Forbidden Royal Vows

Chapter Seven

CHAPTER SEVEN

S EPTEMBER WAS LIKE a dream—the kind of dream that Caius had woken up from, wild with desire, unsettled, and without her, more times than he could count over these past five years.

This high in the mountains, autumn was already making its appearance. The mornings were cold, though they warmed into achingly blue days and crisp nights that came earlier all the time. The trees were turning bright, bold colors, as if gripping on tight to the long summer days already past. Caius could relate.

It was a dream, these September days, but Caius could not fool himself the way he had once before. Because this time, he knew how this dream was going to end. There was no point in imagining otherwise, the way he had once before.

What he couldn’t understand was how, knowing what was to come, he still couldn’t bring himself to change a thing.

“I thought you were going to enact some kind of dastardly revenge plan,” Mila said one evening as they moved around the kitchen together. They had taken to playing music as they assembled their meals, the kitchen brightly lit against the dark that waited there outside the windows, music dancing in the air like some kind of spell to keep the world away.

The kind of spell Caius had wished he’d known as a child, forever languishing in hotel rooms and dreaming of exactly this kind of life. Of becoming the kind of person who was capable of this kind of life. This ease and sweetness instead of his mother’s chaotic rages. This pervasive wave of something he thought might be happiness, instead of the battle to assess his mother’s condition in any moment and figure out how to pretend to be whatever version of her son she might have decided he was that hour.

It was easy, here, to pretend they were other people. People who did not play vicious games with one another and call it family. People who did not fight nasty little wars for supremacy, imagining that somehow they might escape the Countess’s notice—that too-sharp focus that always boded ill.

Here in the September House, they did none of those things.

Here they were different people entirely. People who prepared food because it was good and put out table settings because they were pretty, and then enjoyed each other’s company when they sat down. People who talked of the weather, not because they had nothing else to say, but because even the most innocuous conversations were layered and textured with all the ways they took each other apart and put each other back together when they were naked.

As if it was all the same thing, in one form or another.

Mila did not cook in the classic sense. But she was a deft hand at putting together ingredients that were preprepared for her. He discovered that she was a big fan of a hearty soup or a stew, accompanied by freshly baked bread with a liberal application of butter. That she would eat it night and day, if possible.

Caius contributed his own skills, which were not inconsiderable—because he had developed a deep loathing of delivered food when he was young, so had taught himself to cook—to add a bit of variety to the menu.

And this was how they sank in deep to this long September dream of the kind of domestic bliss neither one of them was likely to have, and certainly not with each other. They prepared all their meals together and ate them slowly while having wide-ranging conversations on every topic under the sun. They fought, not always amicably, over the books they’d both read. They avoided the news and laughed at each other’s stories. They took long walks around the property, taking in the mountain air. They even did a bit of hiking the way they had all those years ago.

And they feasted on each other, at every opportunity, as if they could never get enough.

Because, he supposed, they both knew the inevitable end was coming. They both knew there was no future. Caius had to make sure that every moment of this month was memorable enough to last them both a lifetime.

He took that calling very, very seriously.

And so they indulged themselves in every scrap of sensuality they could find. The stately old hunting lodge offered an endless array of places to explore. From the hot springs that some enterprising member of the royal family had erected an entire bathhouse around in centuries past to a wide selection of beds and showers, including his favorite of those—the outdoor shower that let the stars shine in.

Yet she wanted to know if, through all of this, this banquet of the senses in all its forms, he was plotting revenge.

“You really do have a dim view of me, don’t you,” he said.

She was stirring the night’s big meal, a crock of lamb stew that filled the kitchen with its rich scent. She turned, looking around at him in surprise, the steam from the simmering pot making her cheeks red.

And Mila was always beautiful. There was no denying that. Queen Mila was a study in contemporary elegance. Every outfit he’d seen her photographed in reached new heights of sophistication, as if she challenged herself daily to redefine chic for the modern world.

