Chapter Six
AIKATERINI COULDN’T brEATHE. There was a riot inside of her, and that word kept ricocheting around inside of her head.
Virgin.
But that was impossible.
“I don’t want to talk to you about Venediktos,” she managed to say, though her voice hardly sounded like hers any longer.
This enormous hulk of a man was spread out beside her, with a look on his face that she could only describe as indulgent. It didn’t make sense. She didn’t like it.
Though it did make her pulse flutter.
And he wasn’t holding her down or compelling her to stay where she was in any way. She told herself that was why she didn’t roll away and make a break for it.
Though she thought that really, it was simply that she was too confused to move.
“I know you don’t want to talk about him, much less the two of you,” he was saying with that stern sort of patience that seemed to do something to her bones.
“But I’m afraid that you must. It is for my own morbid curiosity above all else, Aikaterini.
I am astonished, yet very nearly certain that you and my cousin failed to take the most critical step in your union. ”
“I reject that statement wholeheartedly,” she retorted, frowning at him, and she almost wished that Venediktos were here, somehow.
How they’d laughed and laughed about all the bizarre things that people said about them, and to them.
This was where they had talked about all of the things that were unique to their life together.
Including the marital bed. This was where they had marked the sanctity of it.
“We were married for years. We loved each other very much. Our union, as you put it, was completely and enthusiastically consummated.”
“But again,” he said, and he sounded even more patient now, and that patience continued to do very strange things inside of her, “if the two of you weren’t fucking—and I’m using that word very deliberately, Aikaterini—there was no possibility that you would ever have produced heirs.
We can lie here and pretend that love matters, but I think you know that it doesn’t.
Not in situations like ours. Or yours with my cousin.
” He shrugged, still holding his head up.
“It’s lovely that you did, but the purpose of royal marriages is to ensure the line of succession.
To continue the glory of the bloodline, and thereby the rule of this house, on into infinity. I know that you know this.”
What she couldn’t understand, Aikaterini thought then, was why she was indulging this outrageous line of inquiry. But she didn’t roll away. She didn’t tell him that she refused to entertain this conversation. She didn’t remove herself to her own rooms.
She had no idea why she did not.
“Venediktos and I liked to think we could also be people from time to time,” she said instead, her gaze on this new husband of hers, who had clearly indulged in too much alcohol tonight.
She could think of no other reason he would be so insistent on this myth he’d made up in his head.
“Whole humans, who did their duty outside of these doors, but could relax within them.”
“People in our position can do as they please in private as long as we make certain that the line continues,” he said, and there was something so adamant and ruthless about the way he said it.
It wasn’t bullying or loud, it was just…certain. A deep, unassailable certainty that she didn’t like at all. She didn’t understand it.
Yet there was something in her that shook, slightly. As if, despite herself, she understood it all too well.
She stared back at him, feeling as if she was caught tight in some kind of net. That was the way his gaze seemed to hold her fast, allowing for no escape.
Not that you would know, she reminded herself acerbically. You haven’t tried.
Against her will, she found herself sorting through her memories. Looking for something that would explain this, or at least make what was obvious to her clear to him. Because surely there had to be an explanation.
Though as she thought about it…no one had ever sat her down and given her a frank talk about sex or anything of that nature.
When she and Venediktos had been younger, the talks they’d been given had all been about what they should not do in public.
What they should never be seen doing, from eating sloppily to what had been called hormonal displays.
Not to mention what would cause scandals and tear apart the nation, and was it really worth it for there to be so much trouble and misery over something as silly as a kiss?
They had never even held hands in public.
It had been beaten into them that no one wished to think of their sovereigns as sexual beings.
They had both, separately, been assigned extensive reading on the behavior of monarchs through the ages, and both of their tutors had taken it upon themselves to hammer home the point that nations, by and large, preferred to see a highly sanitized, extremely family-friendly version of their rulers and consume only pleasant stories about their private lives.
And it had never seemed particularly onerous to comply.
Both she and Venediktos had agreed that there was no point taking such risks. What mattered was the country, and presenting the people with a Prince and Princess that they could be proud of. There had been no question between them, ever, that they would do anything but the proper thing.
They had taken pleasure in doing it.
The night before her wedding, Aikaterini’s mother had come into her room in their family’s home, tucked away in that borderland between the Royal Quarter and the rest of the island, where many of the Zaccarian aristocracy lived. She had sat on the end of Aikaterini’s bed and smiled at her.
Given that her mother was not much given to smiling, Aikaterini had found this faintly alarming.
Her parents had never been warm. Aikaterini had thought that was reasonable enough.
It had always been brought home to her that her father had in many ways pulled off a coup.
The young Prince Venediktos could have been betrothed to any girl of Zaccarian noble blood.
The way her father had told it, it had been a feat of persuasion and political marksmanship of the highest order.
And whatever Aikaterini might have thought of that particular boast as she grew older, it was certainly true that her family was elevated by her connection to the Prince.
That kind of connection meant that their every move was studied, commented upon, and subject to being raked over the coals at any given moment.
They were treated as nearly royal, but without the bloodline that would allow for a little bit of wiggle room in behavior.
We must exemplify the most excruciatingly perfect version of royalty possible, her grandmother had liked to say. Because we are not royal enough to do otherwise.
Aikaterini always thought that the fact that she’d been chosen as the Prince’s future bride within a month of her birth was why her parents had never had any other children.
It was a full-time job making certain that Aikaterini herself grew up to be not just an appropriate spouse for the sovereign—but an exemplary Princess in her own right.
This had been her family’s mission in life.
Her parents had been almost as involved in preparing her for her marriage as she was—and perhaps more so when she was younger.
They had been in constant intense and wide-ranging conversations with every tutor she’d ever had to make certain that she was expansively educated on all topics that would both assist her in her position and make it clear she was a woman of refinement and education when anyone encountered her.
They had been deeply involved in every aspect of her comportment training, making absolutely certain that she would never put a single foot wrong.
They had also been deeply involved in making certain that her appearance was pleasing in every regard, from what she wore to the modulation of her voice.
Aikaterini had often wondered if she really ought to have come over wholly insecure about it all, but she never had. It had always seemed obvious to her that all of these things had been in the service of her future role. It wasn’t personal. It was reality.
There could be no overpreparing for life on the world stage.
It doesn’t matter what you look like, her father had told her on more than one occasion.
What matters is that you are always perceived to be a woman of distinction, elegance, and grace.
I assure you that if you are, you will be held to be a great beauty no matter the actual arrangement of your features.
Though when the papers had started to refer to her directly—starting the very day of her eighteenth birthday, when she was considered an adult and therefore fair game—as a rare and subtle beauty, it had seemed pretty clear that her father was deeply pleased by the description.
All of that to say that her mother’s appearance in her bedchamber on her last night as a private citizen could not possibly bode well, she had thought at the time.
Normally, her parents came to speak to her together.
They all operated as something of a committee, whose sole focus was making certain that Aikaterini was the best Princess who had ever held the position, thereby elevating both the role and her long aristocratic but never before royal family.
It occurs to me that in all of our discussions, her mother had said, looking distinctly uncomfortable, we have not gone over the particulars of the wedding night.
I’m aware of the traditions involved, Aikaterini had assured her. The procession down the hallway. The locking in. I know we aren’t to be seen again until morning.
Her mother had inclined her head. Yes, my dear, but do you know what will occur inside the bedchamber?
But the thing was, Aikaterini had not only known, she had been deeply and wildly excited about it.