by Susan Stoker
He looked at me with pity. “Sweetheart,” he breathed. “You know I do.”
And he left. He just left, and I stood in my bedroom in the palace that had just begun to feel like home, and I was too hurt to cry. Too broken to sob. I could only and with great effort, keep my heart beating.
Chapter Three
“What is wrong with you?” my mother asked the next morning, when I walked into the dining room. It was raining out, which was perfect. The high windows were full of gray clouds and raindrops. “You look awful.”
“Thank you, Mother,” I said, taking my coffee to sit in my usual spot at the table. The walls were hung with portraits of the Royal Family stretching back hundreds of years. I felt all their eyes watching me. Judging me.
None of them more so than my mother.
“Would it kill you to wear lipstick? A…” She dropped her voice, though no one was in the room with us. “A proper foundation garment?”
“Good morning to you too,” I said, pushing my chair in until the heavy spruce table bit into my stomach. I wore a long sweater over leggings—a tent, really. Hiding all my flaws. My mother had been putting me in Spanx and girdles since I was ten, and didn’t understand my preference for being able to breathe.
My mother, of course, looked perfect. Thin and regal, like she’d been born in the palace instead of a shitty fishing village on the South Island. She’d been plucked from her life as a single mom and bartender by the king when he made his tour through the island ten years ago. He’d taken one look at her and decided she would be his new queen.
His first wife died giving birth to Gunnar, which was the poison at the heart of their relationship.
“Seriously, Brenna, don’t you look in a mirror?” Mom asked.
“I don’t care, Mom,” I sighed. I didn’t have the energy to fight with her. I was braced waiting for Gunnar to come in like he always did to take a cup of coffee with him to the library, where we’d been working in secret.
“No,” Mom said. “You don’t care. You’ve never cared how your actions reflect on me. How they reflect on the royal family.”
“Do you honestly believe that the fact I’m not wearing lipstick to breakfast matters at all? Are you that shallow?"
The door to the family wing of the palace banged open with such force, the portraits rattled on the wall.
“Too far!” King Frederick bellowed, lurching into the room, leaning hard on his cane. He needed a wheelchair, but he was too proud for such things. He looked gray and shaky. His hair and beard a wild bramble around his head. “You’ve gone too far, Gunnar.”
“Have I?” Gunnar asked, strolling behind him. If I looked messy and unkempt, he looked…I swallowed a too-big gulp of coffee. He looked like he’d spent the night in some woman’s bed. There were hickeys on his neck and his hair looked combed through by fingers. His lips were swollen and red in his pale face.
Only I knew it was my bed he’d been in.
Unless he’d left my bed at three in the morning to go to some other woman’s bed. It was something I would have believed of him before this summer. And maybe I still did. After last night, everything I thought I knew about him was rot.
“You’re an embarrassment, Gunnar! You always have been!” Frederick bellowed.
“Fred, please calm down. You’re going to send yourself to the hospital—”
“Look at him. For God’s sake smell him! He smells like a damn distillery and a whore house.”
I could not stop my blush. It rolled up from my chest and across my face. My coffee cup was suddenly the most interesting thing in the room.
“You are the heir to the Throne of Vasgar!” Frederick bellowed. “It’s time you acted like it.”
“The way you do?” Gunnar’s quiet words were kerosene on a fire.
The king looked so mad he might pass out. My mom rushed to his side, and I chanced a look at Gunnar, only to find him watching me.
“What are you doing?” I mouthed to him and he shrugged, taking a sip of coffee. Like nothing in the world mattered, like the grenades he was lobbing into this room were just for fun.
“What exactly do you mean by that?” my mother asked Gunnar, and I wanted to pull her back. Tell her not to get involved. That this was a fight between father and son going back Gunnar’s entire life.
“I mean,” Gunnar said, helping himself to more coffee, “my father is selling this kingdom out from under the very people he is supposed to protect.”
Frederick shook off my mother’s hands and stepped closer to his son. “You are stepping very close to treason, son. You know how our ancestors handled treason?”
“You going to put me out on the glacier? I’d welcome it,” he sneered.
No! No! This was a nightmare! This couldn’t possibly happen! If Gunnar wasn’t here, Frederick and his brother would be unchecked.
I stood up. “Gunnar and I have been sleeping together all summer,” I blurted into the radioactive silence. And when all eyes focused on me, I lifted my chin, holding my ground.
“What?” Frederick asked.
“She’s lying,” Gunnar said.
“I’m not.”
“What are you doing?” Gunnar asked, no longer so nonchalant. No longer throwing grenades. Now he looked shell-shocked.
I was trying to keep him from getting banished.
Mother laughed. “Is that a joke?”
Blood pounded behind my eyes and I took great care putting my coffee cup back down on its saucer, though the china rattled in my shaking fingers.
“It’s not a joke,” Gunnar said, his defense of me at this moment like a knife in my stomach. “Nothing about your daughter is a joke.”
“Is it true?” Frederick asked.
“It is,” I said, before Gunnar could contradict me.
“But…Why?” my mother asked, like she truly did not see the appeal of me.
“How long has this been going on?” Frederick asked.
“All summer,” I said.
