Chapter One
“SO, IT’S TO be a loveless marriage, to a stranger in a strange land.”
Princess Emerald of Basilia stared up at her older brother, King Onyx, his gaze dark and uncompromising as it ever was. And then to his left, at her brother’s right-hand man, and her bodyguard, Andrei Ardelean.
He might as well have been carved from stone. He was a man who exhibited little emotion, unless you knew him. And Emerald and Onyx were two of the very few people who knew him. Sometimes, Emerald could even get a smile out of him. But not today.
“If you wish to look at it that way, Onyx,” she said, staring her brother down, her rebuttal to his attempt at making her decision sound unhinged obviously irritating him.
“It is not how I wish to look at it,” he said. “It is how it is.”
“And what other solution do you see? King Lucian asked for me.”
King Lucian, ruler of Alabria, The Sea Serpent of the Mediterranean. The most feared, loathed and reviled ruler in the string of islands that made up the Jewel Belt.
“You are my sister, you are not a political bargaining tool.”
“Sadly, Onyx, I am. That’s what it means when you’re born into royalty, and you know that. We have to do what is best for the country. There is no other choice.”
“There are many other choices.”
“King Lucian is liable to bring his fleet of ships to our island and raid the place to take me.”
Andrei shifted where he stood, his black gaze menacing. “He is welcome to try.” Even after all these years of living in Basilia, he retained hints of a Romanian accent.
His parents had been fleeing a crime family, so the story went, and they had stowed away on a boat bound for Basilia, but it had sunk and they’d drowned.
Andrei was the only survivor.
He’d washed up on shore, and it had been her mother’s and father’s natures to take him in like he was their own. That poor, lonely orphan had become a symbol of the welcoming nature of their country. But she knew it had never really been about that. It was about love.
It was only after that that her father and mother had been killed in a car accident, and her brother Onyx had ascended the throne at the age of sixteen.
Andrei had been part of the family by that point.
Onyx had appointed him as her personal bodyguard, and so he had become her shadow, wherever she’d gone.
The three of them were bonded together by loss.
By trauma, and she could understand the pushback from them now.
But both of them were far too pragmatic to behave this way.
They weren’t children. Not anymore. They had to put away their fantasies of this place, being separate from the world and being their own personal haven.
They knew better than that. Onyx knew better than that, whatever he said.
He himself was in a loveless marriage with a woman who didn’t care for him at all.
Emerald and Andrei both hated to see it, and Onyx wouldn’t hear a negative word against his queen.
Because he had chosen her for reasons of diplomacy.
Nothing else, and that mattered to him more than anything.
She understood that it was hard to watch your sibling take less than what they deserved, but she also understood why he’d done it.
Ultimately, she respected him for it, because he was serving a greater need, a greater good.
That he didn’t see her as worthy of doing the same spoke to the fact that however much he tried to pretend that he saw her as an equal, he didn’t. It infuriated her. They were royal, they had a duty to their country above all else. Above all notions of love, passion or even personal happiness.
Her mother had given up everything she’d ever known to marry her father, and that marriage had united a kingdom.
How could Emerald do less? In honor of a mother who was no longer here, but who had shaped her in every way that mattered?
She decided to tell him as much.
“What’s good for you is good for me. What’s good for the future of the country is what I must do, just as you did when you married Circe.”
“Don’t speak ill of my wife. Do not compare her to a maniacal authoritarian.”
“The rumors about King Lucian are simply that. Rumors. We don’t know that he killed any of his wives.”
“Even if he killed one of them, it’s a wife too many. And anyway, they seem to always meet an end, don’t they.”
“There were only two. He’s hardly Bluebeard.”
“And this also isn’t A Thousand and One Nights. You’re not going to be able to tell him stories and keep him from doing what it is homicidal maniacs do.”
She decided to ignore her brother’s hysterics.
She’d already reasoned out all of this. She’d been going over the logistics of an alliance between their countries for the past year.
She’d first made contact with King Lucian six months ago, via email, and while he was difficult and mercurial she didn’t think he seemed like a psychopath.
