by Maisey Yates
She dressed slowly, then walked down the hall. She looked around her room, at the pieces of herself she had brought to the palace. Baskets of yarn stacked in front of ancient tapestries. A cat carrier on an antique highboy. A ferret and two hedgehogs in cages adjacent to an Oriental rug that was probably older than the Ottoman Empire.
And she smiled. In spite of the jagged pieces inside of her heart. She smiled because...she was good enough to be here. And she loved him enough. But she couldn’t be healed for him. He had to heal himself. She had chosen to be happy. She had chosen to move on.
To decide that what her mother had told her about herself wasn’t true.
And he would have to do the same. In his own time.
As for her part... She would leave. She would leave without taking his money. Because she would find a way. She would.
And she didn’t want to use the King. Not at all.
Because she refused to contribute to the story that he told himself about what made him matter.
She could survive on her own. And no matter that she didn’t want to, she could.
Without her mother’s approval, without inheritance.
Without Alex, even, if it came down to it.
Because loving him had given her something that his rejection could never take away.
She had found herself.
And she had the hope that when he found a way to bring all those pieces of himself together, he would be brave enough to love too.
The gift that she would take away from this palace was that she was enough on her own.
And it allowed her to close the door on a lifetime of pain heaped on her by her mother.
And as she exited her room, and closed the door on this beautiful moment of her life, she knew that she would be taking with her more than she was leaving behind. Lessons and strength and powerful new truths about who she was.
It was just...that the difficult thing was, she was leaving behind one thing that was quite important.
Her heart.
And she didn’t know if she would ever have a hope of getting it back.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
HE HADN’T HAD to check to know that she was gone. He had felt it. Had felt the absence of her as sure as he had ever felt the presence of her. She was gone, and it was a good thing. She was gone, and it was absolutely what he needed. What she needed.
Is it?
He thought that he’d banished pain from his chest as a boy.
For the loss of his brother had been great, severe and intense and it had torn at his tender, untried feelings. But more than that, the rejection his mother had given him after...
When Lazarus had died, he had been a boy mourning his brother. Above all else. And his mother had not held him. Had not comforted him.
You did this.
He could still hear those three words. Could see himself standing there with his arms outstretched and then she’d said that.
He’d needed her.
She’d turned her pain onto him like a knife.
He had learned then, what it meant to be a man. To take blame. To have to soldier on even with that blame resting on your shoulders.
You were a boy.
Yes, he had been a boy. But the end result was the same, whether he was boy or man, so he supposed it didn’t matter.
He was the King, and he had to be King. He couldn’t... I love you.
He could not accept her love. Any more than he could allow her to give it. It would be the end of them both...
Would it? Or are you simply unable to put the ghosts of the past to rest? Just as she said?
No, if she could love him then perhaps these dreadful and terrible things out in the world weren’t his fault.
He looked out the window of his bedchamber. He looked down to the wood below.
That was it. It was the site of everything. The place of all his destruction. There were no answers up here, but perhaps...
He tore down the stairs, and out of the palace. He was not drunk, no matter how he had wanted to make the pain go away with drink.
He didn’t allow himself such luxuries.
No, he was in his right mind. Utterly and completely sober.
Lazarus had been lost in the wood.
Dionysus.
His fear over Tinley, which had caused him to realize he was edging too close to his greatest fear, had happened because of the wood.
If it was magic, then it was a dark magic, and it wasn’t going away. No matter how much he wanted it to. No matter how much he tried.
If there were answers, they would be there.
Through the darkness, through the mist, Alexius de Prospero, the Lion, charged into the wood.
Alex looked around at the eerie stillness in the trees. There was no sound. Not tonight.
Not even the wolves.
He didn’t know what had called him into the forest tonight, but he trusted it.
Which was an odd thing to feel. To think.
For nothing the forest had ever done was particularly trustworthy.
But he was tied to it. Connected in a way he could not escape. And so he moved forward. Until he was back in that same clearing where he found Tinley and the cat. He heard a sound coming from the bushes, and he turned. But it was not a wolf standing there. It was a man.
Tall, his features obscured by shadow.
“State your business,” Alex said.
“Do I need official business to speak to my brother?”
* * *
She had gone to her mother’s house in Rome. She knew it was a strange choice, considering she was raw and vulnerable and it would be easy enough for her mother to take strips off her in her current state. Except... That would have been true if Tinley had been unchanged by her time with Alex.
But she had been. Utterly and completely.
Walking into her mother’s drawing room, her inner sanctum, made Tinley’s chest go tight, but she didn’t feel nervous. She didn’t feel cowed or afraid.
Her mother was lounging on a chaise, her red hair more a dark copper, sleek and twisted up into an elegant chignon. “Tinley,” she said. “I’m quite surprised to see you here.”
