by Maisey Yates
“I’m donating them,” she sniffed, irritated by his high-handedness. But she wasn’t about to argue because what he was proposing meant that she got to avoid him.
“Do as you like, but you aren’t wearing them anymore.”
“No, I have a better idea,” she said. “For every one outfit purchased for me, two new outfits—new—will be donated to a battered women’s shelter.”
“That is your affair, not mine.”
“If I’m going to get something out of this arrangement I intend to start now.”
He looked at her, dark eyes molten, and an answering heat started in her core. She knew challenging him was a bad idea. But she didn’t really care. Something about him made her feel free. Made her feel like she could say anything. Made her feel like she was no longer bound up by a bunch of safe parameters.
She wasn’t sure she liked it at all. Though, goading Xander had its merits.
“I will make sure you get something out of this marriage, agape mou,” he said, his voice rough. “Several times a night if you’re a very good girl.”
Her cheeks heated. The bastard. “Perhaps I will endeavor to be a bad girl then.”
A slow smile curved his lips. “Even better.”
* * *
True to his word, Xander avoided her over the course of the next two weeks. And she kept busy. Athena had a lot of useful information and between the two of them, they had endless ideas for more efficient and helpful social programs and ways to help fund various charities.
It was the big picture of all she’d done at the convent. There, she’d been on the ground, physically handing out clothing and food, and it had been wonderfully rewarding. But this was like flying over Kyonos in a helicopter, being able to see every bit of it at once.
And even better because she had the resources to help.
The sad thing was, though, that she was unhappy not seeing Xander. Darn him. She should be glad to get a reprieve. And yet she wasn’t.
She’d grown accustomed to his presence. To not feeling alone.
She missed riding. She would have to do something about that eventually, but she’d honestly been so busy. But then, she supposed that was the trade-off. Going from a life of service, reflection and meditation, to a life of high-octane service, balls and luncheons.
There were ever so many luncheons and she’d been invited to all of them. But people were shockingly nice to her.
It made her feel like she might be able to weather it after all. And the makeup artist Xander had hired to help her get ready for big public events didn’t hurt. Neither did the new wardrobe that suited her figure so nicely.
She managed to look polished at the very least.
She glanced into the dining room and saw Xander sitting at the table, an expression of doom on his face, papers spread out in front of him. Her heart jolted. She hadn’t run into him at all in days, and there he was, just sitting there.
“Hello,” she said, coming into the room. She wasn’t going to avoid him. He was her fiancé after all, and it would be silly.
He pushed the papers together, stacking them oddly, his frown intensifying. “I would have thought you’d be ensconced in an office with Athena.”
“We’re done for the day. Athena had to go home and see to her sick child. Why are you glaring daggers at the headlines?”
“It is nothing,” he said, waving his hand. “Just...the news is never good, is it?”
“I don’t know. I’ve spent so much time cut off from it.” She wandered over to where he was sitting and he shifted his elbow, like he was trying to hide something from her view.
Buried beneath the top pages, she saw the edge of what looked like her dress from the ball. “What is this?”
“It is nothing,” he repeated.
“Then I can see it.” She reached down and jerked the paper from beneath the stack and his arm, holding it up, her stomach sinking as she saw the headline and the accompanying photo. “The Zombie Princess,” she said. “Oh.”
“I will not have this,” he said, his tone dark. “I will take steps to make it stop. I’ll...”
“Abolish the freedom of the press?” she asked, feeling dizzy. “There’s nothing you can do. They...they can think what they want and write what they want. After all. It’s only...it’s nothing. Vanity.”
“You told me to stop pretending like the things weren’t important.” He took the paper back from her, throwing it down on the table.
“Yes, well, you didn’t follow my advice, did you? Why should I follow yours?”
“Because this is garbage. They’ve hurt you. And I will not allow this to continue.”
“It’s clever. A joke. An old one. Because I look a little undead. All things considered there were worse things to be called, though.”
“Name one.”
She put shaking hands on her hips. “I...I can’t think of any but it doesn’t mean they don’t exist. It could be Zombie Drudge, so...you know...Princess is better than that.”
“I didn’t want this,” he said.
She took a deep breath. “I know. And now it’s happened. The press did what I thought they would do. They took the easy route and insulted my looks. But that’s not actually very surprising. It’s what they do. It’s how they operate. I can’t exactly get upset about it.” As she said it, a tear slid down her cheek. “Ignore that. I don’t know why that happened.”
Except she did. It was like being pulled from her shell, a defenseless crustacean exposed to the elements and scrubbed raw by the sand. This whole experience had been like that. Being with Xander, being back in the world. She’d lost her protection and it left her feeling wounded and fragile.
