by Maisey Yates
His stomach tightened, turned over, and he ceased hearing her. Stopped listening. “If you don’t want a man who’s been raped, cara mia, all you have to do is say so.”
“Don’t. Don’t make it about me being scared. I am scared, but I’m doing the brave thing. The hard thing. I refuse to let us live our lives as broken pieces when we can be whole together.”
“What are you saying?”
“That for the second time, Princess Sophia is not going to show up to her wedding.”
And with that, Sophia turned and walked out of the room, not bothering to gather her shoes. And he simply stood there, looking at them. Thinking this was the strangest interpretation of a Cinderella story he had ever heard of.
But after that came a strange pain in his chest like he couldn’t remember feeling before. And he didn’t even try to stop it from dropping him to his knees.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
SOPHIA RAN UNTIL her mind was blank. Until there was nothing but her bare feet pounding down on the damp grass, the blades sticking between her toes, mud giving way and creating a slick foothold as she prayed her legs wouldn’t fail her. Prayed they would carry her far away from Luca. From heartbreak.
She was still on the palace grounds, for they extended vastly, and she knew that she was going to have to stop running and get in a car. Get on a plane, to truly escape Luca. But for now she couldn’t stop. For now she could do nothing but run.
She stopped when she came to the edge of the woods, and then she took a cautious step forward, the texture of the grounds changing to loose dirt and pine needles, the heavy tree cover protecting her from the pale moonlight. It was cool, almost frigid, there beneath the dark trees.
She shivered. She wrapped her arms around herself, trying to catch her breath. She took another step forward, and another, her dress shimmering in front of her, catching stolen beams of moonlight, flashing in the darkness.
She didn’t know what she had just done. Didn’t know what her plan was.
To walk into the forest and die?
No.
That was hardly the solution to dealing with a man not returning your affection.
She had been right, in what she had said to him. She couldn’t go through with a marriage to a man who didn’t love her. Not just for her own sake, but for his.
She had the feeling that many people—herself included until recently—thought love to be a beautiful, quiet thing. A force that allowed you to be yourself. And while that was true...it didn’t mean the self that you projected to the world.
Real love, she fully understood now, challenged that identity. It forced you to reach down deep to your essence, and ask yourself who you were there. Real love was not about being comfortable. Not about being protected. Real love was about being stripped bare. Was about revealing yourself, unprotected to the other person, trusting that they would not use your tender and vulnerable places against you. That they would protect them for you, so that you didn’t have to.
Real love was the difference between hiding in a darkened forest, or standing in the light.
Right now she was hiding in a forest.
She closed her eyes, a tear tracking down her face.
And it was then she realized where her feet were carrying her. She pressed on through the forest. Through and through. Until she found the paved drive that wound through the trees.
Her mother had moved into the dower house some time ago. It was an outmoded sort of thing, surely, as the palace was so large, but her mother seemed to like it. Liked having her own house rather than standing on ceremony in the massive palace.
It gave her a sense of peace. Gave her a small slice of her simple life back. Although the cottage, with its impeccably tended garden, bright pink roses climbing up the sides of the walls and exquisite furnishings was far grander than anything possessed by Sophia or her mother in their former lives.
It was dark now, the white stucco of the cottage shining a pale beacon through the dimness, the roses fluttering slightly against the wall as the breeze kicked up.
The gravel in the driveway cut into her feet, but she didn’t care.
She walked up to the door and knocked.
It opened slowly, and then more quickly when her mother realized it was her.
“Sophia,” she said. “What are you doing here?”
“I...” She swallowed hard. “I didn’t know where else to go. I didn’t even know I was coming here until... Until I realized where I was.”
“What happened?”
“Luca and I fought. I... I called off the wedding.”
“Come inside,” her mother said, ushering her in.
There, Sophia found herself quickly wrapped in a blanket and settled on the couch, and before she knew it, a cup of tea was being firmly placed into her hand.
“Tell me.”
“He doesn’t wish to love me,” Sophia said. “Which I feel is very different to not loving me at all. He doesn’t want love. It... It frightens him.” She would not reveal Luca’s secrets to her mother. Because though she trusted her mother to keep confidences, they were Luca’s secrets to tell. “He is very wounded by some things in his past, and he doesn’t want...”
“He doesn’t want to be healed?”
“Yes. Was his father like that?”
“No.” Her mother shook her head. “I was. Your father hurt me deeply. Years of being shunned for being a single mother. The casual judgment I faced every day leaving the house. Collecting assistance so that I could feed you. It all left me scarred and hardened. And then I met Magnus. He charmed me. And yes, when we met, seduced me. I’m not going to dance around that, Sophia, since I know you know full well about those things.”
Sophia felt her face heat. “Indeed.”
