Forbidden Royal Vows

Chapter Eight

CHAPTER EIGHT

M ILA KNEW THAT something had changed after that day she’d heard him on a call she wasn’t sure he’d meant her to witness. Something was different, though she couldn’t put her finger on it.

She wasn’t sure she liked that yearning thing inside her that wanted to know him inside and out in ways she certainly didn’t want to be known herself. She wasn’t sure she liked any of the messy, impossible things she felt these days, come to that.

Then again, September was waning all around them no matter how they filled their stolen days. It felt to her as if both she and Caius were on edge.

It was there in the way they devoured each other, but talked less. Everything was heat and flame, until she began to wonder if they would both burn to a crisp up here on her month away. The kingdom would look up and see nothing but a bright and burning torch where the September House had been.

Some part of her, she was unnerved to discover, actually craved that. As if self-immolation was that perfect solution she still hadn’t been able to find. Instead of a daydream of pure, outrageous selfishness. Not to mention anathema to everything she’d always believed she was.

But that was the trouble with spending time with Caius. She began to imagine that almost anything was possible.

When she knew better.

No matter how she agonized, no matter all the what-ifs that sometimes kept her awake at night wrapped up in his arms—thinking through one implausible scenario after the next—she knew better.

Her life had been planned from the start. It had never been her own, no matter those stolen weeks with him. It wasn’t hers to give away to her feelings— something she’d seemed to understand more fully the last time.

Yet the more torn-up she felt that their end was nearing, the more ravenous he became.

And though she prided herself on never shying away from a difficult conversation, that, too, was different when it was Caius. She tried to tell herself that was only because they had both known, this time, that there would be nothing else.

Maybe this was simply how it would be between them this time, in lieu of any unpleasant scenes.

She told herself she ought to be happy with that. But what she felt, instead, was that she’d miscalculated. There would be no grand ceremonies to throw herself into on the other side of him this time. She had nowhere to ascend now that she was already Queen. She did not have to race home to the palace to comfort her sister, who had never enjoyed as peaceful a relationship with their father as she had. Or to perform her duties seamlessly and beautifully for her mother, who would not speak of her grief, only the future that Mila needed to embody to make it all right that her husband, the King, was gone.

It was beginning to seem clear that she might find this parting more difficult to bear than the last, and with less distraction. Fewer great griefs.

There would be no state funerals or coronations to concern herself with once September ended. There would only be whatever was left of her heart in his wake.

“Where will you go next?” she asked him on one of their last nights in the house, though neither one of them had mentioned next .

Until now, she supposed. Obliquely.

They’d thrown together one of their typical dinners tonight and she was trying her best not to let herself get too emotional—something she had never had to worry too much about and was now going to have to learn how to tuck away again, out of sight, if perhaps not as out of mind as she might wish—over the ease of it. Of simply being in the same rooms Caius inhabited.

After all these weeks they could predict each other’s movements, in the kitchen as well as in bed. And there was something poignant and marvelous about the dance of that kind of intimacy. They hadn’t experienced that before. There had been too much camping, too much hiking, so that everything was always new. Including them.

Mila had not expected the romance of familiarity. Handing him the utensil he needed before he asked for it. The way he moved around her, with the brush of his hand against her hip to let her know where he was, or the touch of his arm to hers because they were close.

The truth she did not know how to process was that she didn’t know how she was going to do without this.

This forbidden intimacy she hadn’t known she hungered for so deeply.

And this time she couldn’t tell herself that the memories she had of him were overblown, that he was just a madness induced by those months of living a life she could never have.

Now he gazed at her as they sat before the fire. They had eaten, speaking in their new, slightly careful manner about things like history, change, and the march of progress, even in monarchies like hers. When she had suggested something sweet to finish off the meal, they had decided the best dessert around was each other.

He had risen, eventually, to bring the wine over and now they were sprawled out on the plush, cozy rug that was tossed out before the fire. She rather felt that they were in some kind of a cave tonight. As if they could as easily be ancient people doing ancient things, with only the light of the fire as witness.

More lives she could only daydream about, she knew.

