by Millie Adams
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
IT WAS A beautiful day for a wedding. Too bad she still felt so terribly sad. But her gown was sensational, and even though her heart was sore, she looked like she ought to.
It was only her feelings that were not quite where she hoped they would be.
She had thought a lot about those feelings. Love. Of course, it was natural that she wanted love. But that did not mean she was in love with him.
That would be the saddest thing of all. It was only that she was lonely. And when he held her, it felt like something special. It was good she had not let him hold her last night. His arms contained a kind of magic that made her feel happy, but also sadder all at once.
And now they would be married.
She walked down to the chapel all on her own. It was different than the day of the coronation, when she had had Maximus to escort her. She held the bouquet of flowers that had been provided for her and looked down at the blossoms. A curl of blond hair fell into her face as she did, and she felt a strange cracking sensation about her heart. Her father should have been here. He should have been here to give her away. To place her on the arm of Maximus King, a man who would care for her. She felt a presence behind her. And she turned. It was Maximus.
“Are you ready?”
“Aren’t you meant to be inside?”
“Probably. But I came to find you.”
Her heart nearly flew from her chest. He came to find her.
She remembered being in that dungeon room. Being in the dark. Seeing him.
Knowing somehow that he would be her salvation, but she had not known it would be this.
Even though she had been too afraid to do it at the time, she reached her hand out for him, and he took it.
He was here.
He had come to find her, just now.
He would be her husband and she... She was happy about that.
“I was only thinking of my father,” she said softly. “It is not so much that I need a man to give me away. I do not. It is that a father cares for his children. For his daughter. And when he gives her to a man, he is giving her to a man he believes will care for her, if all is well. My father died in fear of the safety of his children. I am safe. I wish he could see. I wish that he could have given me to you, rather than seeing me stolen away by the men who then killed him. Though perhaps in his last moments it was not his concern.”
“The ones you love are always your concern,” Maximus said.
There was a flower pinned to the lapel of his suit jacket, and he snapped it off then. Then he placed it down on the stone wall right beside the entry to the church. “For your father.”
Tears filled her eyes and she broke a blossom off the top of her bouquet, then another. And she set them beside the first. “My mother and Marcus.”
“Do you know,” he said. “I never was a big believer in the afterlife. And spirits. And living on. But I know that it is Stella who guides me sometimes. My memory of her, her spirit, whichever you like to call it. They see you.”
She closed her eyes and nodded slowly. “Thank you.”
Maximus looked to the flowers. “I will keep her safe. I swear it with my life. If you were here, you would approve this match. You would know that I was sincere. That when I make vows I keep them. And I make this a vow. Annick will come to no harm as long as I am here. I would give my life for hers.”
Annick shivered. But she couldn’t speak.
“Shall we go in?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said.
He took her arm, and he led her up the aisle, as he had done for the coronation. The priest was there waiting, just as he had been then too, but Maximus stood with her. And these vows were not to the country, but to each other. The traditional vows always spoken at weddings in Aillette.
“The world is full of hard places,” she said slowly, reading from the paper she held in her hands. “But I will be soft for you. The world is full of uncertainty, but I will be constant. The world is out there, and we are here. And in my heart, you have become the world.”
When Maximus spoke, his rich voice filled the room, vibrated with her soul.
“The world is filled with danger, and I will be your strength. Your weapon. Your sword and your shield. I will be your guard. I will be your warrior. I will protect you and preserve you, for my life is yours. And my world is here.”
She was not supposed to believe it. It was not supposed to matter. Not quite to the degree that it did. But oh, how she wished she could. How she wished she could freeze all of this and hold it to her chest.
And when they were introduced as the sovereign rulers of Aillette, King Maximus and Queen Annick, she felt the strangest sense of wholeness. Of unity. She looked at him, and she looked out in the crowd, at the King family watching them, clapping for them. Applauding as if this was a common American affair.
And she felt...part of something. Part of a family. And Maximus had even included her parents. Had spoken vows to their spirits. And suddenly she didn’t feel so alone. And it was that hope inside of her that frightened her the most. That need.
Oh, how could she have ever talked herself into believing she did not love him? This beautiful, broken man who she had spirited away with the aid of chloroform, but who had turned the power around when he demanded marriage. This man who was trying to right wrongs that simply could not be fixed. This man made from lies and vengeance and a deep, unending love for another woman.
She loved him.
She did. There was nothing to be done for it. Nothing that could make it go away. And she didn’t even want it to. Because last night she had revisited that dungeon, and it was isolation. The bars were gone, and Maximus was there instead. Though he might be his own kind of prison. Yes, loving him might be its own kind of hell.
They were swept off to the reception. A large white tent lay out on the lawn. And she had never felt quite so broken or quite so happy in all of her life.