“The two of you will get married,” Frederick said.
“No,” Gunnar said. I’d known he’d say it of course, but I still flinched.
“There is no no,” Frederick said. “You’ll get married.”
“This is the modern age,” Gunnar said. “People don’t get married just for having sex. Not even royalty.”
“What if there’s a baby?” my mother asked, her eyes alight with hope. There was little chance of that, but I wasn’t going to admit it.
“Gunnar and I can get married,” I said, feeling like I could save things if people just would let me. “I’m willing.”
“We won’t be getting married,” Gunnar said. “Because that is exactly what you’d like. You want me to marry her so that I won’t marry one of the rich heiresses that have been trotted past me. So I won’t bring in new money and you’ll be able to sell the oil rights to Russia without anyone protesting.”
Frederick was silent. Red-faced.
“Tell me I’m wrong,” Gunnar said.
“I’m the King of Vasgar,” he said. “I don’t have to tell you anything.”
“If we marry,” Gunnar said to me, his eyes sharp and hard. And every mistake I’d made littered the ground around me like shattered glass. Stupid. I’d been so stupid. “He gets what he wants.”
“We can figure it out,” I said, clinging to the idea of us. “Like we have all summer long. We can do this.”
He glanced down at his hands for a moment, squeezing them into fists.
Yes, I thought. Say yes. Say you agree. Make all of this nightmare go away.
But when he looked up at me with eyes so cold I flinched, I knew the nightmare was just starting. “We could do it,” he said. “But I don’t want to. You were a diversion. Something different. A novelty. I don’t want you, Brenna.”
My mother gasped.
“Then you’ll leave,” Frederick said and the whole room went still. Silent.
“You’re banishing me?” Gunnar asked. “Is
it official? Or just another threat?”
“You have embarrassed this family enough with your indifference and disrespect. You have crossed the line. I can’t have you in this palace. She is your stepsister.”
“Excellent,” Gunnar said, dropping the bread back on the platter. He drained his coffee cup and all but pitched it onto the buffet table.
“Wait?” I said, trying to stem off disaster. “He’s going to be king. He needs to be here. We don’t have to get married. I will leave, but Gunnar needs to be here to—”
Save the kingdom.
“I’m not dead yet,” Frederick said with his usual pride and no small amount of victory in his dark eyes. I’d done this. I’d made it so easy for him to win. Shame and regret and fear were a knot in my body, making it hard to breathe. “And my brother can inherit the throne."
I gasped and looked pleadingly at Gunnar. His uncle was worse by a million times than his father. But Gunnar was looking right back at me, and for a moment I was off balance. Because his eyes were kind. His face earnest.
“Go to Edinburgh and finish your degree,” he said, quietly and directly like our parents weren’t in the room. “And then get that internship back. Leave this place behind. Lord knows I am.”
“But Vasgar?"
“Leave it for the crows,” he said. “Go, Brenna. Go… be amazing.”
And with that, Gunnar was gone.
Chapter Four
Three years later
I found him. I found him in the exact kind of place I expected to find him.
In the belly of a sweaty, filthy club that smelled like smoke and sex.
“I’m here for Gunnar Falk,” I told the man standing at the door. He wore black and the casual focus of a bodyguard. His long stare was an attempt to intimidate me, to make me nervous. Perhaps quake in my heels.
But it would take so much more than this man’s eye contact to rattle me.
I’d been, after all, intimated by kings and queens and council members who didn’t much care for me most of my life.
I arched an eyebrow and pulled the fur collar of my coat open to reveal the necklace I wore at the base of my throat. The wolf’s head and a sword. The seal of the Royal Family of Vasgar.
“I’m here on business of the kingdom,” I said. “Notify Gunnar or I’ll have this place emptied so fast it will make your head spin.”
In acknowledgement of my station, the bodyguard bowed his head, which meant he was one of my countrymen, having recognized that members of the court wore the seal.
“A moment,” he said in our language.
“Of course,” I said with polite patience I was so far from feeling. But it truly was my one great skill. Pretending to be patient. Pretending to be polite. When usually, inside I seethed.
I’d learned my job well, after all.
I wasn’t seething this time, however. No. This time I was a belly full of nerves.
Gunnar. After all these years.
Three, to be exact.
Bodyguard turned to speak into a radio device he had tucked into his sleeve, and I fought the urge to roll my eyes. Gunnar, as usual, taking things a bit too far. I wondered if he didn’t make his staff bow to him every morning.
For a man who resented being a prince, he sure did enjoy being treated like a king.
I had spent a long flight from Oslo to New York City burning all the memories that still lingered from the few months I’d been all too happy to get on my knees for him. But here, standing at his door, it was obvious I hadn’t done as good a job burning it all to the ground as I’d thought. There was the sensation of his hand against my face that I couldn’t quite get rid of. The glimmer of his smile in the dark. His deep, rough voice in his posh accent asking if I was all right.
Those memories that could not be burned on the pyre of our past, would have to be buried. Because I intended to live a very long time, and I refused to be haunted by memories of my worst mistake. The humiliation was still…fresh.