“Bastards.” He picked up his cell phone and dialed a number. “This is Xander Drakos. I want you to track down the owner of National Daily News and let him know that if he likes his pants, he’d better print a retraction for his recent article featuring my fiancée. Otherwise, I’ll sue them off of him.” He hung up. “There. I feel better, I don’t know about you.”
“It wasn’t necessary.”
“Oh, come on, there’s no point in having power if you don’t abuse it a little.”
“I take back what I said about you being perfect for the job,” she said.
Xander stood, looking down at her, his dark eyes intense. For a moment she thought he might pull her into his arms. Thought he might kiss her again like he’d done yesterday. And she found she wanted him to.
“Can I see the rest of the article?”
“Why?”
“Please.”
He handed the paper back to her and she skimmed the article. One thing that had changed about the tone of the articles was the way the press seemed to see Xander. He was being hailed as a man who had changed. As evidenced by his willingness to marry her.
“Well, they seem happier with you,” she said. “That’s good.”
“Is it?”
“It’s what you wanted.”
“They seem to think I’ve reformed,” he said.
“Have you?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Are you going to run again?” she asked, arms crossed under her breasts, her chin tilted up, defiant. If he was, he’d better tell her now.
“No.”
“Then you won’t screw it up. Because I don’t think it’s in you to fail. You have to walk away from everything entirely in order to slack off last time.”
“I’m not going to run permanently,” he said slowly, “but I might need a day off. Do you want to come with me?”
“Where?” she asked.
“The beach. I think I need a day at the beach.”
* * *
For the beach drive, Xander chose that ostentatious sports car rather than the limo.
This moment really did feel like it was from another time. Strangely light. Strangely happy. The Zombie Princess headline lingered in the background, but right now, the mountains were green and beautiful and the beach was a glittering jewel. The windows were rolled down and the wind whipped through the car, smelling of salt and sand and sun.
“Now, this reminds me of the past,” she said. “But in a good way.”
“Me, too,” he said, looking over at her briefly before putting his focus back on the road.
“There’s that little window of life where you don’t worry about much of anything. I think being seventeen was my favorite. I could drive and could do things I wanted with friends. But I wasn’t quite to my dynastic engagement with you, so there was nothing too serious happening. Just parties and trips to the beach.”
“I never had that. I mean, I was always raised to be the heir.”
“You always seemed happy, though. Like you were having fun at life’s expense.”
“Yeah, well, I sort of was at that point. I always knew my responsibility, but I liked to have fun. Because, that’s the flip side of the heir responsibility. I was assured of my place. Of my divine right to become the most powerful man on the island. How can a young guy not get off on that?”
“I suppose it’s impossible.”
They rounded a corner and she noticed Xander’s knuckles get white on the wheel. She looked up at him, at the hard expression on his face.
“What?” she asked.
“Nothing.” She could see his chest, rising and falling hard and fast as he struggled to breathe.
“What’s happening, Xander?”
“I’m so stupid,” he said, his lips white as his knuckles now. “I didn’t realize where I was going.”
She really thought he might pass out on her now. “Pull over,” she said. “Just up here, there’s a place with beach access.”
He nodded slowly and pulled the car into a gravel turn-out on the side of the road, killing the engine. There was silence except for the sound of his breathing and the crashing of the waves.
“What happened?” she asked.
He got out of the car without saying anything, the keys in the ignition, the door open. And he started down the stairs that led down to the beach.
And all she could do was stare after him.
She wondered what pain hurt so bad that he couldn’t bring himself to speak about it. It was related to what had happened to him yesterday with his father, she was sure of that. She unbuckled and got out, following him down to the beach, white sand sifting into her sandals, piling into a warm ball beneath the arch of her foot. She kicked the shoes off and ran ahead to where he was.
He started walking into the ocean. She remembered telling him how she’d longed to do that. To disappear beneath the waves and never come back up. And then he dipped his head beneath the water, and Layna couldn’t see him anymore.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“XANDER!” LAYNA SHOUTED, following him out into the waves.
The waves were hitting her at chest level. She gave up on walking and tried to tread water, even though she could touch the bottom. But the waves washed her backward, away from him. “Xander!” she sputtered, water going over her head. She let the water draw her back toward the shore and stood hip-deep in the surf.
He came back up then, his dark head breaking the surface. A wave pushed him back so that he was near her.
“Are you trying to drown yourself?” she asked, feeling half-drowned herself. She knew all the beautiful makeup that had been put on in an effort to de-zombiefy her was gone.
“No,” he said, his words heavy. “Not that. Just...I felt like there was blood all over my hands and I thought maybe I could get them clean.”
She moved closer to him and took his hands in hers. And without asking why, without asking for an account of his sins, she held his hand up. “I don’t see any.”
“It’s there.”
“Tell me,” she said.
