Chapter Sixteen
HER brOTHER TOOK her arm just outside the church. It was an echo of her aborted wedding two months ago, and it was painful now to think of how different things might have been if…
And Andrei had the power to destroy her. He always had.
He had nearly done it last night. Her attempt at finding a way to make things easier. To make them better.
Because you still haven’t told him the truth.
You haven’t told yourself the truth.
What she felt for him was so big that it had always felt like the right thing to run away from it. It had always felt safer and better to turn toward duty, rather than surrendering to what she felt for him.
And now it was too late. Because the fire between them had turned into something uncontrollable, unbearable, kerosene on a little match when she had decided to marry Lucian after being with him.
He had sacrificed everything for her. To be with her. He had given up on his duty. He had embraced the thing inside himself that scared him the most, and she hadn’t. She hadn’t offered him anything.
She had chosen duty over the desire that existed between them, but not because it wasn’t strong for her, but because she was afraid of it.
Scared enough that the idea of marrying a man she didn’t love, a man who was potentially cruel, a man who was potentially a murderer, seemed less frightening than submitting herself to a future loving Andrei. Needing Andrei.
Because when you needed people, they died.
And all that was left was their memory.
All that you could cling to was… Grief.
Unless you could make it a mission. She was so good at making a mission.
And so bad at living. At feeling. At being a whole person.
“What is it?”
“It’s too painful. I can’t bear it, Onyx. I can’t bear how much I love him. I haven’t been able to bear it or stand it or admit it since I was fifteen. If I were to lose him, I would lose everything. Love is terrible. I pretty much went to the ends of the earth to outrun it, and it came after me.”
“Then why do you look so sad? If the two of you love each other…”
“Because we don’t. Because it… I love him.
I do. But I don’t know how to reach him.
I don’t even know how to reach myself. It sounds so stupid, but I only know how to be a princess.
In Romania, it was different. I was… Angry, and sometimes unstable.
I was his friend. Then we decided that we would do this, for the good of our child.
We are better when we’re on a mission, don’t you get it? ”
“I don’t. I’ve never been in love.”
It spoke volumes about his marriage. He wasn’t even trying to hide it. She wondered how things had been in the months since she and Andrei had left. The answer was likely, not good. Not good at all.
“Well, it’s terrible. I… I hurt him. I think he did love me. I don’t think he ever will again. Our relationship is now in name only.”
“That is the most foolish thing I’ve ever heard,” Onyx said. “And guaranteed to end in destruction.”
“It won’t. We’re both very good at this.”
“Let’s not discuss the severe implosion the two of you had right before your wedding.”
“I’m sorry. That’s really what I’m trying to say.
I’m sorry. I am going to marry him. Our child will be legitimate.
” Since she was making demands now, she would go ahead and make more.
She still wanted to do something of importance for her country, and she would.
“And I would like a job in your cabinet. I would like to take on foreign affairs. I know that I can negotiate different trade deals, different alliances. I’m good at that. ”
“You are. You know you could’ve always had this, if only you would’ve asked.”
“But I was being the architect of my own impossible love story,” she said. “I couldn’t ask you for this, I couldn’t take it, because then… I wouldn’t have any excuses, and how can I keep myself safe?”
“And how will you do it now, sister? How? Because you will have everything you want, and still deny yourself? You will have the man of your dreams, be married to him, have a child with him, and deny yourself everything?”
“I’ll have him. With me. That’s not denying myself everything. The worst thing is to miss somebody like you’ve lost a limb. At least to have him with me.”
“Hear me when I tell you this. There are worse things than that. Having somebody with you and not being able to reach them, that is the loneliness that you are not prepared for.”
It felt like such a deep, dark warning, and it left her feeling shaken.
“Well, it’s something I’m going to have to get used to, I fear.”
“You don’t have to get used to it, Emerald. You can still turn back from this. I don’t care if there are two thousand people out there and millions on a live stream. Nothing has ever mattered but your happiness.”
It wasn’t a shock to hear that from her brother.