“Are you throwing me out already?” he asked, mildly enough, but she didn’t much like that, either. It was the way he sounded now, no longer all that marvelously textured gold. There was something like flint in it.

His wizard’s eyes still gleamed, he was right here , but she couldn’t reach him.

Mila hated it.

And she was making herself sick with all her decorum. With how much it cost to maintain her composure when they talked, if not when he was inside her.

It made her ache.

But, “I’m not throwing you out at all,” she told him, and took more pride than necessary in how calm she sounded despite that ache, that sickness. How serene, with a glass of courage in her hand. “Yet in two days’ time, like it or not, I will have to return to the palace. In all of my state. There will be no nudity near the fireplace, because what if the servants saw me? There will certainly be no unmarried cavorting of any kind.” Ever again , she thought, and she meant to laugh. But the sound that came out didn’t quite qualify as laughter, and that ache in her hardened into something far more precarious. “It doesn’t seem like there’s a whole lot to recommend it, if I’m honest.”

“But you must do your duty.”

Mila didn’t much care for the way he said that, with that unmistakable edge to it.

Or maybe she didn’t like it because it was true. “I must,” she agreed.

And when he reached over and tugged her close, so she could sprawl across his body and he could set his mouth at her collarbone, she was grateful.

Because this fire, she understood.

Maybe it was better to stop talking altogether. That the way they devoured each other, rested as briefly as possible, and then went back for more was the only conversation that was necessary.

The next day they stayed too long in bed together in the morning. He rolled her beneath him, stretched out over her, and broke her into very small, very jagged pieces by taking it slow.

So slow there was nothing to do but stay there. In that gaze of his, all that lost magic she couldn’t bear to lose again. In his arms, where she fit so beautifully. In the sheer, glowing wonder of this thing she couldn’t have.

Caius set a pace that made her want to cry, it was so devastating. It was so shattering, so demanding, so intensely revealing.

He wrung every bit of emotion from her, brought her close to relief and then kept going, and Mila thought it was possible she would never recover.

That she would never feel clothed again, having let him strip her so naked.

She couldn’t tell if she wanted to rejoice in that, or collapse somewhere and sob.

In the shower, before he joined her, she could pretend it wasn’t tears on her face. She could prop herself against the wall and ask herself if it was possible for her to die from all this vulnerability.

Or if its curse was she would only feel as if she might.

As if she had.

She was the one who suggested a long walk to get the blood pumping more productively.

“You and I have very different definitions of the word productive ,” Caius told her darkly as they set out.

But she let the mountain do the talking for her. They hiked up one of the trails that led straight away from the back of the house, winding in and out of the woods and then out at last to what Mila believed was the most beautiful view of the kingdom in existence.

It never failed to soothe her. Even now, she could feel it sink into her, the sight of the lakes far below. The green hills. The villages dotted in the far reaches of the valley and then, far off where she couldn’t quite see it, the palace she knew waited on the other side.

“It looks so beautiful from up here.” They stopped at the bench one of her ancestors had installed a long time ago, because she wasn’t the only one who loved this view. “It’s beautiful down there, too, but from up here it’s like a sparkling little jewel of a country, isn’t it?”

Beside her, Caius said nothing.

And she was...less soothed. A bit raw, in fact.

That vulnerability did not seem to be going away.

Instead, it seemed to wind its way deeper and deeper inside of her, like a grief all its own. It made her wish that she was someone else. Anyone else.

It made her wonder, for the first time in all her life, why she was so certain she couldn’t be—

But it was nearly October. This high up they were well into the fall already, and gearing up for the long winter ahead. There was a hard, crunchy frost on the ground, and it had already snowed while they’d been here. This high up, the air was bright and crisp, no matter how cold. The mountains ringing the valley were capped and white and more than ready for the colder weather that wasn’t hiding its approach any longer.

Yet all she could think about was the man beside her, whose eyes glowed with more and more secrets by the day.

While she felt splayed wide open.

And it was something much deeper than an ache.

She thought back to that first night in the house. When she had let him in through the tunnels and he taken her right there on that couch. How when he’d stood up to get rid of his clothes he’d tugged something over his neck, then tucked it away before she could see what it was.

