Chapter Five #2
The miraculous timing of this packing and transportation and unpacking, all supposedly during her wedding ceremony, suggested that her belongings had been gathered when she’d left the apartment, before she had agreed to this plan.
Clearly she had been entangled in Gustav’s plans for far longer than she had been aware.
Livia welcomed the surge of anger this idea brought, and she sat with it, letting it push out murkier feelings. This anger would keep her sister safe.
Gustav studied her, his expression inscrutable. Then he smiled as if he had read every one of her thoughts. “I believe it is time to celebrate.”
He led them out of the bedroom and through the hallway and the dining room.
They climbed the regal staircase to the aft deck, lined with a semicircle of cushioned benches.
In the time they had toured the boat, the staff had inserted a table on one side of the deck, neatly secured in place much like everything else on the boat, she noted.
On the table was an elegant tray of traditional Isrikeslandic foods, including her favorite shrimp-and-dill salad along with fresh breads and a spread of cheeses, meats and vegetable dishes.
There was a bowl of wild strawberries and blueberries and another with newly whipped cream.
All this food was arranged around two champagne flutes and a bottle chilling in a stone holder in the center.
Livia slid onto the bench and tried to ignore the fact that Gustav was next to her, so close she could touch him. The chef appeared to open the champagne and handed her a bubbly glass, and Gustav raised his own.
“To the future,” he said, and there was both challenge and a hint of satisfaction in his voice.
Livia raised an eyebrow. “After such an auspicious start, I can’t wait to see what happens next.”
“Did you foresee more control over the life you brokered with Edvin?”
His question was moot, of course. She had never planned to actually marry Edvin.
But now she found herself imagining what a marriage to this new, hardened version of Gustav meant.
In eleven months, she and Adele would retreat to her house in Greece, but in the meantime, what on earth would she do with her unexpected husband?
And how would she eventually extricate herself from this man, who was staring at her as if she was his possession? None of this she could have foreseen.
He rested one arm across the back of the cushions, not quite touching her but close enough to feel his heat.
He let the champagne glass dangle from his fingers.
A cursory glance might’ve suggested that this man was the picture of princely ease, but there was a tension in his gaze.
She took him in, both familiar and completely foreign.
“I try not to make predictions about things I have no control over,” she said. “I just plan for the things I can change.”
His eyes narrowed, as if he heard the subtle hint of rebellion in her words.
Livia looked away from him, at the shore, where a larger crowd had gathered on the pier.
They were watching the boat. Watching her.
A little boy holding an ice-cream cone waved tentatively, and she waved back as the boat pulled away from the dock and into the harbor.
Her insides seemed to sigh in relief as they left the everyday life on land behind.
From here, the stone walls of the Old City and the castle on its rocky island perch looked more like an idyllic vacation setting and less like the immovable confines of her future.
They were just the backdrop, rising above busy docks full of boats, their masts swaying in the warm summer breeze.
Isrikesland was not her country, and she had never intended for it to be.
But now that she was suddenly its princess, she couldn’t ignore the longing she felt as she looked out at the shoreline.
Growing up on the grounds of an elite private school had made for an uneasy home from the moment she’d realized her family didn’t quite belong, despite the fact that they had lived there the longest. It was this lens that helped her make sense of her parents’ ambitions, however maddening and manipulative her own role in them was.
She understood their urge to finally rise up among the elite that had so carelessly trampled on them.
But after years of living and eating and sleeping and studying next to those girls in a world where privilege and money was simply the air they breathed, not something one strived for, she knew her parents would never get what they really wanted.
They never would feel the ease that her peers felt, the confidence that the world would lay itself out at their feet.
She might have been tempted to defend her decisions to Gustav if it didn’t mean revealing her hand.
Not before her sister turned eighteen and was safely on the island, with a chance at a life she could call her own.
Not when Gustav still had that hard determination in his gaze that made her wonder what this new version of him was capable of.
They were married, yet she could feel this game was far from over.
“How do you see our life, Livia?”
“In the two hours I’ve had to contemplate it?” she asked, as if she were truly considering the question. “I’ll report back once I’ve digested what just happened. You, on the other hand, must have been planning this for a while.”
“Since the moment I saw the photographs of you and Edvin,” he said with a coldness that sent a shiver through her.
“So this is all about revenge and jealousy,” she shot back. “I made the mistake of giving you the benefit of the doubt, thinking I was just collateral in your game. But this is worse. I am your target.”
He flinched, but before he could speak, she added, “I guess it’s all the same to me. After all, this isn’t a real marriage.”
The expression that flickered across his face disappeared too quickly to read it.
“This marriage is very real, ?lskling, though I suppose I would have done the same thing no matter which heiress my brother chose.” His voice cold, and his words mocked her, but he smiled. “Of course, some things will be different.”
Then he flashed her a smile that was so seductively tempting and warm, and the cold from moments before turned to molten heat.
This was somehow worse. He was taunting her with her own desire.
Spitting her anger at him was not an actual solution to her problems, she reminded herself.
Even if it felt unspeakably good, she had to channel it toward a positive outcome.
Livia took a deep breath and reined her voice under control.
“Now that you have gotten all your plotting and planning out of the way, it should free up some time,” she said. “What comes next?”
Gustav’s eyes traveled over her bare shoulders like a caress. “It should leave plenty of time to enjoy my new wife.”
“And maybe dethrone your father?” she asked with an innocent smile.
The desire faded from his expression, and she got the uneasy feeling that she had hit on something. She registered that for later inspection.
“What do you think our marriage will be like?” she asked.
He tipped his head to the side a bit and studied her. Then his gaze traveled down her body, as if he were assessing a very expensive piece of art he had won at an auction. “Satisfying.”
* * *
Gustav absolutely would not feel guilty about any of his plans. Livia was not a pawn or a target. She had willingly entered into this game, as he had pointed out more than once, and he was treating her as such.
I would have done the same thing no matter which heiress my brother chose. The moment those words came out of his mouth, he realized they were a lie. The building blocks of a plan had been in place, but Livia had triggered him into action.
The possibility for a power coup had opened the year before, when his mother passed away after what had been delicately described as an unfortunate accident.
The fact that it involved the stone steps at the far edges of a garden party and most of a bottle of the nation’s favorite snaps still haunted Gustav, but he had chosen to turn the powerless feeling into action.
His mother had been unreachable for years, in mind if not in body, and yet Gustav had still abided by his mother’s wishes that he honor his father.
Mixed with the grief and anger over the course of her life and the tragedy of her death, in the lingering aftermath, he had found a much-needed clarity crystalize inside him: Her death absolved him from her wish.
If there was an afterlife, surely she would understand his actions when the results were clear?
From that day forward, he had watched for an angle in, waiting for a weakness to appear so that he could take advantage of it.
When his brother disappeared and even the royal guard was cagey about his whereabouts, Gustav’s plans had switched into high gear, and in less than a week, he had executed them.