But her ability to casually, offhandedly achieve the same result without a cadre of attendants amazed him daily. She was a wonder. Today she was wearing her hair in two braids, each one wound into its own bun on the back of her head. He had watched her fix them that way herself. She was still wearing the sleek leggings she’d worn out on their walk, with colorful knit socks pulled halfway up her shins. And an oversized sweater in a fine, lush wool that managed to make all of that look not like a lumberjack or even all that casual, but like royalty.

He acknowledged the possibility that this was just...her.

“A dim view of you?” she repeated. She shook her head as if he wasn’t making sense. “I...don’t?”

“You do.” Caius had been slicing one of the fresh baguettes that turned up at the kitchen door like clockwork and needed only to be baked through. He set the knife down, then propped himself up on his hands against the great butcher block on the island in the center of the sprawling kitchen. “You do, Mila. That’s not an indictment. I’ve spent my entire life making certain that I’m underestimated at every turn. I can’t get angry when my efforts are successful, can I?”

She studied him with those solemn, clever gray eyes. “Yet you seem angry.”

“What I am,” he said, and it was a challenge to keep his voice calm when he knew it should not have been, “is viewing everything that happened between us with new eyes.”

They had danced around this topic since he’d gotten here, after trekking miles through underground, clearly little-used tunnels, hoping that she hadn’t sent him off to march his way into the dungeons she’d mentioned. But this was different. She didn’t cross her arms. She didn’t straighten her shoulders and tip her head in that regal way of hers—to let him know the Queen was in the room.

She only waited, studying him, as if she didn’t know what he was going to say.

It was strange how cheering that notion was.

But he didn’t speak. And the silence stretched out between them. Eventually, she swallowed. “Are you going to say something?”

“There is nothing to say.” He shrugged. “I have said it.”

“How ominous,” Mila murmured.

Caius pushed back from the butcher block and returned his attention to the bread. “My mother is getting married.”

He sensed Mila’s confusion at that change of subject but when he glanced at her, she had already turned back to the stew bubbling on the range, stirring it again. “I don’t know whether to offer you congratulations or condolences.”

“She wants me to attend, of course. My sister—”

“Lavinia,” Mila said, warmly enough that it made something in him squeeze tight.

He nodded. “She keeps calling to tell me how important it is to the Countess that I be there. How devastated she will be if I don’t turn up.”

“Will you go?”

Caius set the knife down on the cutting board. “It’s not that my mother wants my emotional support or has tender feelings about gathering the family together. That’s not her style. I’m not entirely certain she’s capable of tender feelings. She wants my presence to raise her profile. She wants to make sure that the paparazzi, who must be as tired of tracking her marital status as anyone else, will be there to cover it. Because nothing makes my mother feel alive like seeing herself in newspapers.”

“I thought that’s what you liked.” Mila glanced back over her shoulder at him, and there was nothing accusing in her expression. If anything, she looked...concerned. For him. He didn’t like how that sat heavy on him, then pressed down hard. “You used to talk extensively about what it was like to be seen as a kind of conduit for people.” She put the big wooden spoon to the side of the pot, and then drifted over from the range so that she faced him directly across the center island. “To be perfectly honest, I think I drew on that quite a bit in my first days as queen. You once told me that the most important skill you’d ever mastered was being the kind of mirror that anyone who looked into believed was bespoke.” She shrugged, giving him a small smile. “See? I’ve never forgotten it.”

He was stunned by that. If she had picked up that pot simmering away behind her and whacked him with it, he could not have been more stunned—but there was an urgency in him, now. There was something winding its way through him, past the heaviness of her concern for him and the conclusive proof she’d just given him now, that she had not forgotten him. That she had held on to things he’d told her.

That it had mattered, those stolen weeks in California too long ago now to bear.

There were a great many reasons to keep his counsel in this moment, Caius knew, but he didn’t. He couldn’t.

“I have never been more surprised in my life,” he said quietly, “then when I learned that what I considered my superpower—the ability to read any room I went into—was a product of being raised by the kind of terrible people who would, years later, hound the child they’d neglected for clout.” But he didn’t want to talk about his mother. He was studying Mila’s face. “I’ve never asked you how hard it was. It must have been nothing short of terrible for you, to have no time to prepare.”

