Chapter One
PRINCESS AIKATERINI OF ZACCARIA was having the worst day of her entire life.
She had thought she’d already hit that sad mark, and hard, one year ago. When the whole of her small island principality in the Aegean—and most of Europe—had gathered in the Grand Cathedral to mourn the death of their ruling Prince.
Prince Venediktos, Aikaterini’s husband, to whom she had been betrothed for as long as she could remember and then happily married when it was time. She had walked down this very aisle to marry Venediktos. Then, five years later, she had walked behind his coffin here, too.
Today she walked the same long aisle yet again.
This time she was festooned in ceremonial garments that were in some ways more dramatic than the gown she’d worn the first time.
Or perhaps it was only that she felt dramatic—as she was bound by law and tradition to do this vile duty and marry her husband’s successor.
Aikaterini rather thought she might be ill. Or would have been ill, that was, if the Princess of Zaccaria was allowed even a scrap of humanity in public.
But Aikaterini knew better than to let her mask slip.
The organ swelled and sang as she walked, her steps deliberate and measured.
Her posture was perfect. Her face was dialed to its usual setting of approachable serenity, which was not as easy as it sounded.
Every seat in the Cathedral was filled, though Aikaterini rather cynically wondered if the assembled throng was here to celebrate her upcoming marriage or if—like herself, if she was entirely honest—they were all a bit more fascinated by the archaic law that had brought all of this to pass.
It wasn’t that Aikaterini hadn’t known about this law.
She had been raised to fully and wholly inhabit her position.
Everything she’d done had been in aid of that from the time she was very small.
Every scrap of education she had received had come to her under the umbrella of the many topics she would need to know as Venediktos’s Princess.
So, of course, she had long ago studied the marriage laws that stretched back to antiquity in much the same form as now.
These were the laws that would govern her adult life, give it a particular shape that linked the current Prince and Princess to all those who had come before them.
These were the laws that made Zaccaria its own sovereign state, to be distinguished from its powerful and often overbearing neighbors all across the Mediterranean.
As Princess, she had always upheld the laws and had always been happy to do so in such a public role.
Aikaterini had a vague memory of when she’d first encountered the law in question.
This law that she was obeying today. She had been no more than twelve and she rather thought she’d been a bit younger, because she’d been a bit silly back then.
Even romantic. She’d thought it made perfect sense that the kingdom should ensure that a widowed Princess without any children should have the opportunity to have those children with her lost husband’s successor.
She was quite certain that she had found the old law a lovely notion tucked away in the middle of so many tedious royal clauses governing lines of succession and treatises on property.
The reality, however, was a nightmare.
Because her beloved Venediktos’s successor was the most hateful man that Aikaterini had ever encountered.
She could see him, standing there at the other end of the long stone aisle, looking supremely unconcerned with the proceedings. He was good at that.
Despite herself, she knew entirely too much about him.
Because she had spent her entire year of mourning—not, as one might have imagined, a period of time set aside in deference to a widow’s feelings but rather a countdown to make sure that there could be no child growing within her to disrupt the line of succession, which was, of course, the only thing anyone cared about—studying up on him.
Aikaterini had not needed to count dates and wait to bleed. She’d known she wasn’t pregnant. Therefore she had also known what was coming at the end of the year, and no matter that she no longer found it even remotely “romantic.”
The newly minted Prince Kyriakos was Venediktos’s cousin.
Venediktos had been educated, like Aikaterini, by a series of world-class tutors who had made it their business to provide a rigorous course of study from right here on the island.
Where the heir and his betrothed had been expected to remain, always, as was tradition.
Kyriakos, by contrast, had been sent off to England, where he had gone to one of those Oxbridge schools—Aikaterini always got them confused—and had then dabbled in finance in various global locations while simultaneously making a name for himself in the tabloids.
It was said that he was impossibly wealthy in his own right. That he had set out to make himself so, because he did not wish to suck from the royal teat. A direct quote.
Aikaterini was not the only one who found the whole thing a bit tacky. Teat or no teat, Kyriakos had been a member of the royal family of Zaccaria since the moment of his conception and surely should not have been off tainting himself with common trade.
Yet, throughout his life, Venediktos had maintained an affection for Kyriakos that had never made any sense to Aikaterini.
Kyriakos was older by some years. He was forbidding at best and never made the slightest attempt to observe the usual social niceties.
When summoned to the palace—the old, medieval residence on Zaccaria that had once been a fortress and was now covered in flowering vines—Kyriakos had never seemed to appear without leaving a wave of disturbing intensity in his wake.
Where Venediktos had been a fine, gently mannered, elegant figure of a man, Kyriakos was anything but.
He was too tall. All of his various parts seemed carved from stone, brutish and relentlessly masculine, from his face to his feet.
It was as if he exuded ruthlessness when, by virtue of his elevated birth to the old Prince’s brother, he should have been a dilettante. A footnote in history. One more smiling, dismissible courtier.
Kyriakos did not smile, or at least, not at formal dinners.
And he had always rubbed Aikaterini the wrong way—she had never claimed otherwise.
She might even have asserted, once or twice, that it was his lack of gratitude.
Or the way he swanned about as if it was the island that owed him something, instead of the other way around.
It was true that she had concerns about him and that these were reasons why, even if she’d known, on some level, that these issues were ones only she had seemed to see in him.
To everyone else, he was the reasonably dutiful second-in-line who might have made some headlines when he was younger—and indeed, what inevitably famous royal allowed a life outside the palace did not?—but always supported the principality when called.
What was also true was that the real problem was worse. It was that he had always, with little more than a glance, made everything inside of her feel fiendishly tight and hotly uncomfortable. She had decided she must be allergic to him.
But the law was a law.
If the widowed Princess of Zaccaria was without issue one full year to the day from the Prince’s state funeral, she was to be married to the late Prince’s successor—no matter who he was.
And no matter what her feelings were about him, or the law, or her lost husband.
When it came to lines of succession and the ruling of countries, feelings were immaterial.
Something Aikaterini hadn’t cared too much about while Venediktos was alive.
It was the world they lived in, she’d thought, rather placidly.
It might have felt a bit stark and uncaring in the glare of so much attention at times.
It was certainly too consumed with protocol, tradition, and duty.
But that only meant that together, privately, they could create a sense of ease between the two of them.
And so they had.
They had been best friends. Partners in everything.
Venediktos’s father had abdicated when Venediktos was twenty-one, ahead of a set of medical issues the old Prince had not been certain he would survive.
Indeed, he had not and Venediktos had ascended the throne.
A year later, when Aikaterini was twenty, they had married.
They had spent five sweet years learning the contours of their reign together. They had always presented a united front. They had been in no rush whatsoever to produce heirs, because they had expected to rule together for the next five or six decades, at least.
Instead, Venediktos was gone, his hateful cousin stood in his place, and Aikaterini had found no sympathy for her plight anywhere.
The papers had waxed rhapsodic about her selfless dedication to her duty. Her own family had seemed shocked when she’d mentioned even the slightest hesitation about Kyriakos.
You belong to Zaccaria now more than ever, her father had reminded her, that faint frown between his eyes that she hadn’t seen in a long, long while.
Because she had done nothing to bewilder or disturb him since she was a toddler.
She had always been dutiful. She had always obeyed.
Her relationship with her parents had always seemed more like a business partnership, something that had continued throughout her ascension and marriage.
They’d always been cordial and supportive, because in her parents’ eyes, Aikaterini had always behaved beautifully in her role. Just as they had taught her to do.
Only now did she realize how easy that had been when the prize for good behavior had been Venediktos.