He had always behaved that way. It seemed like she was the only person who had a difficult time wanting to be happy.
Because happiness on a grand scale felt so risky.
It felt like something that could be taken away.
Felt like something awful, painful and terrible.
“You can turn back.”
She was in a terrible position now. Because the truth was, she could never fully be happy without Andrei. He was her person. In so many ways. But now that she was looking straight down the barrel of her own cowardice, she realized that there was one thing she hadn’t offered him. Her heart.
She had offered her body, she had offered her hand in marriage, but she hadn’t truly made herself vulnerable to him.
He had done it for her.
He had risked everything to take her from that wedding. He had shown his heart. Because he hadn’t been claiming the baby. All of his anger and his rage after that had been because he had broken his own moral code, his own vows, for her.
Why would he say that he loved her after that?
He had been willing to break himself in half. And then, he hadn’t been.
But if he understood that it came from a place of fear… Because her feelings were so strong, not because they weren’t strong enough.
She gripped her bouquet of flowers tightly, and held on to her brother’s arm.
“You love him.”
“Yes.”
“And you don’t think he loves you.”
“Not anymore. I feel like everything inside him retreated. And why wouldn’t it? You don’t know everything about him. His father was a horrible crime lord, and his whole life with him was difficult. It’s made love such a complicated thing for him.”
“Don’t be too hard on yourself. I think he does love you. I also think you are right. And it’s a difficult thing for him. I think that he hasn’t given you the words either.”
“He gave me the gesture.”
“Trust me, the man is much more likely to jump off a cliff into the sea than admit his feelings. Don’t let him off the hook that easily.”
With that, the music changed, and it was their cue to go down the aisle. Andrei was there, standing, his dark eyes glistening with something she couldn’t quite discern.
Emotion, maybe. If it were somebody else. But it was Andrei.
And so it was impossible to say.
Did he feel the same way about her?
Would she be able to get it back? If she risked everything. If she tore herself open and bared her heart to him.
She’d already tried. She tried to do it softly. With sweet sex, and he had pushed her away.
So she had to give him the words. She had to.
“And who gives this woman to this man?”
“I do not give her,” Onyx said to the priest. “I stand with her, because she is my sister, and I love her. But the choice she makes today is hers. She does not belong to me, nor will she belong to her husband. Princess Emerald will always belong to herself. She stands alone. The most selfless. And I only hope that Andrei understands what he has in her.”
Her brother’s words were wholly unexpected. They shocked her and brought tears to her eyes.
“Onyx,” she said, throwing her arms around his neck and giving him a kiss on the cheek.
She pulled away from him and looked at the front row, where her sister-in-law sat, looking at herself in her front-facing camera.
She wasn’t even paying attention to the wedding. Or to the beautiful gesture that her husband had just made.
Circe did not see Onyx. Not for who he really was. Or in any way whatsoever.
She just wanted the crown.
She was a good queen, Emerald could grant her that. She was well loved by the people, and went out of her way to treat everyone with kindness. Except her husband.
But she couldn’t fix Onyx’s wedding. She also would never be able to forget what he’d said about isolation and loneliness in a marriage.
All she wanted was for her brother to have love.
Worry about yourself.
She found herself being captured by Andrei, his hands large and firm around hers as they stood there in front of the priests.
Her whole body was on fire from his touch.
Even just last night, he had her. And yet, it would never be enough.
But the sex was only a physical expression of the emotion that was already there. It always had been.
Of their desire, of his anger and desperation, of her wordless need for reconciliation and his desperation to take that, even though in the end he had pushed her away.
She needed to add real words to it.
Somehow, she had to show him that they weren’t destined to be broken.
He was afraid, she thought, not of being his father.
But being his mother. Lost in a toxic relationship with a person who didn’t care as much as he did.
And that was partly her own fault. Or maybe, they were both his mother in a strange way.
And somebody had to make the first move.
She already had. It was true. But she would make the first move again and again for him.
Because it had always been him. From the beginning. It would only ever be him.