Chapter 18
Chapter
Eighteen
Dimitrios stayed in the Nicolea home for three days, learning much about its inner workings. He watched the family care for their farmlands and the children play. Every morning, he woke expecting that his grandfather had ordered his removal, but he never did.
Antonis did, however, make sure no one bothered with him.
Other than his Aunt Rena, the rest of the Nicoleas refused to entertain him.
The children ran. The cousins, aunts, uncles…
they sped past any time they crossed paths.
He ate dinner with his people at an empty table and went to bed alone in a fire-warmed room.
“The fact that you’re still here matters a great deal,” Rena said that evening on the third day.
“I can’t stay, and he won’t see me.” Defeat had well and truly settled in right alongside his concern for what was going on in Praevia during his absence.
Rena smiled and squeezed his hand. “Go. See to your lands. Then come back. And keep coming back until he changes his mind.”
So he did. He returned five days later, then five more after that. On that trip, he passed Rena in the hall after another lone meal with his people.
“Are you preparing to retire?” she asked.
“I am.”
Dimitrios folded a recent letter from Milonia, the parchment worn from multiple reads.
Her words and familiar script were the only things getting him through these visits.
The pup updates were especially amusing.
I fear we’ve created monsters. Theron, Thalios, and Lykos had taken to stealing from the kitchens and terrorizing people in the corridors.
Then, there was this: Caius asked me yesterday if you’d written back yet. I told him kings are busy men. He seemed to accept that answer, though he left a half-carved wooden figurine outside your study. It’s a dog, I think. Or possibly a wolf. Either way, it’s missing an ear and looks fierce.
The end of this one, though, made his stomach twist in warm knots. The halls hold less warmth when your voice isn’t among them.
A bold statement, even from a woman who constantly spoke her mind. He’d replied, intending to put a halt to such intimate words, but instead, he’d written: I’ve never liked quiet halls. They give the impression that no one’s listening. Keep them warm until I return.”
He shouldn’t have let their relationship become what it was if for no other reason than he’d promised his mother. But this woman and her son… He was tired of denying the truth. From the moment he’d met them both, they’d brought him back to life.
“Nephew?”
Dimitrios blinked back to the shadowed corridor and flickering candlelight, where his aunt studied his face. “Sorry, did you say something?”
“You were very far away just now. Are you all right?”
“It was a long day, and we have an even longer day of traveling tomorrow.” He probably didn’t have to add how defeated he was to lose another battle to earn Lord Nicolea’s time and attention.
Rena nodded in a particular direction. “Before you retire, might I suggest you seek your grandfather out first?”
He froze. “He’ll see me?”
“Don’t waste it.” She squeezed his hand before leaving him to venture the way alone.
Dimitrios found his grandfather sitting in a study lit by a roaring fire.
A pang branched through his heart to see it—how many times had he walked into a room just like this one in search of his mother?
Antonis even sat in a similar leather chair, one of two, that faced the fireplace.
The walls were lined with the same dark, polished shelves full of books with well-worn spines.
Oil lamps hung from bronze holders, casting the room in a warm glow that battled with evening shadows.
The stone floor was covered by a thick, woven rug with intricate geometric patterns in rich reds and deep golds. The rug muffled Dimitrios’s footsteps while adding warmth to the room.
Dimitrios must have passed into Antonis’s peripheral vision because the old man sat forward abruptly and peered over his shoulder. Antonis then relaxed upon seeing him.
“This is a lovely room,” Dimitrios said with a devouring gaze. “My mother has a study just like it. She calls it her sanctuary. A family as large as ours can bring quite a bit of chaos with it.”
Antonis didn’t respond right away. But he stilled, unblinking, silent… Finally, his hand—veined and careful—drifted across the arm of the chair, fingers brushing the worn leather. A quiet breath drifted past his lips.
Antonis stared into the fire, the flames dancing in his eyes. “She used to sit right there,” he murmured, barely audible, a single finger aimed at the empty chair beside him. “With a book in one hand and a plate of—”
“Figs,” Dimitrios said, his chest warming at the memory.
“She never finished them,” Antonis mused.
“Not once.”
Then, catching himself approaching a smile, Antonis cleared his throat and sat back abruptly, as if folding the memory away. The wall came down fast. “You might as well sit.”
Dimitrios lowered into the twin leather chair to his grandfather’s right.