“It was easy for him to tempt me into his bed, but into his life was another thing entirely. And I did my best. To work my job, to keep my liaisons with a king private. To continue to be a good mother to you. I thought I could keep all those things separate. That all of those parts of myself didn’t have to be contained in one woman. That I could put walls up.” She smiled softly. “But I couldn’t. Not in the end. But I was hanging on very tightly to my pain. And I realized I was going to have to open my hands up and drop that pain if I was going to grab hold of what he was offering me. But when your pain has been fuel for so long, it is a difficult thing to do.”
“I think that’s how it is for him. I think his pain has kept him going, because without it...”
“Without it there’s only despair. Anger is much easier. Do you know what else anger is preferable to?”
“What?”
“Hope. Learning to hope again is a terrifying thing. And when you have been harmed, you don’t want it. You resist it. Those little bits of light creeping back into the darkness are the most terrifying thing. You cannot hide in the light, Sophia. Darkness is a wonderful concealment. But it conceals everything. The beauty of the world. All that we can have around us. But it reveals us, too. The light. I suspect that is what Luca is resisting.”
“What should I do? Should I go back to him? Love him even though he doesn’t love me?”
“I can’t tell you what to do. I don’t want you trapped in a loveless marriage. But...”
“If I love him it isn’t loveless,” she said softly.
“No. It isn’t.” Her mother sat down on the couch next to her, clasping her hands in her lap. “The king loved me all the while when I could not love him. But he also didn’t compromise. He did not want a mistress. He wanted a wife. And as far as he was concerned, if I didn’t love him, even if we took vows, I might as well be a mistress.”
“So he gave you an ultimatum.”
“No. He just made it known he could not fully bring me into his life without love.”
“Well. Luca and I can’t exactly have that sort of arran
gement. We are going to have a child together. And I live in the palace half the time.”
Her mother laughed softly. “I’m not telling you what to do, Sophia. I feel there is the potential for heartbreak at every turn with this situation.”
“That’s not very encouraging.”
“It isn’t supposed to be encouraging. It’s just the truth. I guess the question is... If he’s going to break your heart either way... Would you rather be with him or be without him?”
“I don’t know.”
Except she did know. She wanted him. She wanted to be in his life, in his bed, but it felt like a potentially dangerous thing to do. The wrong thing. Like it would damage...
Her pride. Her defenses.
Perhaps she was more like her mother than she imagined.
Claims of love were bold, but quite empty when the action was withheld until the other person performed to your specifications.
His mother had given up on him. Had put herself before him.
Sophia realized she could not do the same.
* * *
Luca was not a man given to drink. He was not a man who indulged in anything, particularly. But he was drunk now. There was nothing else that was going to calm the pounding ache in his head. In his chest. He had sat there, for hours, on the floor of Sophia’s bedroom, pain biting into him like rabid wolves. And then he had gotten up and gone back to his own quarters, and proceeded to drink the contents of his personal bar.
Now the pain was just swimming back and forth inside him, hazy and dull and no less present.
And he had even less control of his thoughts now. Chasing through his mind like rabid foxes after their own tails.
He was worthless. Worthless. A king of an entire country, worth absolutely nothing.
He did not allow himself those thoughts. He never did. But in this moment, he not only allowed them, he fed them. Like they were his pets. He allowed them to rain down on him, a black misery that coated him completely.
He embraced, wholly, his misery. His self-pity.
Sophia had spoken of how he stood tall in spite of everything. But here he was, on the floor. Prostrate to the sins that had been committed against him, and to what remained of his own soul. Black and bruised like the rest of him.
Dark.
He was a night without stars.
Sophia was the stars.
He rolled onto his back, the earth spinning on its axis.
He was worthless because he had been treated like an object. Worthless because his own mother had not cared to seek justice for him.
And yet, in the midst of those thoughts, in the midst of that darkness, there came a glimmer.
Sophia did not see him as worthless. Sophia thought he was strong.
Sophia thought he was worthy of love.
And in an instant, as though the sun had broken through storm clouds, he felt bathed in light.
Why should his mother, Giovanni, be the ones who formed his life? Why should they decide what he was?
Perhaps, in withholding what had happened to him from the media, his mother had protected him from having the public form an opinion on who he was, but within that, he had allowed her to form his opinion of his life. Of what he could be. Of what he could have.
He had escaped the press defining him by that night, but he defined himself by it. By his mother’s response.
Had trained himself to believe that if he did not act above reproach in every way at all times, that he would be as useless as he had long feared.
Sophia saw more than that. Sophia saw through to the man he might have been. She made him think that perhaps he could be that man again.
And he had sent her away, because he didn’t feel worthy of that.
But she thought he was. She mattered more. She mattered more than Giovanni. She mattered more than his mother.
She mattered more than all the stars in the sky.