He remembered that day in the sort of detail he would have thought usually reserved for, say, terrible accidents. He’d walked into the shower a married man, not unaware of the challenges ahead of them due to their different stations, but secure in what they were to and for each other.

He’d walked out to meet the Queen.

“You prepare for the ceremony,” she told him in a hushed voice. “For the steps that you’ll take and the way that you’ll present yourself. You don’t do it alone. My father planned it with me. His team and mine talked all the time about the plans. Always the plans. Always making it sound like a great festival of some kind.” She gave him a wry little smile, then, that broke his heart. “But you never talk about how much it hurts.”

One of her hands drifted to her chest, directly over her heart, in a gesture that he knew, somehow, was unconscious. It made his own heart ache even more.

“It would be unseemly to talk about how it feels. And so you rely on all of that planning, and all of the pomp and circumstance. You’re busy thinking about how it looks, and what message you’re sending, and how the people are perceiving you... And it turns out that it’s a crutch.” Mila looked almost lost, for a moment, but then her gray gaze found his again. So at least he could be lost with her. “It’s much easier to think about how to become a queen than it is to mourn the death of your father. To be honest with you, I’m not sure I ever have.”

“And one day, if you do your duty, your child will have to do the same thing.”

He realized after he said it how she could take that. How she might see it as a jab, but she didn’t. If anything, her smile grew deeper.

More wry, if that was possible. “I don’t think that’s the privilege of royalty. I am fairly sure that’s just life. We will all of us mourn our parents, if we are lucky.”

“You consider that lucky?”

“The alternative is that they would have to mourn us,” she said quietly.

“Mila.” He said her name so urgently. There could be no mistaking that. He saw the way her eyes widened. But then again, if he wasn’t mistaken, she was holding her breath. “Mila, why did you leave me?”

“You know the answer to that. We are discussing the answer to that right now.”

“That’s not what I mean. You know it’s not.”

He thought she would default to an instant denial, but she didn’t. Instead, she looked away for a moment, out toward the windows, where the night was already dark and seemed to press against the glass. She looked...softer than usual.

Caius realized that it was surprising to think of her as fragile. He never had. She was so good at exuding all that regal energy. She was so good at making it seem as if she was far too iconic to be human at all.

He was going to have to think about the fact he’d let himself believe that, when he knew better.

“Putting aside all the many heart attacks the palace would have over your presence in the tabloids,” Mila began.

“Because the tabloids are bastions of truth, of course. Everyone knows that.”

He couldn’t seem to help himself.

Mila only held his gaze. “Whether the stories are true or not isn’t the issue. The issue is the regularity of your appearances and the kinds of places and people you have frequented over the years.” Her eyes were so gray. So grave. “This isn’t a lecture. It’s an explanation. But that’s an excuse, I think.”

“You think.”

“It’s this ,” she said, and waved a hand back and forth between them.

He thought of the way that same hand had wrapped around the hardest part of him earlier in the shower, las she’d looked up at him so boldly while taking him into her mouth.

“This...intensity. How does that fit into my life? Or your life, for that matter?”

She could hardly think around the man. Much less rule in the way that was required of her. Or she couldn’t imagine how she might go about it, anyway. It felt impossible .

“Do you know what I often wonder?” But she didn’t wait for him to answer that. “If I hadn’t left you, you almost certainly would have left me. If I had to guess, I would say that you would have found a way to manufacture some scandal or another so that I would have no choice but to leave.”

“Again.” His voice was a mere scratch. “It really is a dim view, isn’t it?”

He could see she didn’t like that by the way her chin inched up. “It’s who you are. It’s who I am. Those things can’t mesh.”

“You mean your pedigreed status and the fact I am a mongrel, I suppose.”

“I mean that you like to immerse yourself in intensity. You like projects with a beginning and an end, and when it’s done, you move on. And I...” She sighed, and shook her head a little as if the sigh was a cold wind and now she could not shake the chill. “Everything I do must be sealed in eternity. I must be a walking, talking study in permanence. How could it ever work?”