“He says go on in,” the bodyguard said, his eyes respectfully trained on the floor in front of my black and red heels. I tightened my jacket again, cinching the belt around my waist despite the sweat tricking down my spine. My fur and my cashmere and my Jimmy Choos—all of it was armor. Over my too-thick thighs, and my soft belly and my stupid, stupid heart. I wore the fur hat common in my country, hiding my hair. Because I wasn’t revealing any of myself to him.
And at the moment, about to see him again for the first time in three years…it didn’t feel like enough. I wanted real armor. A shield from the great hall of the palace. A sword from my ancestors.
Yes. A sword in modern New York City would serve me well.
“Thank you,” I said and walked from the dark dingy hallway into a room fit for a Roman orgy. Low couches, red and black walls. Dim lighting. It might have been an orgy, actually. There was that much flesh on display.
Of course, I thought, looking right through the scantily clad women perched on the laps of men sitting on couches spread around the room. What a cliché.
There was a card game happening in the far corner and I checked the players, but Gunnar wasn’t there. The men around the table were of average height and average looks and nothing about Gunnar was average.
“Well, well.” A dark voice boomed out and all conversation stopped. “If it isn’t my dear stepsister, Brenna.” All the skin on my body prickled with a sudden fight or flight panic. And truthfully, fight barely won.
I wanted to be here like I wanted to be left out on the glaciers to fend for myself.
But this was my job. For the good of Vasgar. And I always did my job. No matter how painful.
I stepped around a pillar and there he was. My body recognized him in an instant. The long three years of trying to eradicate him from my senses vanished with one look.
Him, my body said. Always him.
Luckily my body wasn’t deciding shit these days.
Sitting on the far end of the long room, on—no fucking joke—a throne. Not nearly as ornate or beautiful as the Throne of Vasgar, but still a throne. Or perhaps it was just a regular chair, high backed and dark, and it was simply him that made it seem like a throne. He wore a dark suit that made his pale gray eyes look like they were glowing. A crisp white shirt undone a few buttons, revealing part of the tattoo across his chest. His dark hair was brushed back from his high forehead.
He looked exactly the same as he did the last time I saw him, leaving the palace for New York City, his father’s curses using all the oxygen in the air. Which is to say, he looked cold.
Gunnar looked cruel as he did the day I met him. His full lips, cheekbones that could cut ice, a tall, lean graceful body. Every part of him was too beautiful to be real, like he’d been created for the darkest feelings.
Envy. Disdain. Rage.
Lust.
Mostly lust.
Even now, I could feel it, trying to get inside my armor. The way I couldn’t quite stop myself from seeing him with my old lovesick eyes. The way my skin bloomed with a new unstoppable heat that had nothing to do with the temperature of the room.
He was just so fucking beautiful.
He twitched his fingers and a woman approached, handing him a glass full of amber liquid, an orange peel twisting in its depth. He smiled at the woman—she was beautiful, of course, Gunnar only surrounded himself with beauty. I was the anomaly. She wore a red dress that highlighted her long legs and tiny waist. Tits for days.
He lifted the woman’s hand and kissed her palm.
But he watched me the whole time, his gray eyes mocking me. Just to see if his knife found its mark.
I rolled my eyes.
Which, of course, only made him laugh.
With another flick of his fingers the girl was gone, fading back into the background with the rest of the beautiful women he used as window dressing. I truly hoped all the women were getting paid outrageous sums of money.
“Gunnar,” I said, crossing the floor toward his thron
e. Of course the crowd parted in front of me—I’d learned my own tricks over the last three years. I could radiate a kind of disdain that forced people out of the way like an ice ship in the Bislark Fforde.
He would not find me so weak now. So willing.
Not anymore.
In fact, as I crossed the floor, my heels making highly satisfying staccato sounds on the tiles, the smile dropped from his face and his eyes lost their fake slumberous tilt. His eyes walked all over me, just as I imagined mine walked all over him. Taking in the changes the years had made.
We were the same mostly, as those people in my bed three years ago. And we were totally different. All at once.
I was still a six-foot-tall peasant with Viking blood. Too big for this world.
And he was still too beautiful. Too cruel. Too uncaring.
“Gunnar,” I said, not using his title. “How not surprising to find you in the basement of some seedy club.”
He gasped with fake outrage. “Seedy? How dare you call The Despot seedy?”
“Four people tried to sell me drugs when I came in.”
“Well, you look like you need to loosen up,” he said. Though his fingers twitched again and a man stepped to the edge of his seat. Gunnar lifted his chin and spoke into the man’s ear and then the man was gone. Vanished up the stairs, I imagined to take care of the drug dealers in the club.
Oh Gunnar…I thought. But I quickly stuck my thumb in the dam holding back those old disastrous feelings.
“Can I get you a drink?” he asked. “Champagne?”
“No thank you.”
“Honestly, Brenna, it would not kill you to remove the stick up your ass for one night—”
“Your father is dead.”
He blinked at me and for one second I saw all those things… all those feelings. Dark and dangerous like sharks deep under the waters he tried to pretend were so still. So uncaring.
But I knew… or I had at one point. I knew what this man hid. And none of his waters were still. He was a storm at sea, pretending for brief moments of time to be otherwise.