Chapter Twelve #2
But he had to stop this dustup first, and he could not be thinking about any of the things the women in his life seemed determined to poke into.
“Then I will go.”
“Why could you not have simply agreed with Evelyne and let me be?” he demanded.
She rose from her seat on the bed and crossed to him.
“I am so angry with you for so many reasons I can’t even count them all.
” She moved to him then, reached out and put her hands on his forearms. “But I still love you, and I will miss you and worry for you. And I didn’t want to leave without saying that.
To your face.” Her blue eyes were shiny and earnest.
He stepped back from her before he realized it would be viewed as some kind of retreat. There was no retreat here. He had to stand up to her.
“Why does that hurt you, Alex?” she asked, such pain in her voice. Which wasn’t fair. He did not wish to cause her pain—she was causing it herself. If she would just do as he said, feel as he felt… Understand.
“Do not concern yourself with what you perceive as my hurt. If you are quite packed, I will take your suitcase down myself.”
“Do you feel nothing for me?” she asked, her voice quiet, tight, hurt.
The question made such little sense he didn’t know how to respond to it.
“I thought perhaps things had changed,” she said, her voice still vibrating with emotion.
“That the thought of losing me might have opened your eyes, hence that morning in your office. And then again when I returned. Was I wrong? Was it all about avoiding an annulment? For the crown? Is that all it ever was?”
He should tell her yes. He should form that word. It would be so easy, and everything would be all right. “I never promised you anything to do with love, Ines,” he managed.
“No,” she agreed, looking solemn and regal and perhaps a bit shattered. “Nor did I to you. But it’s there.”
It was too much. This insistence. The hurt in her eyes. He had not done this. He was not pushing this. She was. She was using love as a weapon, and this was why he would not engage. He would not love. He would not harm.
“I have had enough.”
“What about what I have had?” she demanded, temper flashing.
“What you have had?” he repeated, frustration reaching its boiling point. Everything he did was for her, for his citizens. And she complained when she was the one who had dismantled all they’d built?
“You have destroyed me,” he shot at her. “Does this make you happy?” he demanded. “Satisfied? This love you speak of has only ever been used against me like a weapon. You are not the first. I hope to God you are the last.”
It was too much. He knew it was too much. A break. She was always causing a damn break.
She looked at him like he’d lost leave of his senses. If only.
“A weapon? Love isn’t a weapon,” she said, shaking her head. “What would make you think… Your father didn’t love you, Alexandre. The way he harmed you and Evelyne was never love.”
She said this with such certainty, as if she worried he saw the warped version of his father’s attention or, even worse, his father’s abuse as love. “No. Never. He never loved us.” But Enzo had loved.
And Alexandre had enjoyed an unwanted front row seat to what that meant. What kind of adversity it caused. The stress, the blows, the end. Violence and grief and destruction.
All for love.
“Your mother also loved you.” She said it like a statement, but it felt like a question, and it stirred up too many things that needed to stay in the past. His mother had loved him. She had tried to save him. She had been good, wonderful. Everything he did was for her memory and for Evelyne.
He was the protector in the face of all the ways he’d failed as a boy.
He turned away from Ines. “I will not speak of her. I have made that clear. You must go. It is for your own good, but you are making me glad of it.”
“She did love you, didn’t she?”
Ines wouldn’t give up. She wouldn’t see. “More than anything, Ines,” he said, exhausted clean through. “Why must you belabor this point?”
“If she loved you more than anything, and your father did not, I do not understand why you feel so…threatened by me loving you. By me wanting you to love our daughter. If you would explain anything to me, maybe I could understand.”
He remained mute for a wide variety of reasons while she sat there looking at him, seeking answers he didn’t have. Even if she deserved them.
“I am trying to understand, and I cannot,” Ines said, quietly but with deep, haunting emotion in her voice. “I know you want to be nothing like Enzo. I don’t think you could be anything like him, but this is not that. So what happened to you, Alex?”
Alex, Alex, Alex. Always Alex with her. Always poking under all the walls he’d needed to erect to be the perfect king. The opposite king to his father.
“Happened to me? Nothing. Don’t you see?
