Chapter 8 – Rowan
ROWAN
Emily is loaded onto an ambulance with Javier riding along with her. The moment the doors shut and it drives off, Sebastian throws me a look. A look I know. A look I’ve seen with more frequency over the last seven months.
He turns to Bellamy and kisses her forehead. “Are you okay if Rowan and I talk for a bit before we meet with the new woman?”
Bellamy is hardly one not to read between the lines, but she’s also wasted with fatigue. She had a night terror last night, which means both she and Sebastian got little sleep. She needs a nap. She can fight it, but she needs one.
“Althea said she’d stay with the children,” he tacks on, reading his wife so perfectly.
She sags and drops her face into his chest. “I don’t want another nanny.”
He kisses the top of her head and holds her close. “I know. I don’t either. But I can’t watch you run yourself into exhaustion either. Will you consider therapy?”
“Not now. Please…just not now. Charlotte is in prison, and Samil is dead. I know this. I’m fine. They’re just nightmares, likely from hormones. Let’s see how things are after the twins are born.”
Sebastian’s hand reaches down and cups her large belly. “What can I do to help you?”
She sighs contentedly. “This. This is what I need.”
“My sweetness, you need more than me holding you.”
“Sometimes yes, sometimes no.” Another heavy breath. “A nanny. Fuck, Sebastian. First Emily needs a hip replacement, and now we need to find another new person? I’m not sure I have that in me.”
“Go rest.” He tilts her chin up and kisses her lips. “Rowan and I will talk. Do you want us to wake you before we meet with Marcella? That won’t be much rest for you if we do.”
“Wake me after. I’m less concerned about her than I am about hiring a new person to watch our children.”
“You’ll need someone,” I say, agreeing with Sebastian. “Especially after the twins are born, so I don’t know what else to tell you other than we’ll do everything we can to ensure she’s not another psycho.”
Bellamy emits a small laugh, but she’s smiling, and that was my goal.
“What he said. No psychos allowed within the palace walls again.”
She drags her fingers through his hair. “You’re very cute when you say things in English to me.”
He holds her face and kisses her softly. “I’d do anything for you.”
“You’re my heart.”
“You’re my soul.”
Another kiss, then she walks back toward the entrance, too tired to continue their back and forth.
“I don’t like it,” Sebastian says the moment she’s out of earshot. “Rowan, when did everything become so fucked?”
I don’t have an answer for that. “Not all fucked. You have her. You have your children.”
He nods, but the creases in his face are unmistakable.
He brushes back his hair and curses in Latin.
“It’s been one thing after another since I brought Bellamy into my life.
I won’t make the same mistake of pushing her away as I did after she fell in the kitchen, but I won’t lie and say that I’m at ease with anything. And now we need a new Emily.”
“There’s something familiar about her.”
His brows dip. “Who?”
“Marcella.”
Sebastian makes a sarcastic noise in the back of his throat. “Familiar? How so? She looks like every other housemaid. Honestly, most of the time I can’t tell them apart, and don’t tell our aunt I said that, otherwise, she’ll rake me over the coals.”
“You’re blinded by your wife, brother. Marcella doesn’t look like every other housemaid we have. Even in that frumpy uniform with no makeup on and her hair in a drab braid, anyone could see that.”
I get a raised eyebrow, and there’s a challenging glint to his eyes. “Oh? Noticed her hair and lack of makeup, did you?”
I roll my eyes. “Stop. That’s not what I meant. Don’t say you didn’t notice how beautiful she is.”
He laughs and nudges my arm with his elbow. “Actually, I didn’t. I was a bit too preoccupied with the fact that Emily fell to notice the girl. But clearly you did.”
I almost laugh, pushing up my sleeves against the summer heat. “Clearly I did.”
“You can’t fuck her.”
I grunt. “Thanks for that. As if I didn’t already know it.”
“I’m serious, Rowan.”
“I have no intention of trying. She’s to be the new Emily. She just has something about her. A spark. An energy. I felt it with Ella too. I’m telling you, there’s something about her. It worries me. It makes me not trust her.”
“Ah. Now it’s making sense. It’s not about your nerves or trust. It’s that you’re attracted to her, and you don’t like it because the last time you were attracted to someone, it ended badly.”
“No. It’s more than that. She’s familiar to me.”
He sighs and clasps my shoulder. “They’re not the same woman, Rowan. You know this. If they were, facial recognition would have caught that and flagged it. Marcella was scanned as part of her background check. Everyone is.”
He’s right. I know this. It’s not the same woman.
I wish I could say my odd fixation with Ella has dissipated over the months, but it hasn’t.
It’s the curiosity of her. Yes, she was beautiful, and yes, she seemed different from all the other women.
Yes, she gave me her virginity, which felt like a piece of her that only I got to possess.
But it’s my unanswered questions that keep her on my mind.
The lack of closure from that entire encounter.
Or, perhaps, I simply have been alone these last six months, watching my brother with the woman he loves above nearly anything else, even hearing them fuck on occasion. Maybe I simply need to find someone real and stop chasing ghosts that don’t want to be found.
“Fine,” I concede, dropping the Ella thing. “Talk to me about what I can do. Right now, all of the Marie shit is a dead fucking end. We have nothing new. No leads on her or Desta. I’m living in your palace—”
He squeezes my shoulder, giving it a small shake.
