Chapter 22 #2
“Quaint,” he said, breaking the silence. “Very rustic. I suppose everyone needs a temporary hobby. A charming little escape from reality.”
I crossed my arms firmly over my chest. The damp vineyard must was drying tight against my skin. I refused to feel ashamed of my home. I had built this place with my own hands. It was authentic. It was mine.
“What are you doing here, Frederik?” I asked. My voice remained steady and cold. I had survived three years in the snake pit of the palace. I could survive a conversation in my own kitchen.
Frederik dropped his leather gloves onto the center of my wooden table. He turned to face me fully, dropping the polite, sisterly act. His jaw tightened, and the mask of aristocratic boredom slipped, revealing a boiling, cold anger underneath.
“I am here to clean up a mess,” he said, his voice dropping an octave. “As usual.” He paced across the small room, his leather shoes clicking sharply on the wood. “I came to ask if you are satisfied. Has this little rebellion finally run its course? Have you proven your point?”
I frowned, my brow furrowing in confusion. I did not understand his angle. I assumed this was just another political tactic to manage me, another attempt to force me back into my prescribed role as a silent, compliant wife.
“There is no point to prove,” I said, keeping my tone flat. “I left. Our marriage is over. He is the one who refuses to leave the cliffs.”
Frederik stopped pacing. He planted his feet and stared at me.
A harsh, humorless laugh escaped his lips.
It was a cruel sound. “You really have no idea, do you?” he asked, shaking his head.
“You sit in this little shack, playing with dirt, and you have no concept of the disaster unfolding a hundred miles from here.”
He stepped closer. The spicy scent of his cologne felt suffocating in the small space.
“Henrik has not just taken a vacation,” Frederik said, his voice intense and laced with genuine panic. “He has abandoned his post. Completely.”
I blinked, trying to process the words, trying to fit them into the reality I knew. “He is taking a few days,” I countered, trying to sound certain. “He is being stubborn. He will go back when he realizes I am not changing my mind.”
Frederik shook his head vehemently. “No, Natalie. He is not taking a few days. He has missed an emergency session of Parliament. He has completely ignored the ministers. He has refused to sign the Baltic trade agreements, allowing months of negotiations to expire. The international summit in Geneva begins tomorrow, and he has grounded his plane. He is not going.”
The floor seemed to tilt beneath my feet.
My breath hitched in my throat. Henrik never missed a meeting.
In three years of marriage, I had never seen him prioritize a single human being over his duties to the crown.
His ambition was his lifeblood. It was the reason our marriage had shattered. He had always chosen the state over me.
Frederik’s face flushed with a dark, angry red.
He raised his voice, abandoning all pretense of royal decorum.
“I was in the middle of the European tour, trying to manage the press and cover for his absence, when the cabinet recalled me. The ministers are in a blind panic. They are demanding an audience. They are threatening a formal vote of no confidence. The entire stability of the government is trembling because my brother refuses to answer a single phone call.”
Frederik pointed a long, accusatory finger at my chest. “He turned away the royal couriers. He told his chief of staff to stop sending cars. He is throwing away his birthright. He is risking the monarchy itself.” Frederik’s chest heaved with exertion.
He was furious, yes, but beneath the anger, I saw stark, absolute terror.
“And for what?” he demanded, throwing his hands in the air.
He pointed sharply toward the back window, toward the shore where the sound of the mallet still rang.
“To haul rocks in the mud! To play peasant on your cliffs!”
I could not speak. My throat felt like it was packed with dry cotton. The air in the room grew painfully thin. I looked past Frederik, staring through the glass panes of the back window.
Down on the seawall, I saw Henrik. He was lifting a massive block of gray granite.
His back muscles strained under a sweat-soaked, cheap cotton shirt.
A streak of dark mud was smeared across his cheek.
He placed the massive stone onto the seawall, checking the alignment with intense focus.
He nodded at Bram, wiping sweat from his brow with a bandaged, bleeding hand.
He looked entirely exhausted. He looked more alive than I had ever seen him.
Frederik’s voice cut through my swirling thoughts, sharp and commanding. “I told him he was burning his birthright to the ground,” Frederik spat out, the disgust evident in his tone. “Do you know what he said?”
I shook my head slowly, unable to tear my eyes away from the man working in the dirt.
Frederik stepped directly into my line of sight, forcing me to look at him. His eyes blazed with fury. “He said the crown is worthless without you,” Frederik said.
The words hit me like a physical blow. They slammed into my chest, knocking the air from my lungs.
“He said none of it matters,” Frederik continued, his voice trembling with outrage. “He chose this. He chose this mud, this pathetic little cottage, over everything we have spent our entire lives building.”
The words rang in the small kitchen. They bounced off the wooden beams and settled deep into my bones.
He said the crown is worthless without you.
I had spent three years begging for scraps of his time.
I had spent three years feeling like a logistical problem to be solved, an equation to be balanced.
I had believed, with absolute, unwavering certainty, that his ambition was the only thing he truly loved.
I had believed I was completely replaceable, an accessory to his reign.
But he was out there, destroying the very thing that had kept us apart.
He was severing the ties of his own power, alienating his ministers, and abandoning his legacy.
He was sacrificing the crown itself. He had stopped trying to buy me back with outsourced diamonds.
He was tearing his old life apart with his own bare hands to prove that he wanted a new one with me.
The walls I had built around my heart, the ironclad boundaries I had forged out of pain, neglect, and loneliness, shattered completely.
They crumbled into dust, blown away by the magnitude of what he was sacrificing.
The bitter resentment I had carried for months evaporated, leaving only a raw, desperate, undeniable truth.
Frederik was still talking. He was demanding that I go outside and send Henrik back to the capital. He was issuing orders, threatening political consequences, laying out the disaster that awaited them all.
I did not hear a single word he said. The sound of his voice faded into meaningless background noise. The only sound that mattered was the steady, rhythmic crack of the steel chisel against the granite stone outside. It was the sound of a man working to rebuild something permanent.
I stepped around Frederik, completely ignoring his outraged shout.
I walked toward the back door, my bare feet carrying me swiftly across the wooden floor.
I reached out and gripped the cold iron handle.
I pressed the latch. The thick door swung open, letting in the biting cold air and the sharp scent of raw earth and crushed stone.
I stepped out into the grass, needing to close the distance between us before I took another breath.