“Why is that? I am your daughter.”
“You haven’t been here for the past four years. Why would you show your face now? Especially in light of your broken engagement to King Alexius. It is being talked about in all of the important social circles. Soon to be in the news, I suspect. Though, I must admit, the dissolution of the arrangement surprises me less than the arrangement itself.”
“How wonderfully predictable for you, then,” Tinley said.
And if she meant that it was predictable her mother had said such a thing, and not that the turn of events was predictable, it was open to interpretation.
“Well,” she said. “What will you do now?”
“I don’t know. I’ll continue to work with my charity. I’m going to be putting on more events. Speaking more.”
“It’s quite fashionable to be involved in charities, Tinley, but not really in the way you do it.”
“I don’t care about being fashionable.”
Her mother’s brows rose a fraction. “Oh?”
“Why does that surprise you? I’ve never done anything to indicate that I cared about being in fashion.”
“I assume that you couldn’t,” her mother said, “not that you wouldn’t.”
It was a strange thing, because her mother was being hurtful, that was undeniable. But she was also being...genuine. And suddenly Tinley saw things through an entirely different lens. Her mother truly believed these things. That Tinley would be happier only if she found favor with the fashionable people. That she would be happier with a certain measure of status. That she would be happier if her hair was straight or her freckles fa
ded.
“We don’t want the same things,” Tinley said. “I want... I want to make a difference. And I want to spend less than five minutes on my hair in the morning. I want to find a man who loves me.” It made her chest catch to say it. “Who loves me as much as I love him. And I don’t care if he’s a king. A prince. A pauper. It doesn’t matter. I just want someone to love me. With my five-minute hair and my unfashionable charitable pursuits. With my cat and my other animals. I just want to be me. I’m... I’m happy with myself.”
“That’s impossible,” her mother said. “Nobody’s happy with themselves.”
Tinley’s heart crumpled. “I... You believe that, don’t you?”
“The public is never entirely happy with anything I do,” her mother said. “How can I be happy with it, then?”
“There’s always room for improving yourself, mom, and I don’t mean looks. I mean your heart. What does it matter if your hair sits just right if the content of who you are is all wrong? That’s what I work at. It’s what I’m trying to find my way with. I want to be happy with the person I am in my heart. The rest of it doesn’t much matter.”
“The press doesn’t care about your heart.”
“And I don’t care about the press. So it’s all fine then.”
“Tinley...”
“I love him,” Tinley said. “I hope you know that. I’m actually heartbroken. Because I was in love with Alex. I’ve been in love with him for a long time. But I didn’t care about being his Queen. That was why I was there. It was why I was with him.”
“Love? Darling, in the grand scheme of all the years you will be joined to a man, love doesn’t mean much of anything. You need to want the life that he can bring you.”
“Things, Mum, you’re talking about things. I don’t care about things. I care about...” She imagined then, the way that he had lain on top of her in the grass. The way that he had come for her in the wood. How beautiful he found her in sweats or a ball gown. “It’s not in the house you live in. It’s in the small things between you.”
“Small things won’t keep you fed. I married a man with influence, in hopes that my child might have influence. Might have better.”
“I do have better. It’s just not the better you wished I wanted.” She let that truth settle between them.
Staring at her mother now, she realized that it had been easy for her to make one parent a saint, and the other a villain. Her mother had hurt her, yes. But her father had not been a perfect man. He had controlled her life. Had wanted a very particular thing for her as well.
It was just he had known how to work with Tinley rather than against her to accomplish it. But even from beyond the grave he had dictated she marry and when.
He had not been a good husband to her mother. He had been distant, had taken Tinley to live at the palace part time.
He had allowed there to be distance in his marriage and all that blame could not fall on her mother.
For it took two people to be in a marriage, to be in a relationship, and now that she truly loved someone she could see that.
“I understand love. And I won’t marry for anything less than that. I want better than the quiet, strained household that you and dad made. And now that I’m older, I can understand that it wasn’t only your fault. For he was in that marriage too. And whatever he did to make you think... To make you think the most important thing between you was his status, he has fault in that. But I want better than that. And I found it. Even though things have fallen apart now, I know who I am. I know what I want.”
“Wanting something you can’t have isn’t better,” her mother said, and in that partially spoken statement was a wealth of truth.
Wanting a love her mother couldn’t have. So her mother had wanted things, because her marriage could not give her real love, real deep emotional satisfaction.
“You can want it now,” Tinley said. “You could find love now.”
“Well. You aren’t going to find it with your hair looking like that.”
She watched her mother close in on herself. Hide because she was... She was afraid.