That was what she’d told herself anyway. That she hadn’t seen it.

And she couldn’t tell, out here in this confronting cold, if it was true that she hadn’t laid eyes on it at all and had merely filled in the blanks in her own imagination, or if she really had glimpsed it.

She wasn’t sure which one should worry her more, since both seemed tender. Both hurt her, if in different ways.

“You normally wear a chain around your neck, don’t you?” she asked.

He let out a sound then. Too low, too ripe with the very shadows she was pretending she didn’t see. “Be careful where you tread, Mila. You might find something you can’t ignore. And then what will you do?”

She could already feel the different parts of herself fighting for supremacy inside her. It was easy to be the Queen in the palace. Just as it was easy to be just Mila here. But this close to leaving the September House, both of them were inside her, pushing and pulling.

It was the Queen who sat straighter, lifting her chin. But it was the Mila who had been here this whole month who gazed at him, sure that all that vulnerability was splashed across her face.

“If it was a chain,” she said quietly, so very quietly she almost wondered if the wind might steal her words away, “I think I know what normally hangs on it.”

He stood up then, thrusting his hands deep into the pockets of the coat he wore. Like everything else that was his, it had been made by the finest craftsman and tailored to make him look even more effortlessly heroic than he normally did. Maybe it was simply that he stood at the edge of a cliff, his eyes out on the beautiful valley so far below while the cold wind moved through his hair. Maybe it was the distance she could see in his gaze, even though she didn’t feel that distance between them, not entirely. Not when her body was still warm from his.

Not yet , something in her warned. But you will .

“How do you think I should answer that, Mila?” he asked in a growl, when the misery inside of her seemed to be at a boiling point. “Should I wrap it up into some kind of charming anecdote that we could tell at a boring dinner party? Is that really how you think this should go?”

She felt a kind of panic, then. It was the only way she could describe the sensation that washed over her. It was the only explanation for the way she opened her mouth to speak, but then couldn’t find the words.

As if her own hand was clenched tight on her own throat.

He turned back to her then and his eyes were glittering, as bright as the jewel of her country behind him. Brighter, somehow. Because her kingdom was something Mila gazed upon. But Caius’s eyes tore into her.

Because he was the only person alive who saw every part of her. Who knew every bit of her.

And she was going to have to give him up.

Again.

“It’s my wedding ring,” he said in that uncompromising way of his, so at odds with the Caius he showed everyone else in public. But she had no doubt that this was the real him. She knew this version of him. This was the Caius she knew in bed. “But I suspect you know that. I wear it next to my heart. Isn’t that a laugh? While I have seen no evidence to suggest that you possess a heart, I still think it might matter if I keep the ring you gave me warm with mine.”

She was surprised she didn’t topple over, that blow hit her so hard. “That isn’t fair.”

“I didn’t realize that fairness was a part of this.” He shook his head. “I rather thought this was an extended torture session. I will admit that I had aspirations for more in the beginning, but that will never happen, will it? You decided who we were to each other long ago. And heaven forfend the great Queen of Las Sosegadas change her mind once it’s been made up.”

Mila found herself on her feet, her whole body shaking as if she’d just run up the side of the high peak that towered above them. “That is quite a characterization. Insulting, but I assume that’s the point. We’ve had this whole month, Caius. That’s something I never thought would be possible. Why can’t we take it for what it was?”

“I study the laws of your kingdom,” he told her, that glittering thing still in his gaze. It made her shake even more. “It’s become something of an obsession of mine. Did you know that the legal spouse of the heir apparent ascends right along with the crown prince or princess on the very day of ascension? A coronation is just icing on the cake.”

When she only stared back at him wordlessly, the corner of his mouth twisted into that famous smirk of his. She hadn’t seen it in weeks. She hadn’t missed it.

“All this time I have already been your king,” he said, and his voice was mocking now, with that bright fire in his gaze. Once again, she almost wished he would simply let her burn. “Some countries demote a man when he’s married to the sovereign. But not here. This country has always understood who is in charge, as do I.” He even sketched a sardonic bow. “Your Majesty.”

