Chapter One
King Onyx of Basilia was no stranger to the cruelty of life. That it was unjust and often took people far before their time was nothing new to him.
Death might be inevitable, but it was no less shocking.
No matter how degraded his relationship with his wife had been, to lose her to a sudden medical event two days prior, and to have already buried her today was still a pain that overtook his entire body.
It was a tangle of guilt and sadness that he wasn’t sure if he would ever be able to fully undo.
There was no fixing anything, not now. Any hope he’d had that he and Circe could fix their fractured marriage was dead now. Along with his wife.
In the blink of an eye, everything was changed. Gone. Everything.
They’d been intent on trying for a child, on improving things between them.
It was the promise of an entire future, wiped away, and the unrelenting pain that he felt over that was more than he had ever imagined.
And yet at the same time, the hardest part of his life was now erased, and that felt cruel to even think.
He tightened his hand into a fist and turned away from the roaring fireplace looking around the dimly lit, desolate library.
He was, now and always, a king before he was anything else. He couldn’t give in to this strange, sinking despair in his chest that also wound itself around a feeling of…freedom.
There was no freedom. A woman was dead. His wife was dead. The future of the kingdom now in turmoil.
He could see Circe as she’d been, magnetic and angry and distant, smart and prickly and alive.
What a waste.
What a terrible, tragic waste. That much he did believe. Deeply in his soul. Because for all that he and Circe hadn’t even liked each other in the end, she had been a vibrant woman.
Well-liked by the people for her fiery ideals and opinions, for her beauty and her sense of fashion and fun.
Onyx and Circe had found it difficult to communicate with each other, to put it mildly.
There hadn’t been a spark between them, nothing to even make the growing bitterness between them exciting.
At least if there had been a spark they might’ve found compatibility in bed.
But no. Circe made it clear she didn’t enjoy sex with him, rebuffing him more often than she accepted his advances, and he could understand it.
They were emotionally distant. While he’d longed to try to find some closeness in the bedroom, she’d needed the closeness to even begin. But she’d never wanted that closeness either.
He hadn’t wanted a divorce. That kind of scandal was antithetical to what he wanted to bring to Basilia.
He wanted to be like his father.
A man who had done right by his country and his family until his very last breath.
What did right even look like now? He wished he had his father with him so that he could ask.
So he could have asked him when a convenient marriage should begin to turn to love, or at least like.
So he could have seen what his parents’ marriage looked like later, and asked about the changing nature of love, of duty.
He stood there, his jaw clenched.
The truth was, Circe had been an honorable queen who had helped him with what he wanted even when they didn’t mesh.
In spite of the difficulty in their marriage, she had stayed.
She had agreed to give him his heir. They’d been discussing methods, and had decided to go with in vitro to give them the best chance.
She’d been on hormones and he’d felt a deep anguish that maybe that had caused the aneurysm.
After all, it was the only thing that had changed.
The doctor assured him that wasn’t the reason but he had trouble believing it. Then, he had no clarity at all. He had nothing but a pain that sat at the center of his chest howling.
Guilt. Relief. Anger. Denial. Stages of grief that he’d never even seen listed, winding themselves around each other and moving in and out of order.
He kept trying to wake up. From this wretched nightmare. From this horrendous thing he didn’t know how to navigate. He couldn’t.
One night he’d gone to bed a teenage boy with nothing more pressing on his mind than driving his new car, the crush he had on an adviser’s daughter, the pressing concern about when and how he might lose his virginity, and he’d woken up a king.
This reminded him of that singular, altering moment in his life.
That his life was forever changed in the space of one breath.
He no longer had Circe in the palace, or in his life; for all that it had been challenging, it had been something. The lack of her left a cavern behind.
The funeral had been beautiful and well attended. There were many guests staying in the palace in the aftermath of it. Diplomats and dignitaries from all over the island, minor royals, politicians and celebrities from countries far and wide.
And as always his sister, Emerald, was here, along with her husband, Andrei, who was also the head of Onyx’s guard.
