Chapter Nine #2
“The truth is,” she said, “I was ready to run away from you. I was ready to start my life over with nothing. If you hadn’t come for me, that’s what I was going to do.”
“Is that why you speak to me like you have nothing to lose?”
“I don’t really,” she said. “It’s just been too many years of being treated like I don’t matter.
It’s been too many years of having to live with people who would rather I weren’t there.
This is what I was trying to tell you in the limousine that day.
I’m going to be a mother. And the one thing that my father could not do for me, at any point, was put me first. Was make sure that I was living in a house where I was treated well, or where people were really nurturing me or taking care of me. ”
She took a deep breath and he could see real hurt in her eyes, but also clarity.
“He hid behind his busyness. Behind his position. But at the end of the day, the thing he cared most about was himself. The thing he cared about was his own comfort. I won’t do that to my child.
And so if that means that I’m going to stand firm with you, then I’m going to.
Because part of that is not being treated like an incidental.
My child will have a good role model. Because that is the thing, my stepmother wasn’t very nice to my father either, and he just took it.
That was what I learned. To take it.” She shook her head.
“I cannot and will not instill being a doormat as a virtue, not in my child.”
“I don’t think I ever suggested that you should be a doormat.” He was offended by the mere suggestion. “Did you ever meet my wife,” he said.
She made a small sound. “Yes. I did. She was a very fierce woman.”
“Yes,” he agreed. “She was. Why would you think that I require something different from you?”
“Because you don’t love me. You don’t even trust me. You thought that I was lying to you about the baby.”
Something uncomfortable stirred in his stomach. “My marriage to Circe was not a love match.”
She blinked rapidly. He regretted saying that. It was dishonorable to her memory. And he certainly shouldn’t have said it to this woman that he barely knew, this woman that he’d slept with the night of Circe’s funeral, which was the height of disrespect in ways that he still felt so ashamed of.
“Oh,” she said.
“It was diplomatic,” he said. “Though, do not mistake me, I appreciated her. Her fire, her mind, her ferocity. The two of us may not have been emotionally attached to each other, but we were united in a common goal. I did not require her to give me fealty, I did not require her to do anything for me. What I required of her was that she be an exemplary queen.”
“And yet you treat me like I’m nothing, and I’m forced to assume it’s because of where I come from.
If you didn’t love Circe, and that’s not the source of your admiration for her mind, for the way that she acted, then I’m forced to assume that the truth is you don’t believe a woman born to my station can be smart with her stubbornness.
You called me manipulative. That’s your big fear.
That a low-born woman might have manipulated you. ”
“I don’t think any man relishes the idea that he might have someone else’s child foisted off upon him.”
“You believe the worst of me.”
“I had no reason to believe the best of you.”
“I’ve served you, in the palace all these years, and you thought that I was simply lying in wait to take advantage of you?
I would rather be free. I’ve never been on my own.
I’ve never been able to live my life on my own terms. Do you think that I crave power?
I don’t. That night, when I went to you, I saw a grieving man, and I wanted to comfort you.
I was not plotting anything. It was nothing more than real, that moment.
And you’ve destroyed it. Desecrated the memory of it because of your shame. ”
Her words hit him, square and true in the chest, and he had no good response to give her.
He was treating her like she had a stake in the shame, and that wasn’t fair.
It was his own, and not a reflection on her, but it was real all the same.
“I do feel shame about it. Because my wife deserves better. Deserved better than for me to find myself in the arms of another woman the night of her funeral because I was free of our vows.”
He felt bad about saying that. And yet it was true. Still, though, it seemed a poor thing to say. And he could see that reflected in her gaze.
“Then your anger is with yourself,” she said. “And you’ve turned it on to me. But I’ve had my fill of that, thank you very much. So I won’t be there to be a surrogate to your self-loathing.”
She moved away from him then, sitting in a far corner of the plane, curled up and ignoring him.
It was all for the best. He didn’t know what to say to her. When they landed, there was a car waiting for them at the runway.
“This isn’t an airport,” she commented.
“No. This is a private island. Owned by my brother-in-law.”
“He’s quite mysterious,” she said.
A strange spike of something hot hit him in the chest. “Not really. He’s the son of a Romanian crime lord.”