“Rowan, you are the prince of Messalina. It’s your palace as much as it’s mine.
This is your family. It is where you always belong.
Having you here has kept me sane when insanity seeks my mind.
I don’t want you to leave. I want you to stay as long as it makes you happy. ”
My hands meet my hips, and I shift my weight again. “I can’t help but feel that if I could find Marie, find Desta, that—”
“I don’t want to say this, but I’m going to, because I think you need to hear it. Not because I’m being cruel, but because I love you and I hate watching your torment. We have to assume that Desta is gone. That she is exactly as our mother said. Dead.”
My throat thickens, and I attempt to swallow, but it’s futile. I’m suffocating.
“You can’t hide a person like that anymore. Everyone has a trail. Marie might be found, or she might not be. But Desta is likely not with her, and this search will only lead to more heartache.”
My insides seize up, but it’s still what I need to hear. I’ve had the same thoughts, but…fuck. “What about Brea?”
His brows furrow. “What about her?”
“Where is she?”
Sebastian tosses his hands up. “Down south somewhere.”
“Yes, but where?” I press. “You realize we’ve been going based on our mother’s word about her.”
He looks off into the distance. “I remember Mother and Althea talking about how Brea was sick from the moment she was born. I remember Mother talking about a heart condition and surgery. How Brea couldn’t be around us. The only time we saw her was right after she was born. Do you remember?”
I shake my head, then think about it, my face twisting up as I dredge up the memory. “Vaguely. She was in an incubator in the hospital, hooked up to a million wires.”
“Yes,” Sebastian agrees. “This was three months after Father died and Desta was taken. Mother was beside herself with grief and worry. I can’t blame her for that.
Her husband died, her child was taken, and by that point, Mother had met with Marie about the tiara, so Mother believed Desta dead.
Then her new baby, her youngest princess, was deathly sick.
I became king and moved out of that palace and you—”
“I was sent to a boarding school.”
I was alone after losing more than half of my family.
Sebastian would come to visit on occasion, or I’d go home to his palace on holidays, but it wasn’t home.
There wasn’t much there. It was empty, and we were too young.
And I hated myself. I blamed myself for all of it.
For everything that happened to us. I filled that emptiness with useless pleasure.
Expensive yachts, cars, and pretty women.
It's a wonder I never became an alcoholic or a drug addict.
Nothing has been right with our family since the night our father was murdered. It’s been endless lies, secrets, grief, sadness, and this fucking curse.
The night I spoke to Sebastian about what a hot pain in the ass his Bellamy was, I came home. Something in his voice made me do it. I flew all day to get to them. It was the first real spark of life to hit any of us since that fateful night killed it all those years ago. But now…
“Mother never mentions Brea. She hasn’t in years. I don’t want to say this either, but I’m sure there’s a reason for that too.”
I close my eyes, that thought sending the worst sort of chill through me. Especially as I think about my growing niece and nephew in Bellamy’s stomach. What if something happens to her or them during delivery? What if something happens to Phaedra, Sabrina, or Zayer?
It would end us all. I couldn’t handle it, and I’m positive Sebastian couldn’t either.
I scrub my hands up my face. “Desta is gone. Brea is gone. Sebastian—”
“Don’t.” He cuts me off. “I can’t. I truly can’t. Bellamy is the link. She’s the curse breaker, even if the curse isn’t broken yet. You said this to me yourself.”
“What if I was wrong?”
He shakes his head adamantly. “There’s a reason she survived Samil and a reason she survived Charlotte. Hell, there’s a reason I survived Samil when I shouldn’t have. I died on that floor, Rowan, and yet here I am. I have to believe there’s a reason for that.”
I release a heavy breath and get myself back in line. “I do too.” Otherwise, I’ll go mad. Maybe I already am. I just want to fix this for all of us. I want my family to be safe. To be happy.
“Let’s just hope this Marcella woman is as sweet and loyal as she seems,” Sebastian says, pulling me from my thoughts.
I nod in agreement. “Let’s go meet with her.”
Sebastian and I walk inside and go right to the stairs. We had instructed Marcella to wait for us in the parlor where Emily was, and when we enter, we find her standing by the window that overlooks the back gardens and pool.
She’s not on her phone. She’s not pacing. She’s not impatient. She’s simply standing there, lost in her own introspection, a soft song humming from her lips. Before I can stop it, my gaze locks on her profile, admiring the pretty lines of it.
Sebastian throws me a side-eye. He knows me and can read me better than anyone. Yes, I’m attracted to her. I can’t imagine there’s a man alive who wouldn’t be. She’s seriously fucking gorgeous in a very sweet, girl-next-door sort of way.
But so what? It doesn’t matter.
I won’t fuck her.
She’s only been here four months, and I don’t trust her. I don’t care how polite, loyal, and demure she seems or what the background checks showed. Hell, Charlotte was the daughter of the head of the guard and a former schoolteacher, and she turned out to be as fucked as it gets.
That’s the look I give him.
What I told our aunt is a fact. I’ve never messed around with staff, and I have no intention of starting now. Especially when she’s going to be the primary keeper of the palace.
With that thought, something inside me catches.
I won’t let what happened with Charlotte happen again. I’m going to watch this woman like a fucking hawk. Sebastian has enough on his plate with running the country, the children, and a pregnant wife.
It’s up to me, and I won’t fail us again.