Chapter Eleven
AIKATERINI WATCHED HER words move through him as cleanly and completely as if she’d found a weapon somewhere and shoved it straight through his heart.
She supposed she had.
Kyriakos staggered back, then came up against the glass door and stopped before he shattered the glass with that huge body of his. She had the urge to go after him, but something about that look on his face stopped her.
Something about how utterly thrown he looked made her own heart start to kick at her, harder and harder.
“You don’t mean that,” he muttered. “You can’t mean that.”
But it was almost as if he was talking to himself.
Because then he simply turned around and walked right back out of this meeting room the way he’d walked in. And this time the glass did not tremble in the wake of his passing.
Aikaterini stayed where she was, though she couldn’t pretend it was really by choice. She wasn’t certain that her body could move. She was frozen into place, her heart getting louder and louder in her chest, and her wrists, and her ears, and even her fingertips as she waited for him to return.
Even though, somewhere inside, she understood that he had really and truly walked away.
Again.
She had sat on that couch earlier today, talking to her dead best friend, for longer than she wanted to admit.
But Aikaterini thought that she and Venediktos had come to a place of peace. Or she had, and she was the one living, so that was what she had to hold on to. She’d stopped fretting over what their marriage hadn’t been and had started remembering what it had been, instead.
She’d started letting herself remember who he had been, not just as her best friend but as the Prince.
The role he’d been born to and trained to excel in.
One thing that she’d always admired was that Venediktos was notoriously impatient with hearing that things had to continue the way they were because they had always been that way.
What is the point of being the Prince if I’m constantly told that the Prince has never done what I wish to do? he would ask when they were alone. Surely I—the Prince himself—should be able to decide what it is the Prince does.
She had forgotten that. But today it had come back to her, and she’d smiled and missed him. Then she’d thought about how that might apply to her own situation and it had settled in her like a plan.
Because what was the point of being the Princess—in so many ways nothing at all but a vessel and in other ways the most important person in the kingdom at so many critical moments—when she couldn’t decide which one of those she was?
And what was the point of any of this if she didn’t have the right to demand that her life be as happy as possible, within its necessary constraints?
As far as she was aware, that was the goal of any life. Why not hers?
Aikaterini had chosen neither one of her marriages. She had chosen none of her education. But surely, having surrendered herself to this new marriage and settling into the role in ways she couldn’t have imagined before it, she could choose what this relationship of hers was like.
And if she couldn’t, then maybe there was a different life for her out there somewhere. Maybe there was a place where she didn’t have to be the Princess.
Maybe there was the possibility that she could live a life where it wasn’t required of her that she choose duty above everything else.
No matter what it did to her.
It wasn’t that she didn’t wish to do her duty, as she thought Kyriakos had suggested.
If she was perfectly honest with herself, she took great pride and pleasure in the execution of her duty.
Unlike some of the royals she knew across Europe, Aikaterini had never balked at that part of her upbringing.
She liked her duties and the traditions and meanings and customs that were attached to them. She assumed that she always would.
But she also had to think that finding what she had with Kyriakos was rare.
And worth fighting for. She knew that from a great many royal marriages across Europe, too.
Also, she’d read every account of royal marriages on the island that she could find over the last year.
There was a lot of talk of duty. There were many, many pages dedicated to honor and other forces greater than individuals, like the love of Zaccaria.
One thing she saw precious little of was love itself.
She didn’t think that meant that none of them had ever loved one another, but today she’d found herself thinking of those stories again.
Then she’d started thinking about the whole aristocratic class of Zaccaria, the nobles and courtiers whose lives revolved around the palace and the royal schedule.
It was a long-standing joke—in the sense that everyone spoke about it wryly, not that they thought it was terribly funny—that Venediktos’s grandfather had arranged more marriages than there had been arranged marriages in centuries.
A regular romantic tradesman, one noble grande dame had famously sniffed.