Not My Majesty , she noted. As she was meant to.

And they both knew it was a demotion.

Her throat hurt as if someone really had choked her, but she made herself speak. “So we will end as we began, then? With more threats?”

“I don’t want to threaten you,” he threw back at her. “But I don’t know what to do with the fact that I’ve been walking around with a wedding ring all these years. I don’t know where to put that, Mila. At least before I came here I could pretend to myself that it mattered. That those months mattered, even if nothing came of them. That maybe you were out here living on that memory the same as I was, but you weren’t. You won’t.”

He walked toward her then and for an exhilarating, much-too-telling moment, she thought he would sweep her up into his arms—

But he didn’t.

Caius passed her instead and started for the trail back down to the house.

“I never forgot you,” Mila said then, foolishly. Recklessly. And when she turned around, she could see that he’d gone still. He’d stopped right there where the trees were about to swallow him whole, though he didn’t turn back. “And I still have the ring. I could never throw it away. I keep it on a chain myself and hide it away in a safe space, but I always know where it is.” She wanted to stop there, but there was something inside of her that couldn’t. That wouldn’t. Maybe that was why she felt as if she was choking—maybe it was happening from the inside out. “I always know where you are, Caius.”

She saw something go through him, like another gust of wind, though the branches of the trees around him did not move at all. And he looked back over his shoulder, his eyes brilliant there against the backdrop of evergreens.

“I would like to tell you that I would find it an insult if you thought you could call me up once a year to play house with you, Your Majesty .” And her title was even sharper and more damaging this time. “But I think we both know that’s not true. All you need to do is call and I’ll come running. Like the little lapdog I suppose I’ve been to you all along.”

He stared at her for another long moment, then he turned and disappeared down the trail. And Mila wanted to run after him, but her knees stopped working. They gave out completely.

She sank down heavily on that bench again, looking out at the kingdom. It was beautiful. Truly it was, but how had she never noticed how distant the kingdom seemed from here?

Because that was the point of all of this, she understood as she sat there, feeling far worse than simply vulnerable now. Thrones and crowns, rituals and schedules. The demands of aristocracy. The expectations of royalty.

All of it was to create that distance. And to keep that distance, day after day, year after year.

And this time when she cried, her tears turned her cheeks ice cold.

Her body followed, as if he’d never warmed her at all.

She couldn’t stand it, so Mila got up and headed down that path herself, but she should have known before she got there that it was too late.

Because Caius was gone.

He’d taken her keys and left them in the door to the tunnels. She stood down there in the dim light, using the thick walls to prop herself up, for a long, long time.

It seemed to take a lifetime to climb back up that spiral stair. To wind around and around without him. To make her way through the cellars and back up into the kitchen that seemed to echo all around her without him.

Everything was too big, too empty. Nothing fit.

Mila decided that she couldn’t face staying here for the last little bit of time she had left without him. The remaining time stretched out before her like a prison sentence. What would she do? Just float like a ghost through this house, missing him with every step?

The very idea felt like torture.

So instead, she called for her car and headed back to the palace early.

That meant she had extra time to turn herself back into the Queen .

She had to ride down from the September House and put her mask back on. Her armor. She had to root out every soft place, inside and out, and wall it up. She had to wrestle her body back under control, because the way she wanted him was physical , and still forbidden.

With every kilometer, she forced herself to remember who she was.

The closer they got to the palace, the more she reminded herself of what her life was, would be, and always had been. Who it was promised to. And what her duty required of her.

Mila is dead once more , she told herself as the car pulled in through the palace gates, and they shut tight behind her. Long live the Queen.

She woke up the next morning and surrendered herself to the team of aides who tended to her wardrobe, her skin care, her hair, and everything else concerning her appearance. She let them sigh and cluck over her as they repaired the damage of her month away, muttering over her cuticles and giving her hair what they called a little gloss .

Mila presented herself at a private dinner with her mother. Then she sat there while Alondra, seeming not to notice her daughter’s mood, launched into her usual recitation of gossip, innuendo, and scathing commentary on everyone and everything Mila had just spent a month forgetting.

