Chapter 5 #2
By the time he entered the palace, his mood had sunk to the dredges of bitterness. He could board a ship with Pandora in the morning. He didn’t have to stay here. In fact, he should go. He wouldn’t find happiness here in the shadow of the men who came before him.
Familiar voices inside a room halted his dreary steps and urged him toward the door with a sliver of open space.
Councilmen Nektarios Callas and Leonidas Primakos stood inside a chamber thick with the scent of parchment and power.
Tapestries hung from the walls depicting old Perean victories—gilded reminders of glory.
The braziers flickered low, casting the two men in long shadows.
A sharp pain flashed through Dimitrios’s clenched jaw. Leonidas had been playing the part of the king since Orestis’s death, and Nektarios, the council’s foreign emissary, had been attempting to micromanage him from behind.
Nektarios’s thick body was braced forward on a table, leaning heavily in Leonidas’s direction, his face blotched and sweaty.
The High Chancellor stood upright on the other side, arms folded across the light-weight green himation wrapped over his white chiton.
The man never showed signs of tension or worry. It might be his only redeeming quality.
“Soterran forces have never camped so near our borders,” Nektarios was saying. “I don’t care what Tassatos says. Titos has sensed our weakness and plans to exploit them.”
Leonidas rubbed his eyes. “Titos depends on our trade routes as much as we do. Merchants can’t reach Soterra without going through our waters. And the majority of their grains, fruits, and vegetables come from our lands.”
“You’re a damned fool. He won’t have to worry about any of that if he takes control,” Nektarios hissed. “I suppose the increased attacks on supply routes are just a part of the natural order as well?”
“It’s not unusual for this sort of uptick in bandit activity following a change in authority. Smugglers and pirates are sniffing at our boundaries to see how much they can get away with. I’m handling it.”
Nektarios raised his chin. “Like you handled the other mess?”
Leonidas barely shifted. “Which one?”
A pause. Too long.
“The one in the north,” Nektarios said. “The abandoned outpost. Where did an entire unit of men go?”
Dimitrios tensed. A unit of men was missing?
Leonidas let out a slow breath, one meant to sound tired but rang measured. “Commander Demas’s last report indicated a supply issue, but there’s no evidence of conflict. Nothing to suggest…” He waved a hand, dismissing something unsaid. “They’ll turn up, and we’ll deal with them then.”
Another pause.
“One of our ships was seen sailing toward Yiria,” Nektarios said. “The missing unit—”
“A misunderstanding, I’m sure.” Leonidas’s tone remained steady, but there was a blade beneath it now. The High Chancellor would suffer this topic no longer.
“As you say,” Nektarios ground out, then folded his arms. “As to the previous matter at hand, we can’t continue to hire mercenary armies to protect our routes.
We can barely afford those Rangers. The gods only know how long they’ll milk this job with the oxbeast; it’s how they make their coin, and our coffers are dangerously low. ”
Dimitrios straightened. These men were already running his kingdom into the ground. What was he walking into?
A man cleared his throat nearby. Lord Stavros Salidis, the Inquisitor the council hired to determine his fate as king. The man was nearly as tall as Dimitrios—over six feet—and fully gray. Stavros was a quiet and watchful man with pale eyes who saw everything and never—ever—smiled.
Dimitrios strode away from the conversation he wasn’t meant to hear. “Inquisitor.”
“I never took you as a man who lurked outside open doorways. One might think you were eavesdropping.” His tone came with a low rumble, bland in his intonations.
“One might think your presence and how you’ve dragged out my hearing had underlying motives as well, but we don’t talk about those.”
Stavros blinked, slow and deliberate. “Walk with me, my Lord.”
“I’m in search of my mother. You can walk with me.”
“As you wish.” Inside the first stairwell, the inquisitor said, “Tell me about your parentage. What evidence can you provide that Mihail Vidalatos was your biological father?”
“You know the answer to this already.” Dimitrios was growing exhausted by these repeated inquiries, but he couldn’t not answer.
Stavros was looking for a change—no matter how small—in his story.
“What further evidence could I possibly provide? My mother was already pregnant when she arrived in Milia. I was newly born when she married Elias. Pericles Garas testified to all of this before his passing.”
Pericles had been the one man in the world who’d known the truth from the start. He was the temple priest who married Mihail to Pandora, then traveled with her to Wairia when bade to flee by Mihail and another man named Nikos.