“I couldn’t go any further,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize to me. Explain. Explain all of it. Yesterday, today. Something hurts badly enough that you have to run when it catches up with you and I want to know what it is.”
“We were going to have to pass the accident site to get to the beach I had in mind and for some reason I didn’t realize until we went around that last corner. It reminded me of that day.”
“Oh...no, Xander I’m sorry.”
“I’m sure it’s horrible to watch someone die,” he said, a shiver racking his body, “even if they’re a stranger. But to watch your mother...to watch her get white, all of her color bleeding out of her, onto your hands...there is nothing worse.” He met her gaze, the demons behind his eyes raging now, lashing him from the inside out. “I couldn’t do anything but sit with her until help arrived and by then it was too late. But they couldn’t get me to let go of her. The last thing she ever heard from me was anger. Those were the last sounds she heard on this earth. Me yelling at her. Swearing at her. I was...so angry with her, Layna.”
“About what?”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “It doesn’t change anything. It doesn’t change what happened. It doesn’t change the last moments of that relationship. I can never fix it. Can never apologize for the words I said. I can never go back and decide not to get angry. Decide to pull the car over. Decide not to go out that day. I can never go back and tell her that no matter how angry I was back then, I would have gotten over it and we would have been okay.”
He shivered again. “Get on the sand,” she said, “out of the water, and wait for me.”
She scrambled back up the stairs, up to where the car was parked and took the keys from the ignition, fished a blanket and food out of the trunk, then closed all the doors before heading back down to where he sat.
She threw the blanket over his shoulders. “There. And I have sandwiches.”
“I don’t think I could eat,” he said.
“Then we’ll talk.”
“Trust me?” he asked.
“Not really.”
“Probably a good thing. But if memory from my misspent youth serves me, there’s a cave over here. We could get out of the wind. And not have anyone stumble across the heir to the throne shivering and on the cusp of a mental breakdown.”
“That might be for the best.”
He kept the blanket on his shoulders and led the way down the beach and away from the water.
“This is all a little too perfect, Xander,” she said, walking into the small stone alcove cut into the mountain.
“My break with reality and emotional meltdown?”
“How many women have you seduced in here?”
“Oh, this was my much younger misspent youth. Not my teenage years.”
“I never really knew if you’d dated much before we were together.”
He winced. “I didn’t date so much as take advantage of women who liked the idea of getting dirty with a prince.”
“I see.”
“I take it you didn’t?”
She blushed, but thankfully, in the dark she knew he couldn’t see it. “I come from a political family and my mother was very blunt with me early on about what nets you a good husband. Purity, or at the very least the illusion of it, is quite important. Princes and the like don’t want a lot of tabloid articles going around about their future wife’s wild years.”
He laughed. “I was expertly snared, wasn’t I?”
“We both knew what our marriage was supposed to be. But yes, I did work to make my image one that would fit in with the Drakos family. I worked to be suitable.”
“You did far too much for me,” he said. “I never deserved any of it.”
“I didn’t do it for you,”
she said. “I did it for me. I don’t think you fully grasp what a shallow little power grabber I was.”
“You were far too pretty for me to care.”
“Yes, and when life took that I had to work on developing my character a bit. A harsh wake-up call, and I resisted it for as long as I could.”
“I’m still resisting it,” he said. He put his hand on the rough stone wall and looked up. “I know a little bit about those hazy years, you know.”
“Do you?” she asked, her throat tight all of a sudden.
“Yes. I was so high for the first couple of years after I left I could barely remember my reason for taking off in the first place. It was a lot harder to remember what it was like washing my mother’s blood off of my body, too.”
“It’s terrible to live like that,” she said. “Half alive.”
“I tried to use things like sex and drugs to make myself feel. But in the end, it doesn’t work. It’s fleeting and the aftermath is so bad you wish you would have just stuck with empty.”
“When did you stop?”
“The drugs? Probably twelve years ago. The drinking and sleeping around? It’s been a couple of weeks. I’ve been walking with my favorite crutches for a long time.”
“It’s funny. I’ve been in a convent and you’ve been in a casino, but I think, at the end of the day we were doing the same thing.”
“I think you might be right.”
“I’m sorry about what happened. And I’m sorry I was so angry at you. I didn’t really stop and think about how you must have felt. All you must have gone through. My own tragedy overshadowed yours in my mind.”
“I don’t blame you for that, Layna. You were put through hell.”
“We both were.”
“Yesterday when I kissed you,” he said, “I just wanted to lose myself. To forget who I was. Where I was. To forget that this was my life. That my father, who I haven’t spoken to in so long, was unconscious. That he’s dying. Another person I’ll never reconcile with. When I kiss you it’s hard to think about any of the bad things because...I just want you.”