“It does work, Mila. Behold, it’s working right now.”

“We are magic,” she agreed, though her voice was rougher than he’d heard it in years. Since she had looked at him with the same gray eyes but a stranger’s face and had said, There has been some news. My father, the King, is dead. Here, now, she leaned a little bit closer over that island between them. “But it can only be a temporary magic, Caius. Like before. I thought you understood.”

But she laughed—looking startled—when he came around the island, swept her into his arms, and then demonstrated how powerful his temporary magic was, right there on the old wood table.

More than once, for good measure.

Still, Caius found he continued to brood over that a day or two later.

She’d had to take an extra call that day, in the alcove off the main living room that she’d told him at least five of her predecessors had sat in to do the work of the kingdom. He stayed nearer the fire, but he could hear the cool, collected way she spoke to her ministers. Not the words themselves, but her cadence. Her tone.

It didn’t matter what she was saying. It was all regal.

Every single thing that made Mila who she was, he understood, was another nail in the coffin that was the two of them. And this month that was winnowing its way out.

He pulled out his mobile and didn’t bother scrolling through his messages. He knew what he would see—that his voicemail was full and there were so many texts that he might as well toss the bloody thing off the side of the mountain, then start over.

The way he did several times a year, usually without explanation. Everyone he wanted to talk to always found him again.

But he didn’t get rid of his mobile just yet, though the mountainside beckoned. Instead, he looked up a number he rarely called, then pressed the call button before he could think better of it.

Well. Not before he thought better. Just before think better of it could stop him.

It rang and rang. And when it was finally answered, it was in a great flurry that shouted drama is occurring and you might be the cause and he could feel himself tensing already. Before she even said a word.

Though it was always the same word. Lavinia and he had long ago decided that she could not recall their names. Not in a pinch.

“ Darling . I was beginning to think the worst.”

“Hello, Countess,” Caius drawled. Because his mother did not take kindly to the term mother . Or any other version of that word. Or anything that suggested an age differential of any kind.

The last time he’d tried he had been six. He had gone racing into her room, called her Mama, and had gotten slapped soundly across the face.

After all, she’d been entertaining. It had been his fault.

She had made certain he knew that he’d done it to himself.

Now, his mother was prattling on, the way she did. It was always so tempting to think of her as insubstantial when she wittered on about dresses and wherever she was living now and the cost of something after which he hadn’t inquired.

But Caius knew that she was a shark and this was how she circled, looking for blood.

“I will come to your wedding,” he said abruptly, cutting her off. “But only on the condition that nobody knows I’m there.”

His mother laughed in obvious incomprehension, and there was nothing about that sound that anyone would describe as insubstantial . “I have no earthly idea what that means.”

“It’s very simple.” He sat back in the old, soft leather couch and stared up at the art on the wall before him, a finely rendered landscape painting. Likely of a view from this house. “I will attend to support you, as your son. But I don’t want the papers to catch wind of it.”

“Darling, the papers don’t catch wind of anything.” Now she sounded like the shark she was, teeth and all. “They follow you around. Surely you know this.”

“Sometimes they follow me around, and sometimes people call them to let them know where I’ll be,” Caius countered. “I’m going to need you to promise me that won’t happen this time.”

“Caius.” When it mattered, apparently, his mother did actually know his name. “This is all very childish. You are a public figure, like it or not. And there’s a certain expectation when it comes to our family. The people have come to require certain things of us. It’s the least we can do to give them that.”

But he was sitting in the September House, in the company of a queen. An actual queen who lived her life for her people. Who had walked away from him for them. Who would do it again.

A woman who did these things for duty, not fame.

“You have my permission, indeed, my encouragement, to seek out that attention all on your own,” he told his mother. “With my compliments.”

“Don’t you dare do this,” his mother seethed at him, and he thought, There she is. It was that instant flip from one face to another that he remembered so well, and he could hear it in her voice. He didn’t have to have eyes on her because he knew exactly what it looked like. One moment, his beautiful mother, all that was lovely and graceful. The next, the monster who wore that shining vision as a costume and was never too far from the surface. “After all I’ve done for you.”