Her people were here, eating and smiling and free. It all made sense then. How she could live for them and herself. How those two things were not at odds. How she could love Maximus with deep ferocity and love them as well. How she could love him and expect nothing in return, but also want it desperately. How she could wish to devote herself to this country, but also wish to be a wife, and a mother to whatever children they had. Children who would also be both property of the country, and property of themselves. It was a difficult life, this. And one thing she was certain of when she stood there watching it all was that it took more courage and more love, and not less. You could not lead if you did not contain all these things. Not well. Not right.
And so it might be dangerous. To care like this. But if she did not, if she held back, if she tried to protect herself, then it would be like living in a dungeon. For then, in that life, she had held back everything that she believed, everything that she felt, simply because she had to protect herself. That had been a matter of life and death, but this was not. She could not hold back these feelings. To do so would make her a lesser Queen. To do so would make her less than Maximus deserved.
He had believed in love at one time. And all that he thought about the world had been destroyed. Cruelly. Could she not give him a piece of it back? She wanted to. Oh, how she desperately wanted to. For her Maximus King. Her King. Her husband.
Her love.
And she somehow knew innately that after today he would try to resist her. Because of course he would. It was the way of him. He drew close, and then away. What was he afraid of?
Feeling. She knew.
He was adamant that he had no heart left, but everything she had seen of him suggested otherwise.
The way that he stayed with his family, even with the issues he had with his father... No, he was not a man with no heart. Not a man with no soul.
He was a man with so much love to give, so br
ight and brilliant, like the sun that had been hidden from her for all those years. And it was nearly too much for her to bear. But also, she was sensitive to it. More perhaps than most because she had been kept in the darkness for so long. Because she had been kept away from people. And this thing between them... It was magic. It was more than necessity.
More than sex. She was certain of it.
She tried to remember back to when she had thought that sex was merely an appetite, as he had said. That he was a pastry she could go about sampling before she had another, and she realized what a foolish thing that was. There would never be another. Not for her. It was this broken man. With her. All broken. Together.
Yes, life was filled with tragedies, but looking at him now, she felt all of the miracles it contained as well. For he was a miracle to her.
She only hoped that she could be one for him.
And she would not let him pull away. Not tonight. Not on the night of their wedding.
She might have been a virgin only recently, but she was not afraid to seduce him.
She was not afraid to show him what was in her heart.
He had taught her about food, and the pleasure she might find there. His body, and all the joys that it contained. And now perhaps she would teach him about love. In the way that she understood it.
Love after brokenness.
After all these gifts he had given to her... Could she do anything less for him?
* * *
The wedding had left him feeling grim. Yes, it had been his idea, and yes, he had made many a bold declaration inside of himself that a wedding meant nothing, but he found it seemed less true than he would like.
By the end of the evening Annick was tired, he could tell. So when all the guests had left, he took himself off to his own chamber. He had a need for distance. His family was still in residence, and interacting with them was always a chore. Being that charming playboy that he was so accustomed to being... It was becoming a chore.
So what are you, then? The soldier?
He feared that it might be true.
That everything about Maximus King was simply a shell. That the one who was real was a man who took orders, carried out missions other men shied away from.
The one who pulled the trigger without mercy when necessary. The one who existed in a space between revenge and vigilante justice.
He had done good, but the question was, how much did he even care about it anymore?
If he were honest, he had lost that connection to Stella at some point over the years.
He no longer felt that deep, aching grief that he once had for her. No longer felt as if she was some sort of eternal love, a guiding light.
No. All had become darkness at a certain stage. Except Annick.
When he had walked Annick down the aisle today, when he had seen her in her gown, she had been light.
And he felt...reluctant to touch her. Like if he put his hands on her snow-white dress he would leave behind oily dark fingerprints. Or perhaps blood.
There was blood on his hands and he couldn’t even bring himself to feel guilty about it. And that bothered him more than anything.
At first... At first it had had a cost. Killing. At first, he had felt the weight of every life he had taken. Yes, it was no different than war. These military operations. He knew that; he understood it. Many men did such things. They fought for the safety of their country, the lives of their countrymen, and what he was doing was that. He killed dictators’ investments. Assassins. Murderers. None of them were innocent. But at a certain point, he had lost his own claim to innocence. He might be able to justify each and every thing he had done, might be able to weigh it against the lives those men would have eventually taken. But it did not make him a saint. It did not make him right.
He wondered sometimes if he was simply a man in darkness, the same as all of them. Choosing a side, and deciding it was right.
If the right evidence had been presented to him, would he have been involved in the removal of Annick’s father?
He wanted to say no. But there had come a point where he had chosen who he believed. About who was good and who was evil.
