Chapter Eleven #2
Because she wasn’t wrong, she told herself. And Kyriakos knew that he was.
And when she thought that, it seemed to shift something inside of her, like another bit of that feminine wisdom she hadn’t known she had.
A deep kind of knowing, perhaps.
Kyriakos had taught her things about her body and her capacity for pleasure that had changed her so profoundly that she was shocked that she could look in the mirror and still see her same face looking back.
But Aikaterini didn’t think that that meant he was the expert on everything. He certainly didn’t seem to know much about feelings. Even when he was having big ones.
Maybe especially then.
Meanwhile, she had been hiding her real self her whole life. For good reason—but that meant she knew what it looked like when someone else was doing it in front of her.
And that was what got her moving.
Aikaterini marched back out of the building, nodding as serenely as possible to all the attorneys she passed, and set off to see if she could find her husband.
She was heading for the front of the palace when a movement in the corner of her eye caught her attention. She stopped walking, and frowned out toward the gardens.
It was dark now, and clear after all the earlier rain, with patches of inky, midnight blue in the night sky arched up over the sea.
But there were torches everywhere, lighting up the garden pathways that moved between hedges and flower banks, flowering trees and gazebos, overgrown passageways and hidden grottoes.
Following her instinct, and maybe whatever she’d thought she’d seen, she moved toward the nearest path. Then she started to wander her way along—though not entirely aimlessly.
Because after she’d walked a few minutes, she saw a bit of movement again, and she knew it was him. She would know that astonishing, sculpted form anywhere.
Aikaterini could pick Kyriakos out in the black of night. It was even easier with torches dancing in the breeze.
And when she reached him, he was standing there at what they called the Edge of the World.
It was an optical illusion made by the slope of a hill. Because the slope on the other side cut away dramatically, it looked as if a person could walk to the edge and fling themselves from there into the ocean. When in fact, the ocean was some ways away.
Kyriakos had stopped there and was looking out at the high waves in the distance, and so she took her time walking up behind him.
When she did, she came around so she could stand beside him. And for a moment, the two of them simply stood like that. Breathing in the sultry island air, cool at this time of year but still sweet and soft.
She didn’t come out here much, and Aikaterini thought she needed to change that.
Because there was something specifically wondrous about this particular spot on the island.
The palace was behind them. The ocean was a good fifteen minutes’ walk in front.
If she turned her head to one side, she could see the bright lights of the city gleaming far in the distance.
On the other, there was only the gardens and protected land.
Zaccaria felt vast and mysterious, cloaked in the thick darkness of late fall.
Standing here tonight, Aikaterini felt as if anything was possible. As if there was magic in the air like salt and none of them could possibly escape without it finding a way deep inside them.
Here, in the dark, she accepted the fact that she didn’t really want to leave.
She didn’t want to leave this place. She didn’t want to leave this man. She didn’t want to leave the life that she lived here and all of the people who she tried her best to represent—people who meant so much to her in a thousand different ways.
She didn’t want to reinvent herself, or stagger about through the rest of her years knowing that she had loved a man this much, lost him, and left him.
Though she also knew that she was resolved to do it if she had to.
If it was necessary.
Aikaterini just hoped against hope that it wasn’t.
“Kyriakos,” she began.
“It is as if I do not know my own heart,” he gritted out in a low voice, still not looking at her. “It is as if it is a stranger that beats in my chest, and I cannot account for it.”
“Perhaps you’re confused,” she suggested, because she couldn’t help but throw that back in his face.
He turned to stare at her then, and he looked about as close to outraged as she’d ever seen him.
“It hurts, Aikaterini,” he thundered at her. He slammed his hand onto his chest as if he wanted to stop his own heart beating. “Do you understand? It hurts.”
But she smiled as if he had given her a gift. It was coming up on December, the holidays were closing in, and this growl of outrage was the loveliest thing he could possibly have done for her.
And she knew he didn’t even realize it.
“Why are you smiling?” he all but shouted at her.
She moved closer to him and wrapped her arms around his waist, then melted against him. She could feel the resistance in every part of his body, but he didn’t push her away.
Instead, his hands came to her upper arms and he held them. She could feel the heat of his grip and the glory of his strong body, all around her.
How funny that she’d once convinced herself he was anything but beautiful.
But he wanted to know why she was smiling.
“Because you might be a PhD in deflowering virgins and all things sexual,” she said, her smile widening as she gazed up at him. “And I’m no medical doctor. But if you think you’re going to escape me by having a heart attack tonight, I am very sad to tell you that you’re absolutely fine.”
Kyriakos looked something like disgruntled for a moment. “Of course I am not having a cardiac event, Aikaterini. I take my health and fitness seriously.”
But this was something he could not run from, or lift weights to battle.
“Your heart hurts because you care,” she told him softly. “You care about the principality. You care about the palace. You care what the people think because you care very deeply that you do a good job at this thing you never thought would be yours to do.”
She felt his grip tighten, but that only made her smile more.
“You care so much, Kyriakos, and I know that goes against everything you always thought you were. Because the spare has to be funny, doesn’t he?
He has to be in on the joke that is his existence or the crowd turns on him.
Therefore he must always be the first one to talk about cannon fodder, or that his life is a footnote, that he’s but one heartbeat away from the top spot, and all the rest of it.
As if that wasn’t a human being, your very own cousin, whose heart stopped. ”
Whose heart had stopped and who had gone too soon, she thought, and without ever knowing or even desiring the kind of passion that Kyriakos had taught her.
She could not believe that his life was a waste, but she mourned what he’d never known as much—perhaps more—than what he’d lost.
But she was here, now. Alive. In love. Aikaterini slid her hand up to cover Kyriakos’s heart again, the way she had before. Unlike before, she felt that shudder go all the way through him. “And I regret to inform you that you care about me, too.”
She felt his body tighten, but she didn’t move away from him.
“Before you argue with me, it’s not a debate.
I know that you do. I was there when you patiently made love to me, when you already knew that I wouldn’t have known the difference.
You are the one who taught me how to see stars when you could have taught me to be disappointed.
To lie there and think of the good of the country.
For it to be a nonevent, at best. But you didn’t, did you? ”
“Doing the bare minimum hardly makes me a hero,” Kyriakos bit out.
“I don’t think anyone would describe what happens between us as the bare minimum,” she said, her smile taking her over again.
“I’ve been studying up on it. I’ve been watching all sorts of things I’m sure the palace wishes I wouldn’t, in case it got out.
I’ve been reading everything I can get my hands on.
And it all circles back to the same thing.
If you didn’t care, you wouldn’t go so far out of your way to make sure that every single time we touch is like lightning.
Fire and thunder and all the rest of it. ”
“I don’t know how to be the kind of man you seem to think I ought to be,” Kyriakos told her after a moment, and this time the words were quiet.
Painful. “I’m not sure that man exists, and if he does, it has never been me.
I’m not sure I’m cut out for any of this.
You and Venediktos were trained your whole lives—”