More like an unhappiness epidemic, Aikaterini thought. And as far as she could tell, her own parents were perfect examples of that.
They were considered a hugely successful couple, of course. Not only had her father secured the Prince’s betrothal to his only daughter, but he and her mother had raised that daughter up to her current paragon meets saint meets local goddess status.
Yet Aikaterini had never seen the two of them exchange anything that could possibly be interpreted as physical affection. Not once in all these years.
And she had lived with them until she was twenty, so she could also assert that she’d never seen them have a single discussion that ever veered anywhere near an emotion.
While she supposed that it was possible that her parents had an entire private life they kept hidden from her, she doubted it.
Because the truth was, throughout most of her youth, they didn’t spend much time in private, away from her.
They were too busy managing every aspect and every moment of their daughter’s life.
Even if they had a physical relationship that she not only couldn’t conceive of but didn’t really wish to imagine, it wasn’t an emotional one. She was certain of that.
Her parents had always been, for lack of a better term, chilly.
Maybe this was why she had interpreted her deep, encompassing friendship with Venediktos as something far more romantic than it was. Because in comparison to her parents’ love, well. It really was romantic.
And after all, no matter what else was true, they really had liked all that kissing.
Aikaterini felt as if these past few months had been a kind of rebirth. It had been unbelievably painful. She couldn’t deny that. It had been shocking in many ways.
But she and Kyriakos were something different from all the aristocratic marriages she’d seen. No matter how many times he might want to try to tell her that she was confused, she wasn’t.
She knew she wasn’t.
Because she’d seen the way he looked at her. Both in private and for all the world to see on their little press tour of a honeymoon. She’d seen the way he smiled. She’d heard him laugh.
She’d been the one he was looking at when the cameras looked away.
Aikaterini knew that these things were real. More than that, she thought that they mattered.
One night, he’d woken her up from a dead sleep with his mouth between her legs. She’d been tossed off into all of that bliss before she’d even come fully awake. Then he’d crawled up the length of her body, pulled her beneath him, and surged inside of her as if he couldn’t help himself.
The look on his face then had been desperate. Altered.
He’d fallen asleep quickly afterward, but she hadn’t. Her husband had wrapped her up in his arms and rested his face on her, and she had breathed him in.
And later, when he shifted position, this big, dangerous man with the whole of the principality in his hands slept as if he felt safe. As if he was safe, because he was with her.
She didn’t have to be an expert in psychology or sexual relationships to understand that Kyriakos did not sleep that way with everyone. She might not have understood what marital sex was supposed to look like for too long, but she understood people.
That didn’t change just because she’d threatened him with leaving, she reminded herself.
It wasn’t an empty threat, either.
Aikaterini had set the palace’s legal team on its ear when she’d marched into this place and had asked them to provide her with all the abdication law they had on hand.
After never causing a commotion in as long as she could remember, she’d found that she quite enjoyed it this time.
They had set her up in this room and she’d dug in.
She hadn’t actually meant to miss her dinner engagement.
But she’d started reading, and like every time she started reading about the history of the island, she found herself getting caught by all the stories that were tucked in there between the dry lines of text.
The Prince who had abdicated to keep his son from going to war, as he would have to assume the crown instead. The Prince who had used the threat of his abdication to keep the feisty aristocracy in line.
Warring clans threatening to force each other in and out of the palace, and succeeding as many times as they’d lost over the course of centuries.
Maybe it was all chess games. Maybe Kyriakos was right.
But as Aikaterini had sat there at that table, reading until her eyes hurt, she’d found herself more and more unable to accept that this was the only outcome that they were allowed.
When he’d walked in, it had seemed like a dream come true. Maybe he was here to tell her that he’d been wrong before, that he loved her back, that it didn’t matter what sort of politicking went on around them as long as they had each other…
Now she stood there and waited for despair to knock her over, because he’d felt none of those things and she knew that because he had walked away yet again.
But that line of thinking didn’t land. Neither did the despair.