If he wanted to sit and take comfort in friends, he could.
And yet in this moment he wanted only solitude.
Craved it.
So when he heard the door open, tension washed through him. He turned and squinted into the darkness.
Just as a small figure slipped into the room, blond hair in a tumble, her face obscured in the dim light. She was dressed in black, as all the guests had been. As he was.
She looked up, but he still couldn’t make out her features. “Oh. Your Highness. I’m sorry.”
“No need to apologize,” he said. “I can take my leave.”
He moved away from the fireplace, and the woman moved nearer to him. Her movements tentative.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
This was a different apology to the first. That had been about her worry she’d interrupted him. This was different.
Her voice was low and husky. A function, perhaps of the fact that she was trying to keep quiet in the stillness of the room.
He couldn’t see her expression, but he could hear the earnestness in her voice. A sweetness he’d not heard from anyone else. A sincerity that felt unique. “I know that it’s been said to you a hundred times. But I would say it a hundred more. I’m… I’m so very sorry for your loss.”
It had been said to him. A hundred times was perhaps understating it.
He’d been wrestling with it for days. Circe’s parents, her sisters and brother, deserved sympathy far more than he did.
They knew her. In many ways, Onyx knew he’d never scratched the surface of her, and perhaps doing so wouldn’t have fixed anything.
But this felt different. It felt like something he could accept. It felt like sympathy that was somehow created for him, and matched him in a way he couldn’t explain. It was balm for him in the moment.
She was small, this woman, short, petite and very slim. She moved closer to him, the top of her head barely reaching his chest. An emotion too large for him to name began to grow at the center of his chest. A bitter regret that was something other than grief.
The woman lifted her hand and touched his face.
Everything in him went still. This was the first time he’d been touched by someone other than his family for at least two years.
That part of his marriage to Circe had been resolutely dead even before she’d gone.
What they’d been trying to keep intact was a partnership for the sake of the country.
The idea of there being any sort of romance between them long gone.
That futile hope he’d had as a young man when he’d taken her as his wife—
Perhaps that was the source of the shameful relief that he’d felt. This sense of being free that made him feel an enormous streak of guilt.
He was a man.
He had been nothing but a king, a husband whose wife recoiled at his touch, for so many years, and now this woman’s hands were on his face reminding him that beneath all of that, he was a man.
This woman that he couldn’t even see clearly.
Her blond hair was curly, the firelight making a halo around her, her features obscured. He didn’t know her. If she was someone that he knew then she would’ve been recognizable even in this light.
The black dress she was wearing clung to her petite curves, her breasts small, but pert, her hips delicate.
He was trying to remember all of the people that had been at the funeral.
Who she might be with. Where she might be from. There was a delicate air of aristocracy around her; that much was certain. She could be a celebrity, but more likely she was a dignitary, political figure or someone of social prominence.
And allowing her to touch him in this way was a risk. As much of a risk as it was wrong.
What man would experience lust for another woman two days after his wife died? It was abhorrent. And yet he didn’t want her to stop touching him. Likely she only meant it as a comfort, but it was making his blood warm. Making it stir.
It was making him feel things that he’d decided were best left dead.
He felt hungry then. Hungry for the kind of connection he hadn’t experienced in so long. Maybe ever. This woman’s sweet touch, this simple condolence warmed him in parts of himself that he’d thought were long dead.
But it was only that. Just an act of comfort. Still, he stood frozen, letting her touch him like that, until that touch shifted, just slightly, and there was a change in the way that she was breathing. More ragged, more labored.
He could feel his own heart raging, his body responding to this.
Then the little woman in front of him lifted another hand, touched the other side of his face, holding him now.
He couldn’t make out the color of her eyes, not in this light.
Couldn’t make out the fine details of her features.
But he knew that she was beautiful. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered.
She stretched up on her toes and kissed his cheek.
Then she began to pull away, and he reached back, cupping the back of her head, her hair sliding through his fingers, silken and tempting.
What in God’s name was he doing?