Chapter Nine
CHAPTER NINE
C AIUS FIRST HEARD the news that he was having a scandalous affair with his wife, a shock to all and sundry as neither all nor sundry had the slightest idea that Mila was his wife, at an arthouse film festival in Manhattan.
He had been working overtime. Not to promote the film he’d worked on that was being shown at the festival, because he felt the film spoke for itself. What needed his fierce concentration and total commitment was returning to his expected form.
Because Caius had never felt less charming or personable in his entire life.
One of his business partners had even commented on it the night before, looking at him askance as they’d circulated a private party in Gramercy Tavern, filled with all manner of gleaming, glittering people who were not Mila.
What happened to you? he had asked.
Nothing ever happens to me , Caius had replied, aware that his smirk was a tad more cutting than necessary for the sort of party that was all about creating connections and behaving like instant intimates, the better to extend their spheres of influence. Ask anyone.
In that case, let me talk to people tonight , his partner had said. Why don’t you just let them look at you. They like that.
He couldn’t even work himself into a temper about a comment like that. He’d brought it upon himself. He had lived down to the version of him that people wanted to see for so long that it was now all they saw.
And Caius knew perfectly well that the longer he inhabited that character, the harder it would become to tell the difference between the character and the man he really was, deep inside. He would forget it was possible. He would erase himself, one laconic bit of wit at a time, and this time, he wanted that.
The quicker he could disappear into everyone’s favorite guest—the kind who never stayed too long in any one place, could be depended upon to provide the entertainment wherever he went, and never demanded anything of anyone—the better. He had let one person see that there was more to him and it didn’t matter. She didn’t care—
But he tried to stop himself when he thought things like that. There was no need to be unfair to Mila. Caius knew full well that she cared. The fact that she’d recognized the ring he wore around his neck and still had her ring too ate at him, with sharp little teeth and the occasional claw...but it hadn’t mattered.
She could care about him enough to spend a month with him the way she had and it still didn’t matter.
He needed to stop letting it matter, too.
He would. He was sure of it.
Any day now.
Caius had been prepared for the flashbulbs when he stepped out of the theater tonight. He was an old hand at paparazzi scrums and usually engaged them in conversation, got them all laughing, and generally did not behave the way some famous people did, as if this necessary evil that kept them a household name was a personal attack upon them.
As an old hand at fending off personal attacks, Caius knew the difference.
It was his habit to laugh off or ignore the suggestive things that paparazzi yelled at him, looking for that reaction shot. Sometimes he planted new stories while refuting the old, simply to entertain himself—because there was only one woman alive, as far as he knew, who did not want her name linked to his.
Tonight, that was the name they were yelling.
He shouldn’t have stopped, but he couldn’t credit what he was hearing. It took him a few moments of looking around to see if there was another Mila about to accept that this was really happening.
But how?
No one had seen him go in or out of those tunnels. He’d been scrupulously and excessively careful. He was not going to be the cause of any of her problems, whether he agreed that they were problems or not.
He did have some pride.
But only where she was concerned.
“How long have you been sleeping with the Queen?” screamed one fool who clearly did not value his life and would never know how close he came to a swift end, there on a street in New York City.
But Caius knew better than to react the way everything in him demanded he react. With prejudice. Because he could not protect Mila without making this worse, whatever this was.
So he laughed, the way he always did. He smirked and posed for pictures with actors and directors and the people like him, who usually preferred to stay behind the scenes but could always smile for a camera.
Still, they kept at him with The Queen, Queen Emilia, weren’t you there all summer and the like.
“Come on, Caius,” a paparazzo he’d known for years complained as his car pulled up. “You need to tell us what’s up between you and your queen.”
“I would describe every woman I’ve ever laid eyes on as a queen,” he replied smoothly, and with a grin. “You’ll have to be more specific.”
And he kept that grin on his face as the car pulled away, out of the pack of them, pounding on windows and shouting his name. He kept it there until it was clear that there were no paparazzi on motorcycles following them, as sometimes happened.
Then, when he was certain no one was looking at him, he let his face...do what it liked. Whatever it liked. He didn’t even look at his reflection in the window to see what that was. Instead, there in the safety of his car on the way to a private airfield outside New York City, he pulled out his mobile and stared at it in frustration.
Because the sad truth was that he couldn’t do the thing that every cell and atom in his body wanted him to do. Reality reasserted itself like a slap upside the head.
He could not simply call Mila.
There was no reaching the Queen of Las Sosegadas on a whim—that was why he’d gone to all of that trouble to find his way into her palace by other means.
The mobile phone she’d used in America had long since been disconnected and redistributed. He had checked. Years ago.
Though he checked again now, just to be sure, and hung up when he got the voicemail of a surly-sounding American man with an accent he couldn’t quite place.