“And what was that again?” Caius asked, making sure he sounded bored.

He wasn’t. Because he supposed there was still that little six-year-old inside him somewhere, wishing he’d had that mama he’d gone looking for. But if the Countess ever got wind of the possibility he might have actual feelings, she would hunt him down and try to eat him alive. That was her favorite pastime.

Caius knew her well enough to know that for a certainty.

But maybe, as he sat in this royal hunting lodge as the Queen’s guilty secret, he was starting to wonder who he was.

“I was in labor for seventy-two thankless hours,” his mother railed at him. He thought she was slipping, or confusing him with his half siblings. Usually she said ninety hours, for the drama. “And raising you was no walk in the park, Caius. Your father was a horrid monster. You can’t imagine the things I suffered!”

“Surely if that’s true, you would have seen it before the wedding and shouldn’t have married him,” Caius drawled, because he had not let her wind him up in a long, long time.

Maybe his father was a monster, too. He had always seemed deeply sad and ineffective to Caius, but then, people were different with their intimate partners. But there was nothing he could do about a marriage she’d left when Caius was small. None of the things she claimed she’d suffered excused her.

And he couldn’t help but notice that she only used her excuses to land what she hoped were mortal blows.

“And this is what I get,” the Countess snarled, switching tacks yet again. “As if it is such a hardship to do the only thing you’ve ever been any good at. Simply show up. Smile. Practice that empty charm of yours that you throw around like confetti.” And she laughed as if she could see him. As if he’d let his guard fall when he knew he hadn’t. She was good at that, too. “That’s all you’ve ever had to do, Caius. No one wants anything from you. No one expects anything from you. You drift through your life as meaningless as the day you were born. All that’s needed from you—ever—is that you stand still long enough for the right pictures to be taken. How can that possibly be a trial? Even for you?”

He didn’t mean to hang up on her. Or he didn’t think he did.

But he found himself staring at the mobile in his hand, the call ended, and a selection of some very unflattering thoughts taking space in his brain.

She’d like that, he knew. She’d like to think she’d gotten to him.

If I could slap you again , she’d said at one of her weddings, I would do it harder, so it taught you something.

In case he’d been tempted to believe that she might harbor regrets. Or have amnesia about her own behavior.

In case he took his sister’s position and tried thinking of her as a flawed human who had used what few, poor tools she had—instead of the shark she had always been and always would be.

Caius could still hear the Queen from the other room. Cool. Commanding. When this was the same woman who had sobbed in his arms only an hour ago, digging her fingernails into his back and leaving her trademark trail of half-moon crescents down the length of his spine.

One of these times , she had said later, sprawled out beside him and panting wildly, you will break me down into too many pieces. They’ll never put me back together again.

But then, at the appointed time, she had risen from the bed without question or any excuses. She had pulled herself together in a flash, requiring no one’s help to put her own pieces back, right where they belonged.

Something deep inside of him seemed to tremble at that, as if the ground beneath his feet was giving way.

He punched the button again to ring his sister.

“She’s already on the other line,” Lavinia said crossly, in lieu of any greeting. “What did you expect would happen, having a go at her like that? I’m not sure I’ll ever talk her down.”

“Then don’t,” Caius replied shortly.

His sister was quiet. He heard her mutter something, as if excusing herself, and then the sounds around her changed. He heard a door shut and imagined her walking from one room to the next, leaving whatever social situation she was in. Taking his call the way he would if taking her call in similar situations. A roll of the eye. A few choice words, mouthed to her friends.

All of these performances.

“I have a novel idea,” he said into her ear. “What if you don’t try to talk her down? What if we ignore her?”

“I didn’t realize that was an option available to us,” Lavinia said dryly. “Ignoring her and hoping she’d go away never bore any fruit that I can recall.”

“All I did was tell her that I didn’t want my picture in the paper if I went to her wedding,” Caius said.

His sister sighed. “Why on earth would you tell her that?”