Though, maybe good psychopaths hid it well. She couldn’t know for sure, and she felt it didn’t benefit her to be complacent, but if she really felt that she was signing herself up for murder she wouldn’t be doing it.
She believed him, ultimately, that what he wanted was an alliance.
Alabria was isolated, had very few alliances with anyone, and would make an excellent trade partner and military ally.
It was just that Lucian wanted marriage in exchange for those things.
She was a good negotiator. She always had been. She could think of no reasonable excuse to deny him what he was asking. There would have to be a better political prospect on the table, and currently, there wasn’t.
So she’d agreed to the marriage.
It was signed. Notarized. Official.
Onyx’s objections to it meant nothing.
Legally.
They meant something to her personally. But what she wanted personally wasn’t the feature here.
She was a princess. With that came an obligation to duty and legacy. That was what mattered to her.
“The agreement that he sent over is very reasonable, and does not have a hint of homicidal ideation. The fact of the matter is, this is a great proposition, a boon for our country, and you know it.”
“I don’t like it. In fact, I would like to forbid you from doing it.”
“Don’t. We agreed that I wasn’t going to be treated like I was inconsequential because I was younger, and a woman. I am one of your key political strategists and have been for years. I am not your spare, Onyx.”
“Of course not. You never have been.”
“Then let me do this. Alabria is the gateway to the Jewel Belt of the Mediterranean. Being able to move through that route freely would change the economy of our country. Alabria is bigger than we are. He is more powerful. I know you don’t like to admit that there is any man on earth more powerful than you, but there is a point where ego becomes foolishness. ”
His lip curled, his offense apparent. “This is not about my ego, it is about your safety.”
It was only then she let herself look at Andrei. His eyes burned bright with a sort of black flame that made her feel a world of things she didn’t want to feel. That made her feel…
There was regret in taking this marriage offer, of course. There were so many things she hadn’t done. So many things that she wanted that… They were impossible, and they always would be.
There was, in addition to regret, relief.
Relief that she would get the distance she’d never been able to manage before. Relief that she would be safe from this. The tyranny of desiring what she couldn’t have.
Even though her brother loved her very much, she would always have had to make a union that mattered politically.
Always. She could understand why he was opposed to this, but even if it wasn’t King Lucian, it would be another king here or there, a noble, a prince.
Someone who could provide a beneficial alliance to Basilia.
“What are your thoughts on the matter, Andrei?” Onyx asked.
Of course he would ask Andrei. His adviser. The chief of his guard. His best friend.
Andrei shifted. “I don’t like it. She could be putting herself in danger. I will not allow that.”
“You are not in charge of me,” she said. “Your job is only to protect me in the situations that I put myself into.”
“Andrei will go with you,” Onyx said.
“Excuse me?”
She couldn’t imagine anything worse. She could not be followed into her new marriage, into the country by… She couldn’t. The way that Andrei made her feel, the things that he aroused inside her…
Those were secrets that she kept locked down deep.
For so many reasons they were impossible.
They always had been. If her brother’d had any idea that she was lusting after the man sent to protect her, then he would no longer be her protector.
He was like a brother to them, or rather he was supposed to be.
The problem was, he had never quite felt that way to Emerald.
At least not after she began to understand why men and women were different, and what made a man beautiful.
Andrei was beautiful.
He had black hair, deep olive skin and a perfectly sculpted face.
The cheekbones and jawline of a model, but the ruthless intensity of a warrior.
He was a puzzle. For no matter how long she knew him, she would never be able to get entirely down to the depths of him.
He was a code that was impossible to crack.
If somebody could have, it likely would’ve been her or Onyx.
Given as long as they’d known him. But there were certain things he never spoke of, and emotions that he never showed.
He’d been sixteen, like Onyx, when the king and queen had died. Emerald had been twelve. She had been certain she’d seen tears glistening in his dark eyes that day, but he’d never spoken of it.
He’d never shown his emotion openly.
Even when he’d been a boy, lying in bed, just waking up to discover his parents were dead, his manner had been stoic. Grave.
It was his way.