He had always known that he could reach her in person if he needed to. That was the story that he’d told himself for years, and he’d proven it in August. He could do it again now. It was easy enough to direct his plane to fly him back to Las Sosegadas. This time, he wouldn’t need any kind of intermediary to bring him along. He was well enough known there now that he was certain he could show up, like an honored guest, with or without an invitation.
But what he couldn’t do was call Mila himself and ask her if she was okay.
He knew she wasn’t. There was no way they were coming after him and not her. She had to think her world was crumbling, and here he was, incapable of doing a single, solitary thing to help.
It was hard not to think that his mother had been right about him all along.
And that maybe he should have listened.
That wasn’t even a round of self-pity. The person he was sorry for in this was Mila. He should have known that going anywhere near her would taint her with the same slime that he only got away with because he’d always acted as if he was in on the joke. The joke being him.
Now she had to pay for that joke, and he couldn’t so much as text her that he was sorry for it.
The grief of that sat heavy on him for the rest of the drive, and it only got heavier. Once his plane was in the air, headed for his meetings in Hollywood instead of a tiny kingdom across the Atlantic where he was quite certain Mila did not wish to see him, he opened up his laptop and started looking for the story. Whatever it was.
It didn’t take long to find.
There was one tabloid article after the next, videos from every outfit he’d ever heard of, and a great many he hadn’t. Not to mention the user-generated content, which was far more scathing.
All of them using that single photograph to springboard into speculation.
He could remember walking out of the maze with her, but he’d been so certain they were discreet. It was something like an out-of-body experience to look at photographic evidence of the last five years of his life when for so long, the truth about the two of them had been something he’d thought only he even remembered. It was locked away, down deep, and had remained there until the summer. And even then, he hadn’t really imagined that they would ever stand in the light. Not where anyone could see them.
But here was a picture that told every truth he never had.
Here it was, displayed in color for everyone to see.
He had to sit with that for some time. Because for all his brave words to Mila in the September House and up on that trail with the view of that valley she would always love best, the truth was that he’d never believed that she would ever truly acknowledge him. He had never believed that anyone would ever know that they had this kind of connection.
And it was hard to reconcile how resigned he’d become to that with... this .
He felt inside out.
With a sense of impending doom, he switched on his mobile.
A queen, Caius? came a message from his sister, almost at once. I should have known there was a reason you were suddenly so interested in that random kingdom.
Thank you, Lavinia, he messaged back. Your support at this time will not be forgotten.
It makes no sense unless there are ulterior motives, she wrote. But I know you always have more than enough of those!
Then she added a spate of emojis that he supposed were meant to indicate that this was a lighthearted response from her.
And this was his sister. The only member of his family he actually liked.
Caius sat back in his seat, staring out at the patchwork quilt of the American continent far below, wondering why his chest felt tight, his heart was pounding, and sitting still felt more and more oppressive by the moment.
Then he made it worse. He started looking at the comments.
And by the time his plane landed in California, he had saturated himself with more dire opinions about himself than anyone should. Or could, really, without going a bit mad.
He had meetings to attend, but when he got into his car, he didn’t drive toward the studios. He drove for the ocean instead, feeling that same tightness in his chest. That same driving need to do something.
When he got to the water, he turned right on the Pacific Coast Highway and headed north.
Except he didn’t stop in Malibu, where he lived when he was in town. He kept right on going.
It was like something was chasing him, but he was pretty sure that the biggest threat to him was sitting right here in the car, inhabiting his body.
Everyone thought so.
Literally everyone. His so-called defenders, if such they could be called, thought he was attractive. That was it.
He had read hundreds upon hundreds of comments about himself and Mila on too many sites to count, and had not encountered anything he could construe as positive, save that.
Caius had expected to be called names. He could even have guessed the names, without having to look. He’d made those kinds of names the basis of this character he’d been playing all this time.
Given that the Countess had often called him a great many of these names herself, they didn’t really have the power to bother him anymore. He had cultivated his own image, after all. He wanted people to think of him as entirely insubstantial, so they could never be disappointed by him. And would never expect anything of him, either.
He was, as one scathing commenter had put it, A man whore of epic proportions whose only talent seems to be showing up next to cameras where other, more talented people happen to be standing.
That was all fair enough. But the more he read about people’s disappointment in Mila for lowering herself to the likes of him, the less fair enough it felt.
Because it wasn’t simply that they didn’t like him looking at everyone’s favorite queen. And they really, really didn’t.
It was more than that. Her proximity to him in one photo made her a disappointment. It made the entire world question who Mila really was.
Caius could not think of a greater torture, and there was nothing he could do about it. There was nothing he could do at all.