No, he never, ever would have harmed a woman or child, but even so.
He had questions about his own frailty.
And he wished to drown those questions away in alcohol tonight. Not in Annick.
There was a knock at his chamber door, and she appeared. As if he had conjured her up with the pour of the whiskey. Whiskey like he had on the plane.
Whiskey, which Annick claimed she never had.
Oh, Annick, far too innocent for him. Far too much of a soft, undeniable beauty. That was, he supposed, the trade-off of her being locked away in that abysmal room. She had not been able to touch the outside world, and it had not been able to touch her.
“What are you doing here?”
“What is this? This stupid question. Why do you think I’m here?”
“For a drink?”
“No. An insult, Maximus, that you think I’m here for anything other than my wedding night.”
“Such a traditionalist,” he said, fighting against the rising tide of lust that was taking hold. Doing away with any kind of defenses he’d put up.
He had promised her family he would care for her, and this vow he’d made to the dead felt binding. But it was heavy. For how could he be sure he would not fail her? How?
“Don’t take it as an insult.”
“I have.”
“I’m not in the mood.”
She looked at him, all narrowed eyes and indignation. “Me, I think you’re a liar.”
“Of course I’m a liar. A liar,” he said, advancing on her. “A liar who shows a mask to the whole world.” He took another step closer to her, a dangerous heat rising up inside of him. “A drunk.” He lifted his glass. Then he took another step toward his bride, so close that he could smell the lovely, enticingly feminine scent that he associated only and ever with her. “A killer.”
“Yes,” she said softly. “All these things. And me? I am broken. Grieving. Tragic. Ruthless. Innocent. Guilty. We are all a great many things, are we not?”
“Don’t test me tonight,” he said.
“It is for just that reason that I test you. Because you don’t wish it. Who wants to test a man who is prepared for that test? Boring.”
“Are you in danger of being bored?”
“Not with you. Never with you.” She closed the door behind her. “Also, I am not leaving. You do not scare me, Maximus King. I suppose I am now Annick King. You have made me a King as well.” Her lips tugged into a smile. “And a Queen. A strange thing.”
“I did not think a Queen would take the name of the man she married.”
“Maybe not in public. But in private, I would like to do so. I have no family. I like very much the idea of being part of yours.”
That brushed against that raw, deadly thing inside of him. “Whatever you wish.”
“And if I wish for my wedding night?”
“Unwise,” he said, tipping back the last of his whiskey.
“You keep saying this. As if there is a monster in you, waiting to savage me at the first available moment. But I have not met this monster. What would you say if I told you that I would like to meet him?”
“You don’t.”
“Why not? Did your Stella meet the monster?”
“Stella,” he said, his voice rough, “didn’t meet the monster because I was just a man when I was with her. Just one man. Not...whatever I have become.”
“Good,” Annick said. “I want to be the first. You were my first. Let me be yours.”
“There have been many women.”
“But none of them have met the real you, have they? No one has. Not your family...and even with me you hold back.”
&nb
sp; “I saw the dungeon that you lived in for all of your life. I feel sorry for you. I pity you. I would never put you in an even more pitiable position by exposing you to everything I am.”
“And me, I’m not fragile. You know what I’ve seen. The same things you have. The life of the ones I love drained away right before my eyes. How could you think that I am someone who needs to be protected from monsters? Maybe I am a monster as well. Maybe we all are, given the right circumstances. Maybe that is the real secret. That we are all of us capable of anything if pushed. I kidnapped a man and dragged him across the world in spite of the fact that I spent many years being held prisoner. You would think I would not be able to do so, but I did. When feeling desperate. Because we are all human. We just lie, all the time, about what it means to be human.”
“This is your final warning.”
He could feel the beast within pulling at the chains. He would give her something to be afraid of if she wasn’t careful.
“I do not do what I’m told anymore.” And then she unzipped that wedding gown and let it fall to the floor, revealing her bare, pale body, so fragile and lovely. Soft. Calling to everything that was dark and rough and hideous within him.
He wanted to devour her. Consume her. Make her his own. Utterly and completely. His captive.
His Queen. Did she understand that he was no better than those men that had held her for all those years? She didn’t seem to care. She was foolish for him, and it made him angry as much as it satisfied him. He had no real consistency when it came to her, and that bothered him most of all. He didn’t know what face to wear, what mask. And that resulted in this feeling that he had no mask at all. A fate that terrified him most of all.
“Give me your darkness.”
“No.”
“It is in our vows. And I will add to them. Give me your darkness and I will be your light.”
“You need all the light you have. If you have any yet remaining inside of you...”
“I will give it how I wish. It is not exhaustible.” She reached out and touched his face. “And when it is put up against the darkness, the light wins, Maximus. Every time.”
