Chapter Eight #2
It took him a full week to realize that it was because they were both quite good at their jobs, as a matter of fact. They were both capable of acquitting themselves beautifully in all scenarios, no matter what manner of mischief they might have been up to in the car just before.
And at night, they could do precisely as they wished in the confines of the royal bedchamber.
It was midway through November when he set off to meet with his father for a private dinner engagement.
The weather was a marked change from the Novembers he’d spent in London.
The days were still warm when it wasn’t raining, but the nights took on a cooler cast, and the sea was far rougher—brooding all around them as it liked, reminding the island’s citizens that it could do as it liked with them.
Tonight he chose to drive himself from the palace.
It reminded him of what his life had been like, before.
When he had been what he’d liked to call free-adjacent.
Never truly free, because he’d always had his responsibilities to the island, but it had been like a waiting game.
He did what he liked, but he always knew that a single phone call could bring him back.
Though he’d never expected that he would come back to stay. Much less to rule.
Taking opportunities like this, to drive himself alone in a car like he was a regular person, made all the difference.
When his mobile rang, he looked down and saw it was Vesuvius.
“Hello, Your Royal Highness,” he said, letting the title come out as a bit of mockery, since he thought he was perhaps one of the only people in the world who could tease this man.
“I assume the wedding planning must be at a fever pitch. A regular frenzy.”
Vesuvius’s arranged and unwanted marriage was due to take place at Christmas this year. His kingdom was in an uproar of anticipation. The whole of Europe was expected to attend.
Kyriakos thought his friend might explode first.
“A frenzy is one way to put it.” Vesuvius sounded darker than usual—which was saying something as the dreaded day drew close—and Kyriakos frowned, but his friend was still speaking.
“I find that the graceful walk to the executioner’s block that is expected of me sits heavy, but you know all about this, do you not?
” Vesuvius laughed. It was a bitter sound.
“The bloodline above all. We are nothing but broodmares in crowns.”
“And a merry holiday season to you, too,” Kyriakos said with a laugh that was deliberately much less bitter. “Are you quite well?”
His friend laughed again, in the same way he had before. “I am royal. The kingdom is well, so therefore I must also be.”
Even though the conversation turned a bit lighter after that, Kyriakos found himself worrying about his friend as he drove the rest of the way to his father’s house.
It was the house he had grown up in. Even though his family was an offshoot of the royal bloodline, they did not live in a historic dwelling. That was one of the things Kyriakos’s father had walked away from once his brother had produced Venediktos.
The family home was an airy villa in the classic Greek style, though locals liked to sniff and remind each other what the Greeks had stolen from the Zaccarians, and tonight it looked particularly bright and gleaming, standing on a cliff above the surly November water.
Because they were of the blood, the house sat within the Royal Quarter, so Kyriakos did not have to worry about where he would park the car—meaning, he did not have to succumb to security measures as the whole of the Quarter was protected.
He could simply pull up to his father’s house and pretend for a moment that he was a regular citizen.
It was amazing the things a person missed. The smallest little things that he probably would have considered an irritation before felt like comfort to him now.
Especially when, for reasons of national security, he was not permitted to go anywhere outside the Quarter without the Royal Guard and significant police protection.
But tonight he could simply walk into his father’s house, smile at his father’s butler who was like an uncle to him, and make his way to the cozy, book-lined study where his father waited for him.
His father clapped him on the back, handed him a drink, and then they sat and talked happily enough about subjects great and small until dinner was served in one of the small, unpretentious dining rooms that his father favored.
It occurred to Kyriakos, in a way it hadn’t before, that it was possible his father’s preference for the simple, the modest, was not the affectation he’d thought it was when he was younger.
Maybe it was his version of carving out space from the palace.
“Have you heard from your mother?” his father asked once their dinner was laid out before them and the servants had retreated.
Kyriakos studied his father for a moment. “Have you?” he asked.
“This has been a year of patchy communication between your mother and me,” his father said with a shrug. “I saw her at your wedding, of course.”
Kyriakos sighed. His mother and father had been betrothed when they were teenagers, upon the command of the Prince—Kyriakos’s grandfather.
That Prince had taken a keen interest in arranging the marriages of the aristocracy, because he had apparently felt that the Zaccarian nobles were incapable of making decent decisions.
He had therefore made the decisions for them, as Zaccarian nobles were not permitted to marry without his permission.
Kyriakos’s parents had dutifully married as commanded, when commanded, and they remained married to this day. Though as far as he knew, they had made certain never to live in each other’s vicinity once Kyriakos reached the age of about five or so.
His mother preferred the family’s foreign estates. She was particularly fond of the apartment in Paris’s 16th arrondissement, where she spent most of each year.
“I don’t believe I saw her at my wedding,” Kyriakos said, instead of pressing his way into family history. “But it’s lovely to know she attended.”
“One thing this family has always done,” his father said quietly—deliberately, more like, “is its duty. However personally uncomfortable.”
Kyriakos inclined his head. “Perhaps never more than now.”
His father had stopped eating. He was sitting back in his chair, and there was a look on his face that Kyriakos did not love.
It reminded him too much of the talks his father had insisted they have over the course of years.
Usually when it was agreed upon—by his father, by the palace staff, by whoever was occupying the position of Prince at any given time—that Kyriakos needed some handling.
Some encouragement, they would have said. To remember his place. To remember that his life was created to give glory to his cousin’s reign. To remember that at any moment, he might be called upon to step in and represent Zaccaria.
He could not imagine what his father might have to say to him now that he had assumed the principality in full. And was executing the demands of the position admirably, according to the government officials whose job it was to criticize him.
“I have been watching your honeymoon tour,” his father said after a moment. Very, very carefully, to Kyriakos’s ear. “Are you certain that you are…handling the situation in the most beneficial way?”
What Kyriakos realized, then, was that things really had changed for him.
Because nobody spoke to him in this way any longer.
Nobody ever suggested that he was making a mistake, even if he was.
The palace staff contorted themselves to make everything he did seem not only perfect, but if it wasn’t, they somehow managed to let him know that without ever correcting him.
They were so good at it that he’d hardly noticed.
But this was his father. And he had only been the Prince for a little over a year. So he supposed it was lucky indeed that he could remember he was, in fact, fallible. Or at the very least, able to seek the counsel of someone he had always trusted as much as he did himself. Sometimes more.
“I will take from that question that you do not think that I am,” was all he said in reply.
“I only wish to warn you,” his father said, and he looked…
troubled, Kyriakos thought. Never a good sign.
“It is a lovely thing to sell a pretty story to the press. Pretty stories are, by and large, what the people wish to hear from the palace. Privately, I hope you are not falling victim to these stories too.”
“That is marvelously opaque, Father.” Kyriakos shook his head. “I am no longer a teenager. You can say whatever you wish to say.”