Back in her rooms, she could feel that ring in the back of its secret drawer, seeming to pulse like it had its own heart. Like it was beating to its own rhythm. Like it was shooting out light and heat, daring her to keep ignoring it.

But she did.

She got up and went out to her little viewing room instead. She wrapped herself in quilts. She got into her personal supply of wine, and she watched Caius’s films.

In chronological order.

They were love stories.

But they were not happy. They were textured and complicated. They were tragic and they were beautiful, and she could see him and her stamped deep into all of them.

And so there, on her favorite couch, alone at last, she cried.

That terrible ache. That impossible grief.

Oh, how she cried.

The next day, she was absurdly grateful to throw herself into her usual roster of meetings and appearances, and only slightly puffy and hungover after her aides were done with her. That night, she went to a dinner where she sat between two equally tedious self-styled titans of industry , where all she was required to do was nod sagely and make the odd opaque remark.

And it was fine, she told herself back in her rooms again that night. Once again refusing the siren call of her ring. The ring that he wore around his neck. Right there, next to his heart—

But it did her own heart no good to think of it.

It did her no good to think of him at all.

All thinking about him did was keep her up at night, watching the films he’d helped make. The films he’d tinkered with, like a mechanic after all, to create art while all she could do was sob.

And then suffer through her aides clucking all around her as they tried to repair the dark circles beneath her eyes the next day.

It did her no good to dream about him, either, because her body refused to understand that he no longer slept there next to her, that long, rangy body of his sprawled out beside hers, with a muscled arm tethering her in place.

A dream just like that woke her on her third night back in the palace.

He wasn’t there, she knew that, but it took a while before she could do more than stare at her ceiling. Before the tears stopped sliding down her cheeks to make her ears wet.

And she couldn’t fall back asleep.

But it was productive, Mila told herself, because she used the time to plan. Who she would call in her legal office to come talk to her about what had happened long ago in America. Who she would trust with that information, and who she thought would give her the best advice in return. Who, then, she could trust to hunt Caius down and handle him appropriately. So that, whatever else happened, they could legally be separated. As quietly and under the radar as possible.

Something she should have done five years ago.

Mila told herself that the emptiness she felt, that stunning desolation, was nothing more than a quiet certainty that she was on the right path at last.

And that was why she was particularly unprepared for the morning papers.

They were delivered without comment with the breakfast that she always took in her private sitting room. It took her a few more moments than usual to stop staring pointlessly out the window and to unfold the paper on top.

It took longer to stare at that picture on the front page.

Without a shred of comprehension.

Because she recognized the people in that image, but she couldn’t let herself understand what she was seeing.

She was slow to put that puzzle together. Possibly because her brain rejected the possibility that she could be looking at such a thing at all.

It was a picture from the Garden Gala. She recognized the hedge towering there in the background. She stared at that hedge for a long while.

A very long while.

But she was quite certain that the only thing anyone else saw were the two people in the center of the photograph. Mila and Caius, doing absolutely nothing untoward.

That was what was almost funny about it. Of all the pictures that could have been taken, this was the most innocent.

They were simply walking side by side, coming out of the maze together.

But it was the way they were looking at each other.

She could see that immediately.

It was the way she was looking at him.

Mila had a look on her face that made three things abundantly clear:

One, that Queen Emilia of Las Sosegadas was a woman, made of flesh and blood and desire , not simply a monarch.

Two, that there was something unquestionably electric and charged and even carnal between her and Caius. The fact that the evidence was simply right there in the way they gazed at each other, even though they were fully clothed, somehow made it all the more blazingly obvious.

And three, the thing she’d been dreading since California had finally happened. The proverbial had hit the fan, with a vengeance.

She had finally caused the scandal she had vowed to her father she wouldn’t. She had finally become the very thing she had worked so hard to avoid. She had betrayed herself in every way and worse, she had betrayed everyone else, too.

And now they would all know it.

While Mila knew that it was only the tip of the iceberg.

Caius Candriano, her one and only mistake, was going to take her down after all.