“Because I don’t want my picture used as currency to buy things I don’t value,” he bit out, and there was a different sort of silence then.

And he knew why. He hadn’t laughed. He hadn’t sounded lazy, or amused, or deeply jaded.

If anything, he had sounded stern and that was something he never did. Not with Lavinia. Not with anyone, really. Not even with himself, if he could avoid it.

“Are you...?” He heard Lavinia blow out a breath. “Are you all right, Caius?”

“I would like to see what my life looks like if it is not a performance,” Caius told her, the words welling up from within as if he had prepared them. Or as if they had been trying to come out for a long, long time. “If I am not the poster boy for the bad behavior of every single person I am related to, through no fault of my own. It occurred to me to wonder what it must be like not to have pictures of myself staring back at me from every newsstand, no matter where I go.”

“You’ve done this before. The last time, you wandered off into the wilderness, as I recall. Did you learn something then? Because my memory is that you wandered back out of the mountains and became a tabloid darling all over again, overnight.”

His sister sounded exasperated, but Caius looked up. Maybe he’d sensed something. Maybe she’d made a faint noise.

But either way, Mila was there. She was standing in the doorway, watching him.

And her face was caught somewhere between the Mila he had been with all these weeks and the Queen. He wanted to ask her which one was real, but she wasn’t like him. She hadn’t created her role in response to a mother like the Countess. She had been born to be the Queen.

She was both Mila and the Queen.

He’d gotten that wrong, last time.

Because last time he’d been so sure that he knew himself that well, too. He’d been wrong about a lot of things.

“I will tell you what I learned,” he said into his mobile, his eyes on Mila. “Wandering around this planet with only my own two feet to guide me from one place to another made it clear that I have more to offer than a photo op. The Countess is under the impression that all I have to bring to the table is a smile. In which case, I suggest she find a cardboard cutout of me. She can use that at her wedding, with my compliments. Because what I learned all of those years ago, hiking around in places where nobody recognized me at all, was that anonymity is a gift.”

“Oh, Caius,” Lavinia said, laughing now. “You only think that because it was a choice. You’ve never seen a stage you didn’t climb up on, then position yourself dead center. Why pretend otherwise?”

“Lavinia,” he said, almost gently. “I’m not going to her wedding. Or any future weddings. Ever.”

Then he hung up on her, too.

“That seemed intense,” Mila said after a moment, when all they did was look at each other across the expanse of the long room. “Families always are, I know.”

He wanted to tell her all the things that were swirling around inside of him, all of the odd thoughts and new understandings that he wasn’t sure he really wanted. He wanted to tell her that he wasn’t temporary, that he didn’t want to be temporary.

That just because he was good at center stage didn’t mean he liked it.

“Do you know why I like producing?” he asked instead. And he must have looked as rough as he felt, because all she did was shake her head, no .

And the tiniest little frown appeared between her eyes.

“I like fitting the pieces together,” he said, and he knew he was losing it because he sounded so vehement about it. Not the faintest hint of an incoming joke or any small drop of self-deprecation. But he couldn’t seem to stop. “I like putting the right people into the correct rooms. Making sure the trains run on time. That everyone is paid. That everything works the way it’s meant to work. When most people see a beautiful sports car, they ooh and ahh over the shape of it. The form. How it looks when it drives. But what fascinates me is what’s under the hood. That’s what I like.”

He stopped himself from saying, That’s who I am.

For a moment, they held each other’s gaze.

But then, Mila laughed.

And he didn’t know how to tell her that the sound splashed over him like acid. “You have always been a great many things, Caius. But I would never consider you a mechanic .”

He should have told her then. He could have. He could have dug down into that trembling place inside, where everything was unsteady and new, glaring and terrible. He could have torn herself open, and showed her who he was.

That it was no laughing matter—

But his mother’s voice was in his head, snide and harsh, telling him exactly what he was good at.

So all he did was smile when she came closer, and laugh along with her, careful to make sure he was charming. So goddamned charming, because that was the only thing anyone ever saw when they looked at him.

Even Mila, apparently. After everything.