the King of Idylla to walk her into the first holiday ball of the season.
Worse still, she allowed him to claim her as his with a perfect, romantic kiss from the balcony that would have swept her off her feet entirely. That would have made her forget the crowd, and the astonishment from all quarters, and the cruel satisfaction on her father’s face.
It would have broken her heart and sewed it back together, she was sure, if only she hadn’t been faking.
And if she had to remind herself, repeatedly, that she was faking, that Orion was performing under duress, that none of this was real nor ever could be—
Well.
Calista had learned a long time ago how to keep a smile on her face and pretend like her life depended on it. Like Melody’s life depended on it, too.
Because it always had.
CHAPTER FIVE
“THE STAFF IS in disarray,” Griffin declared, letting himself into Orion’s study.
“Do come in, Griffin,” Orion murmured sardonically as his brother prowled over to fling himself in his favorite chair, without even pretending to wait for an invitation. “Make yourself right at home. No need to worry I might be tending to delicate matters of state.”
He wasn’t, just at the moment. But he certainly could have been.
Griffin looked notably unbothered at the possibility. “It’s an uproar out there. The pala
ce halls are alive with speculation now that everything has been made official and all the rumors are at an end. You may have kicked off a revolution after all.”
Orion sighed and stopped attempting to make sense of the latest lengthy, meandering tome that his least favorite minister had presented him, expecting Orion would have it read and annotated with cogent commentary already. He rubbed at his temples, suddenly aware that he’d been at his desk reading stacks upon stacks of documents since early that morning. Because like it or not, he was playing catch-up on the past twenty years. The whole of his father’s reign.
“What is it I’ve done to provoke the revolutionary forces today?” He eyed his younger brother with the usual mix of baffled affection, no little hint of jealousy at the antics Griffin as spare rather than heir was permitted to get up to, and a rush of gratitude that all the same, they were who they were.
“Your fiancée, my liege,” Griffin drawled, stretching out his legs. He was dressed for appointments, though he preferred a rather more carefree and rumpled approach to his sartorial choices. Then again, no one expected any different from a man not expected to ever take the throne. “Or are you unaware that she has refused to submit herself to the tender ministrations of your fleet of private secretaries?”
“What do they want from Calista?” Orion asked, and couldn’t help but think that it was an excellent question. One he asked himself nightly, come to that.
He kept waiting for familiarity to breed contempt, as it was meant to do. But instead, the more time he spent with the woman he was to marry, the more feverish his nights became. Because the more he saw her, the more he wanted her.
It hadn’t helped that he’d seen beneath that sharp, edgy surface she wore so comfortably. He could have done without the vulnerability she’d shown before their first ball. Just like he could have happily stayed ignorant of the way she tasted.
It would have made things easier, surely.
During the long nights when all he did was ache for her, he reminded himself that finding himself sexually attracted to a woman he was forced to marry anyway was a gift. That he should celebrate it, no matter how the marriage itself came to be. Because that attraction could only make what lay ahead of the pair of them easier. More pleasant, certainly.
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