The last time he had felt this powerless, he had been a child in his mother’s neglectful care. He had vowed he would never let this happen again, and now it was not only happening in real time—it was happening to Mila, too.
His phone kept ringing and ringing, but he didn’t answer. When he drove through Santa Barbara, he chucked it in a bin and bought himself a fresh new phone that no one could reach.
And then he drove. Low and fast, in a sleek little sports car that made him even more of the flaming cliché that he was. An embarrassment of such epic proportions that a single photograph of him with an otherwise beloved queen meant that there were calls for her to abdicate, so thoroughly had she stained the crown.
It wasn’t his history splashed all over the papers that bothered him. He knew how much of it was made-up. It was the one they’d created for her.
As if he was so infectious— A virulent strain of cringe , one young girl said in a widely circulated video—that it was obvious she had to be some kind of liar and deceiver to have concealed this kind of thing.
He called only his assistant, to update her on his new mobile number and the fact he was not available, at all, to anyone.
Though he knew that if Mila really wanted to reach him, she could.
But she didn’t.
Mile after mile, she didn’t.
And that was why, in a tiny little town up north, he bought the supplies he needed, stashed his flashy car, and hiked his way back to the Pacific Coast Trail.
Because everything in him rejected the character he was reading about in the papers, because he knew that wasn’t him.
But all he could think was that this was how Mila saw him.
This was the reason she’d walked away from him five years ago—and even now, after their month together, assumed without any question whatsoever that the only logical thing to do was separate again.
It hadn’t even been a discussion.
And now he knew why.
He should have expected it.
The truth was that Caius had already been tired of the games he played. Reading about them was even worse. Cataloging the entire series of a lifetime of misdeeds made him feel sick.
It didn’t even matter that more than half of the suppositions about him weren’t true.
This was who people thought he was. Like his mother, they might have valued him for his proximity to fame, but they didn’t value him .
He had turned into the Countess, he realized now. Entirely without meaning to, he had become a parody of himself. Just as she was.
And he knew that if he said this to Lavinia, she would encourage him to go talk to their mother because she still believed that there was some sort of conversation they could have that would fix their childhood. Caius knew better. He knew who his mother was. And better yet, he knew that the Countess would never see what she’d done to them. She would never admit that she had been in the wrong.
As far as he knew, she never had.
And showing her that they cared would be a weakness she would try to exploit.
There was no point talking to his father, either, because while the man might eke out an apology, all he really cared about were his highs. Caius had never been sure if his father remembered that he existed between visits.
All he was, to anyone and everyone, was that character he played.
Smirky, salacious, dismissible.
DISGUSTING! more than one commenter had typed. In all caps.
With every step, he thought about the fact that this was who Mila believed he was. This was the man she thought she’d married.
This grasping, empty, cardboard cutout of a creature, dead behind the eyes and good for absolutely nothing but the clout the entirety of the internet was certain he had not earned.
Hell, he agreed.
But for a short while, he had been a man that he was proud of. In a lifetime of make-believe, playing characters to manipulate people and situations to survive or to shine, there had been one stretch of time when he had only been himself.
That was what he hadn’t forgiven her for leaving.
Their marriage was a symbol of that. The ring hanging there around his neck, still and always, reminded him with every step. It wasn’t just that she had promised to love him forever. It was that when she had made that promise, she’d meant him .
The real him.
Those months had been extraordinary. No one had known who Caius was, and therefore, he’d had no influence whatsoever. There’d been no performance to put on. They had all simply...walked. And hiked. Camped and slept, then hiked on some more.
He and Mila had gotten to know each other as people .
Nothing more, nothing less. They had never spoken about their lives off the trail, not for a long while. Not until they’d left their guided hike and gone off on their own.
Caius had liked that version of himself.
Mila had fallen in love with him.
And this last month in her September House had been a reintroduction to that man. It had been a sharp reminder of why he’d long ago decided he hated what he’d become—the reason he’d gone on that long hike in the first place.
He hadn’t wanted to return to that in the five years since, but he couldn’t put the fact he had on Mila. That was what he’d done to survive the loss of her. He’d gone out and frolicked in that spotlight, acting like it had never happened and he was incapable of caring either way if it had, and this was what he’d won.
He’d made himself what he hated.
He’d become exactly what his mother said he was.
So Caius took himself back to the woods. Step by step, he walked away from the spotlight and the speculation and that goddamned smirk, and he vowed that he would walk until he found himself again.
Until he became that man that he admired once again.
That man that Mila had loved before she’d become the Queen. The man he knew she didn’t believe he was now.
But he was. He wanted to be, for her, but mostly so he could find a way not to loathe the very sight of himself.
He vowed that he would walk until he found that man again, no matter how long it took.
And when he did, he would go back to Las Sosegadas and he would figure out how he could save the love of his life.
From himself.
For good.