“How could she marry this man if she was already married to the crown prince?”
Dimitrios turned his head to hide the roll of his eyes. “Word of Mihail’s assassination had reached Wairia. She believed he was dead.”
It wasn’t until Oskar Dahlin sent a letter a few months ago that she learned Mihail’s death had been fabricated.
Until that moment, Dimitrios had believed his true father was just a regular man who had died before he was born.
It hadn’t mattered because Elias Gabrea never made him feel like anything other than a natural-born son.
Still, Dimitrios had been devastated to learn he’d been lied to about his parentage, and it had taken time to understand Pandora’s reasons.
The danger to his life turned out to be very real, and he’d had to reveal himself to the people of Perean carefully.
A feat he might not have survived without Selene’s knowledge of Court and help with the council.
“Odd, don’t you think,” Stavros said, “that no one can attest to your parentage but your mother?”
A scoffing laugh leapt from Dimitrios’s chest, burning on the way out.
“Odd that they didn’t invite a third party to watch them consummate their marriage?
Or to stand by every other time they had sex?
Odd, considering they’d married in secret and hadn’t had time to reveal it to anyone before attempts were made on my father’s life?
No, Lord Salidis, I don’t find that odd. ”
Dimitrios paused at the top of the stairs and faced the inquisitor. “Is this truly how you intend to waste our time?”
“My Lord—”
“No.” He held up a hand. “Perean sits in a vulnerable state after Orestis’s poor decisions, and the man holding all the authority at the moment is sitting on his hands.
You know…” He paused and hooked his hands to his hips.
“Perean’s future sat at the forefront of my father’s mind for decades, but he couldn’t do anything about it, could he?
Not while he was shackled and broken in that fucking tower.
“But, I’m here”—he aimed a finger at the marble floor—“in the wide open. Ready to do whatever it takes. So, I need you to decide, Inquisitor. Decide before it’s too late for me to help my people.”
Stavros’s mouth twitched. Not a smile. Not quite. But something dangerously close. “We will take this up again tomorrow. In a more formal setting.”
“Take a few days, Lord Salidis. Gather all your questions because we will finish this in our next meeting. You will make your ruling by next week. Our people can’t continue to endure the quibbling and indecision of Orestis’s council. Not if what I’ve just heard is true.”
Dimitrios spun toward his mother’s apartments before Stavros could argue.
These men had wasted enough valuable time, and surely Stavros saw that.
If the council’s goal had been to put his cousin Alexandra on the throne, they’d misjudged her own intentions.
No one had seen nor heard from her since learning she’d arrived on her uncle’s palatial footsteps five months ago.
She could be dead for all anyone knew, and Dimitrios couldn’t bring himself to care.
At Pandora’s apartments, he rapped a knuckle three times to the door before swinging his way inside. “You won’t believe—”
Across the expanse of Pandora’s sitting room, the terrace doors sat wide open to allow for the breeze drifting in from Castona Bay.
The woman standing at the marble balustrade wasn’t his mother.
Her back was to him, and her thick brown hair was tied back in loose twists that hung to her belted waist. Her sleeveless silk chiton reminded him of cinnamon and turned the light brown tones of her skin to honey.
Pandora’s voice cracked like thunder as she exited her private bed chamber. “There you are. How was your ride with Commander Contas?”
Dimitrios, heart in an abrupt gallop, cleared his throat. “Good. Fine.”
The woman on the balcony drifted toward their voices, her dark eyes large and round, surrounded by thick lashes. She met his gaze, and her full lips turned up in the corners.
He should have looked away first. He should have bowed and excused himself, let her slip out of sight and out of mind.
Instead, his feet took root. His pulse flashed like a roaring flood in his ears. Her gaze dipped, and his stomach clenched like he’d been caught in something illicit.
Too much. Too soon. Too damn tempting.
Heat flashed through his entire body, and he couldn’t tear his gaze off the younger woman. Although “young” wasn’t accurate. Younger than him, but he didn’t suspect by much. She would certainly have a husband and several children.
“Who’s this?” As soon as he asked, he winced. He knew exactly who this was. The palace’s new Head of House.
Pandora had released a woman named Roya ages ago for “stirring things up.” The woman wasn’t missed by anyone, especially considering her tendency to whip the staff if she caught them acting out of line. Something Dimitrios had no intention of tolerating in the future.