Antonis moved a book from his lap onto the side table. “Your aunt, Rena, has a much more level head than I. She says I have long judged Pandora unfairly and that I am not yet in possession of all the facts.”
He dug into the side of his chair cushion and produced an unsealed fold of parchment. “Your mother wrote to me before she sailed away. I had refused it upon arrival, but Rena held onto it.” A sound that was half-grunt, half-laugh escaped his chest. “She knows me well.”
“What did my mother say?”
“I’m certain you can guess. She loves us still and wishes me to know what a good man you are.” He twisted to face Dimitrios more fully. “Are you? A good man?”
“I try to be.”
Antonis stood and paced toward the fireplace. He tossed the letter into the flames.
Dimitrios’s stomach sank like a stone through water. That wasn’t merely his mother’s familiar scrawl blackening, but the care she put into words, the hope, cheapened by one toss. “You don’t believe her.”
“I make my own determinations.” Antonis faced Dimitrios, his expression hard, but his eyes betrayed the storm. “Perean sits on a precipice, and here you are again, digging in your heels inside my home. These aren’t the actions of a man who would be king, not one who cares for his country.”
Dimitrios didn’t flinch. The past months of cold interactions and doubts couldn’t have prepared him better for this conversation.
“I’m well aware of the dangers to Perean, and I can say with full authority that not even you can imagine the depth of our situation, my lord.
But that’s where my authority ends—I uncover horrible truths and prepare for the day I can actually do something about it. ”
He shifted to the edge of his seat and leaned into his grandfather’s space.
“The people might recognize me as a Vidalatos, but even I can see how anxious they are for the inquisitor’s fate.
Right now, he’s the one man they’ll listen to, the only man who can declare me the rightful king, and yet he remains in a coma. ”
Antonis’s gaze carved into him like a sculptor with a fresh block of stone. “Yes. I heard what befell Stavros. Unfortunate circumstance, though for all you know, he could wake up and declare your cousin, Alexandra, queen.”
“He’d already decided in my favor,” Dimitrios said, heat edging his words. “He would have told the council had we not been attacked.”
“You can’t know that.” Antonis didn’t move, but the set of his shoulders shifted, retracting, not retreating.
Like a soldier bracing for an impact he’d already accepted.
“You hoped he would. You need him to. Otherwise, all of this”— he gestured vaguely—“will have been nothing but wasted time and flailing ambition.”
“I was with Stavros during the attack. He said the words aloud. He was trying to warn me that the council couldn’t be trusted.”
Antonis faced the fire. Silence stretched for an eternity, then, quietly, he said, “You must think I can help, or you wouldn’t be here.”
“I think you want to help,” Dimitrios said. “That’s not the same, but it’s not nothing either.”
“You’re mistaken.”
Dimitrios exhaled sharply through his nose.
He fought the urge to stand and pace, to raise his voice, to bare his throat to a man who clearly wasn’t ready to see him.
Only control would help here. Only truth.
“Sometimes, help isn’t about titles or armies.
Sometimes, it’s just…having one person you trust at your side. Just one.”
The old man stilled. A beat. Two. Then, he half-turned, and he met Dimitrios’s eyes across that unspoken, fragile chasm.
Dimitrios stepped into it without hesitation.
“I’m alone in a land I barely know, whose ways I don’t understand, and surrounded by people I can’t trust. Everyone who’s guided me through these pitfalls—my mother, Selene, Oskar—they’re all gone.
I don’t know who’s next. All I know is that Mother said I would find the allies I need here. With our family.”
Antonis’s eyes narrowed, not in accusation, but in thought. Like a man trying to solve a riddle he didn’t like the answer to. “She said that?”
“That surprises you?”
“Everything I’m learning about Pandora these days surprises me.”
There was no venom in his voice now—only something quieter.
Sadder. As Antonis lowered himself into the chair again, sinking deep into its leather embrace, Dimitrios felt the flicker of progress.
A crack in the stone. Maybe they could talk now.
Maybe this would be a conversation between family—if not in affection, then at least in honesty.
He should have known better.
Antonis rested one hand on the armrest, fingers curling into the worn leather. “Pandora betrayed our family to marry a Vidalatos. It’s as if we’re talking about two different people.”
“You truly hate the Vidalatos name that much? She’s your daughter.”