If Sophia could love him...
Pain burst through him, as brilliant and blinding as the light from only a moment before.
He loved her. He loved her. And he had hurt her. He had sent her away to protect himself. Which was truly no different than what his mother had done, in many ways.
Putting himself before her.
He would not.
He didn’t want to marry Sophia because of the baby. He didn’t want her because he was sick.
He wanted her because she was her.
Undeniably, beautifully her.
When he closed his eyes, it was her face he saw.
And then, he knew nothing else.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE DAY OF the wedding, Sophia stayed in her mother’s house until clothing could be sent. Then she was bundled up and whisked off to the palace, where she checked to see if anything had been canceled.
It had not been.
Perhaps it was Luca’s ferocious pride not able to come to grips with the fact that she was going to defy him.
Perhaps he had a plan to try and win her back.
Or perhaps, he had simply known that in the end she wouldn’t leave him to be humiliated.
Whatever the reasoning, she would find out later. With the help of her stylist, she got dressed in her wedding gown far earlier than was necessary. And then she began to make inquiries of the staff.
“Where is he?” she asked.
“The king?”
“Yes.”
“In his rooms. But you know it is bad luck for the groom...”
“I already had the bad luck to fall in love with my stepbrother. I think I have reached my limit.” She picked up the front of her dress and dashed across the palace, making her way to Luca’s chamber.
But he wasn’t there. Dejected, she began to make the journey back to her own. The halls were remarkably empty, the staff all seeing to preparations for the wedding that might not happen, it seemed to Sophia.
So she was surprised when she heard another set of footsteps in the corridor.
She looked up and saw Luca standing there. He was wearing black slacks and a white shirt that was unbuttoned at the throat. For one blinding second she could hardly fight the impulse to fling herself across the empty space between them and kiss him there. Right at his neck, right where his heart beat, strong and steady.
But she remained rooted to where she was, her breathing shallow.
“Luca,” she said.
“I was searching for you,” he said.
“Here I am.”
He frowned. “You’re wearing a wedding gown.”
She swished her hips back and forth, the dress swirling around her legs. “Yes.”
“You said you wouldn’t marry me.”
“I changed my mind.”
“Well. I have decided that I changed my mind, as well.”
“What?”
“I do not wish to marry you simply because you’re having a baby, Sophia. You’re right. That would be a terrible thing. A terrible mistake.”
Sophia felt crushed. As if he had brought those strong hands down over her heart and ground it into powder.
“You don’t want to marry me?” she asked.
“I do want to marry you,” he said. “But I’m happy to not marry you. We can live in sin. We can have a bastard. We could create scandal the world over and forget everyone else.”
Sophia was stunned. She blinked. “No. Luca, your reputation... The reputation of San Gennaro...”
“It doesn’t matter. If I must court scandal to prove my feelings for you, then I will do so. It is nothing in the face of my feelings for you. My love for you. And if I have to burn all of it to the ground to prove to you that what I feel is real, believe me, Sophia. My reputation is nothing, my throne is nothing, if I don’t have you. I would give all of it up. For you. That was the real sicknes
s in my blood, my darling girl. That I wanted so badly to hold on to this thing that I believed was more important than anything. Was the only thing that gave me value. While I fought with what I really wanted on the inside. You. It was always you. But I knew that I was going to have to give up that facade of perfection that felt as if it defined my very existence if I was going to have you. Please believe me, cara mia, I would gladly leave it all behind for you. For this. For us.”
Then Sophia did cross the space between them. She did fling her arms around his neck. And she kissed him there, where his pulse was throbbing at the base of his throat. “Luca,” she whispered. “Luca, I believe you. And I want to be married to you. Because I want it to be real. I want it to be forever. We could make vows in a forest, and I know it would be just as real, but we might as well give our child legitimacy, don’t you think?”
“I mean, I suppose it would make things easier. With succession and everything.”
“You’re a king. We could bend the rules. But I feel like perhaps we should just get married.”
“I kept thinking there were more rules for me because I was a king. But all those chains were inside me. And all the darkness... It’s because I refused to let the light in. I stood there, on the island, and looked up at the stars. And I marveled at them. And wished very much that I could... That I could be more than darkness. That you could be my light. The only one stopping that was me. All along. The only thing stopping it was...”
“Fear. I understand that... That hope is the most frightening thing there is.”
“It is,” Luca agreed. “Truly terrifying to want for more when you simply accepted all the things you would never have. When you’ve told yourself you don’t need it.”
“Luca,” she said softly. “You’re not broken. You are not damaged. The people who hurt you... They are the ones who are broken.”
“I was broken,” he whispered. He grabbed hold of her hands and lifted them, kissing her fingertips. “I was broken for a time. But not now. You put me back together.”