Nothing happened to me. My mother died because of love.
My father used her dead body as a punching bag.
Because of love. My father violated the trust of his citizens and his duty to them.
Evelyne suffered abuses her entire childhood that I could not stop, but I stand before you, all in one piece. ”
Ines’s eyes were wide and bright and full of tears. She looked pale. “Perhaps in one piece, Alex, but no less marked. No less…warped.”
“You dare call me warped?” he demanded. The shock of the blows just kept coming.
“Just because my father didn’t love me doesn’t mean he didn’t love.
Oh, he loved. My mother most of all. Until I was born and ruined everything.
Because she did not have room for both of them, only me.
And he blamed me for that. She blamed me for that. ”
If I loved you less, I could be what he wants, but I love you too much for that. How often had his mother whispered that to him, as if it were some mantra to save herself?
But it had only felt like blame.
It wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t. It was his.
If she loved you less, everything would be the way it was. There is no good in you or for you, I will make sure of it, so she never knows your love. How often had his father taken his rage on not getting exactly what he wanted on Alex—a punishment for love.
Love was Enzo’s weapon. His bludgeon.
And his mother’s excuse.
And Alexandre had built himself to be everything his father was not, but he loved in spite of himself…and he would never, ever use it against another.
The silence was heavy, throbbing, but it was Ines who broke it first.
“And you’d never wield a weapon your father did,” she said, with such quiet surety he felt as though she’d used her own weapon to cut him open. But in all that pain, he found some semblance of nothingness. Detachment. A bit like watching his parents fight when he’d been but a boy.
Over him. And he’d learned the only way to survive it was to retreat within himself. Through the fights, the abuses, the blame, the death. Even watching Enzo beat his mother’s body. He’d learned how to exist outside himself. So that reality couldn’t touch him.
Ines had upended that skill for a while, but it was back because this hurt badly enough he needed it to be back to survive.
He turned to face her then. He felt nothing but ice and was relieved. Because she understood, so maybe he could survive. “No. I will not. The car will take you and Evelyne and Gabri to the airport first thing in the morning. You will be ready.” He did not pose it as a question.
She studied him, her hands clasped together over her heart as if she could feel his own pain radiating inside of her chest. She looked broken. Appalled.
But there were worse things in her eyes. Worse even than the tears. Something too close to pity to be considered anything but.
He was a king. He was not meant to be pitied.
“We can go back to the way things were.” There were tears in her eyes, but they didn’t fall.
There was a shake in her voice, but each word came out clear.
“I will make it all as easy on you as possible. I will go while you fight this threat, and when I came back, it can all go back to the way it was.”
He had no words for this strange turnaround. No way to fight the shocking pain those words elicited, when he should feel nothing but relief. Or the calm detachment of disassociating.
“But I will love our daughter,” she continued fiercely.
“With all I am. And I will prove to you that it will not warp me. It will not be a weapon. Because what your father called love, and perhaps even your mother, was nothing more than control, Alexandre. And you of all people should know that. You are not your father, but you have certainly learned how to control the world around you. You do it for good, but that does not make it good.”
He had no words. He couldn’t even breathe. Was she accusing him of being, if not as bad as his father, still not better?
“I love you,” she said firmly, never looking away from him. “That’s not a weapon. It’s only a fact. It is only a promise.”
But he felt stabbed clean all the same, as though it was nothing more than a dagger shoved into his heart.
“When you are ready to heal from these horrible things you saw and felt, I will be here.” She pressed her palm to her stomach. “We will be here.”
“I will never be ready.” Because there was nothing to heal from. He had endured. Survived. He was a king, and his kingdom would remain in one piece no matter what he had to do in the coming days.
Men might need healing. King’s were only the weight of their crown.
“Then, I guess we will all be miserable,” she said, as though it was he who was the one damning them to that fate.
Before he could find words, or perhaps more likely before she could do anything else, someone cleared their throat behind them.
Alexandre looked back to find Gabriel standing somewhat awkwardly in the doorway.
“I apologize for the intrusion,” Gabriel said, his expression apologetic, the set of his mouth grim. “We’ve moved up the timetable. The car is ready. I’d like everyone to get out now.”