“Really?”
She sounded genuinely interested and he found that irritating.
“Yes,” he said. “Really.”
“That must be appalling to you,” she said.
“Why would it be?”
He got into the driver’s seat of the car.
There would be no staff on the island while they were here.
Everything was in place for them, meals had been preprepared and supplies had been delivered for the period of time that they would be taking their honeymoon, but they would be isolated.
It had been at his request. He did not need an audience for this prison sentence with his little maid.
“Because you’re deeply snobbish.”
“Andrei is and has been like family to me all of his life. I don’t care who his parents were.”
“You certainly care about who mine were.”
“No,” he said. “I don’t.” She was right. That was the problem. She was right about the fact that what he really hated was what this said about him. That what he really despised was his own weakness reflected back at him in her eyes. The way that she made him feel even now.
He had been angry, ever since he’d discovered her at the ball, but it wasn’t at her. It was him.
The way that he had let himself obsess about her. The way that he had become so…frail. So human.
It was something he had never been allowed to be, and he had flung himself into it, and it had been the easiest thing in the world to leap to the worst conclusion possible so that he could push those feelings away. So that he could discount them.
It was easier to believe that she had put some kind of spell on him than it was to believe that he was just a man. One who had been held captive by his cock.
It was beautiful on the island. He was having difficulty taking it in. She sat in the passenger seat, looking out the window, deliberately looking away from him, and he started up the engine, the car purring to life.
The GPS in the car was programmed to take them to the house, though Andrei had told him that it was all very basic because there was only one road that went all the way around the island, and another one that led up to where the house sat, perched on the only high elevation that the island possessed.
He was out of his element, out of his comfort zone. And that was a very strange experience.
He was used to having staff, not used to being isolated like this. If he traveled it was typically for diplomatic events. He didn’t take vacations. Certainly he had never gone on a trip like this with Circe.
For one, brief moment, he had the realization that he and Birdie were suddenly on equal footing.
She had never been here; neither had he. There would be no staff, no servants. Nothing to put her more closely in their category and not his.
Was he a snob? It was quite a snobbish thought to have, he supposed.
When they reached the house, he parked the car in front of it.
It was beautiful. Very unlike the palace.
Modern and made of heavy, dark concrete, the windows large and expansive.
It looked like a continuation of the mountain.
The same black-lava rock color all around them.
The bottom floor was completely shrouded by the jungle surrounding them.
And the second floor rose up above the palms, likely offering beautiful, circular views of the glorious Caribbean Sea.
There were cracks in the concrete, naturally occurring from the elements and from shifting; moss and vines had begun to grow around and in them. It had the look of an ancient temple, and he felt a quiet whisper in his soul that was something like reverence.
He looked at Birdie, and saw that the expression on her face was reflecting much the same thing.
It was…off-putting to say the least. To experience such a unified response to this woman who…
He didn’t like the way she made him feel.
That was what it came down to. It was inconvenient. And it had nothing to do with his running of the country.
Nothing to do with the legacy that he was chasing.
“I believe we will find the inside completely outfitted for our use.”
He looked at her, and then away. There was something about the clarity of her blue gaze that bothered him.
“Wonderful,” she responded.
Then she did some thing wholly unexpected. She walked ahead of him, and directly into the house without deferring to him, without waiting to see what he would do.
He followed behind her, but she was already halfway up the floating staircase at the entrance of the house when he got in.
“Where are you going?”
“I’m going to find my bedroom. I assume it will be the one with the women’s clothing in it. I would like a reprieve. And I would like perhaps to explore the island.”
“I…” He found himself speechless. He couldn’t remember the last time that it happened. He had a feeling it was around her, though, and he didn’t care for that at all.
“There’s no one here,” she said. “We have no need to perform. Even less than we had a reason to perform when we were in the palace. I find that cheering. Don’t you?”
He couldn’t say that he found anything cheering. Not at this particular moment. But before he could open his mouth to say it, Birdie had vanished up the stairs, and he heard the opening and decisive closing of the door. The click of a lock echoing through the empty house.
For the first time in his memory, Onyx had been firmly told exactly where he stood.
And it was on incredibly unhallowed ground.