In that moment, Tinley saw that if her mother admitted that Tinley was right, she’d have to admit she’d made mistakes when her daughter was young. And she couldn’t do it. Not now.
And Tinley wasn’t...wounded or angry or any of the things that she expected to be. Because she was too confident in the position she stood in now. Too confident in what she had been fashioned into.
Because of Alex.
And she felt bruised with not having him.
But not broken.
For she was able to stand before her mother now, and feel confident. Feel no shame. And see the wound in her mother, rather than just seeing her own.
“I will come to visit again,” Tinley said. “But I hope... I hope things change for you between now and then.”
And she walked out of her mother’s house with her head held high, and a certain measure of confidence in her heart.
Her life might not look exactly how she wanted it to. But she had become the woman she needed to be.
And she would have to be able to find some solace in that.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE MAN STEPPED into the light, a pale beam cast there by the moon. Alex stared at this man, but he could not recognize him. Half of his face was scarred. He was as tall as Alex, but broader, his body that of a warrior’s.
“Who are you?”
“It really spoils the theater that you haven’t guessed yet. But who do you think? Mother named me to enable coming back from the dead in a rather dramatic fashion. Though she could never have planned such intense irony. Honestly I’ve been waiting for the reveal for a very long time.”
“Lazarus.”
“Yes.”
“How?” It was the only question he could ask, because there were so many, and they were all trapped in his throat.
“That isn’t the interesting part. Not really. Because the how is easy. Your assumption was that something killed me in the wood. That was the assumption of everyone. But I was taken. Not murdered. Though I suppose,” he spread his arms wide, “the fact I wasn’t murdered is fairly self-evident at this point.”
“What are you doing here now?”
“Oh, I came to take your bride.”
He said it with the casual arrogance that only Alex ever spoke with. Certain no one ever spoke that way to him.
“Why?”
“Revenge.”
“Against me?”
“Yes. I... I hate this place,” he said, looking around the wood. “Not the forest. I hate this country. And for years I’ve hated you most of all. I can’t say you’re my favorite person now.”
“We were children,” Alex said. “It devastated Mother that you were gone. It nearly destroyed Father.”
“And you?”
“I couldn’t let it destroy me. I had to be the King.”
“That is the thing,” Lazarus said. “I think you did let it destroy you. It’s why I didn’t take her.”
“Who?”
“Your little fiancée. I was watching you both from the wood. It was easy enough to lure her cat into the trees, and once the cat was here, she followed. Predictable. I was going to kidnap her. But I realized something. In this dispute between the two of us, she’s...innocent.”
His brother seemed perplexed by the idea that Tinley’s innocence had affected him.
“She is,” Alex agreed. “And if you had put a hand on her... I would like for you to remain back from the dead, Lazarus, I would hate to send you back to the grave. And if you put a hand on her...”
“I thought as much,” Lazarus said. “Though that is not what stopped me. The way she looked at you... She loves you. Alex, I was taken into a society of people who despised me. Love is a rare commodity in the world. Lo
ve like she feels for you.”
“What does her loving me have to do with anything?” The very question made a streak of pain tear through his chest.
“Because the way that I was brought up, Alex, there is little but hate in my heart for anyone or anything. I was created to come back and destroy you. But my captor died. And...” His brother looked into the distance. “I don’t care. I don’t want to be a pawn. Not of the crown of Liri, and not against her detractors. There are truths about our family that would be difficult for you to stomach, I’ve a feeling. Truths that go back further than Father. All those wars we fought for all those years, all those mysterious deaths in the wood. Why do you think people are kept out of here? It’s not the wolves.”
“It’s not...”
“There are people here. Oppressed by this country. I was taken to be a symbol.”
“But you weren’t used.”
“Things didn’t go as planned. The woman Dionysus was with that night... She lured him into the wood. It was never wolves.”
“Is he...”
“He’s dead. I was not a part of that. You must believe it. And that, is where my fault lies. I cannot bring myself to kill you. Any more than I could’ve brought myself to kill him. Just as I couldn’t take your woman. She loves you. And you love her. Those are gifts that I will never have, Brother, for they were stripped away from me a long time ago. And I let that fester into hatred, of you, of this place. Which was exactly what my captors wanted. But I... I see a different path.”
“What path? I don’t understand.”
“You might be the Lion of the Dark Wood, but I am the Prince. And I have my own people to protect. And you and I... Well, we have some negotiating to do.”
“Surely that can wait.”
“It can. Though... I heard that you broke your engagement.”
“Yes. I did.”
“Why? As I said, it was clear to me there was a great deal of love between the two of you. You don’t have to stand in front of a fire to know it’s warm. I don’t have to be able to feel love to be able to recognize it.”