And the tone he used made her chest...hurt.
“What did my father say?” she asked, because she’d seen them, off to the side in a little alcove, where no one else could hear. And she knew full well how her father liked to take advantage of things when no one else could hear him.
She felt a clock ticking inside her, so loud that her head ached.
Time is running out, something within her whispered.
Because somehow, she’d forgotten that the point of all of this was Melody. Taking her father’s power so that he couldn’t hurt Melody. It was Orion’s fault. He had made her feel things she would have said she didn’t believe in—
But none of that mattered. It couldn’t matter, not until the board meeting was done. On December 23, she would take on her father, and win. At last.
Even if, inside, it felt as if she’d already lost.
It doesn’t matter how it feels, she snapped at herself. It matters that you get it done so Melody is never at risk again.
“What do you imagine your father had to say to me?” Orion asked, and for the first time in this interminable car ride, he actually angled his head to look at her.
The breath left her in a harsh exhalation she could do nothing to prevent.
Because for the first time, possibly ever—and certainly in as long as she’d known him—King Orion looked...
Furious.
“I’ve no idea,” she gritted out, though that was a lie, and her heart was galloping.
“I blame myself,” he said in a gritty sort of voice that didn’t make anything better. “After all, you did warn me. Repeatedly. But somehow, I thought your loathing of your father would win the day.”
She tried to make her heart stop racing. “Everybody loathes my father. He inspires it in everyone. I’m not sure that’s newsworthy.”
“Understand this,” Orion told her then, his voice a hard thing and his dark gold gaze pinning her to her seat. “I am not embarrassed by my inexperience. If it were splashed across every paper in the land, I would not care at all. I kept my vows of celibacy because I wanted to keep them, and I broke them because I wanted to break them. You and your father cannot shame me with the truth.”
His name was on her lips, but she bit it back. She didn’t dare.
Orion held that terrible gaze on hers. “What shames me, Calista, is that I imagined you were better than him.”
Calista felt sick.
She hated herself, deeply and wildly, and she hated most of all that she’d felt she had no choice but to throw her father a bone. Because she had to keep him happy and distracted or she knew she would never see her sister again. He would ship her off somewhere, never tell her where, and if Calista was lucky, she might get upsetting reports about how Melody was faring from time to time.
It was more likely that he would act as if Melody had never existed, just to torture Calista.
She could see it all unfold before her as if it had already happened.
The decision should have been an easy one. She hated that it hadn’t been. That telling her father something so private had made her feel as dirty and disgusting as he was.
It had never occurred to her that he would sell her out so quickly. Not before the wedding, anyway.
“I had no choice,” she said now, trying not to sound as miserable as she felt.
“No attempts to convince me it wasn’t your fault, I see. No tears, no protestations.”
She lifted her chin, even though there wasn’t a single part of her that didn’t want to curl into a ball and die. “I think you know that my father delivered me into your hands for one reason only. To funnel information back to him.”
He let out a hollow laugh. “Why did I imagine otherwise?”
“I don’t believe you did,” she made herself say, as if nothing had changed between them from that first meeting to now. “Not really.”
Another laugh, as if he was angry at himself, not her. Or perhaps both. “It is good to know that you follow instructions to the letter, Calista. Something I will have to keep in mind in the future.”
She wanted to cry. She wanted to hit things, or possibly just crawl away somewhere and sob her heart out.
Instead, she made herself glare at him. “I warned you. I told you not to trust me. There was no reason why you should have in the first place.”
And her heart stuttered in her chest when he reached over and took her chin in his fingers.
“Because I wanted to trust you, Calista,” he bit out. “Because I knew exactly who you were, but I hoped—I wished—that you might surprise yourself.”
“Then you really are a fool,” she threw back at him, though it made her shake. “What did you imagine? That you could change the world simply because you decreed it?”
She jerked her chin out of his fingers, but she was all too aware that he let her go. And more, that she wished he hadn’t.
“Yes,” Orion said, starkly. “I thought you would want to change.”
He couldn’t have hurt her more if he’d swung and hit her.
Hard.
Her breath left her as if he had.
“You will never know how much I wanted—”
But Calista cut herself off, because it was all futile. It didn’t matter. This was never the part of her life that was supposed to matter. This was the distraction, and she didn’t understand when or how the King of Idylla had shifted everything around inside her.
When he had got to her and got her so...muddled.
Some mornings, she woke up and forgot all about board meetings and Skyros Media and her lifelong dream of bringing down her father.
For hours.
And every time she remembered, it was another betrayal of her sister.
She couldn’t pretend she hadn’t known, when she’d chosen to give her father information about Orion—much less that information—that she was sacrificing those hours of freedom, no matter how much she’d loved to forget the mess of it all. The squalid dirt that had made her family’s name.
She knew full well she was sacrificing the bright glow of these past weeks for the same cold future she’d always been aiming toward.
It was the right thing to do, she told herself, again and again. A king would always prosper, but the same couldn’t be said of Melody, there beneath their father’s thumb.
But that it was right didn’t make it hurt less.
Calista was starting to think that the hurt was a part of it, and one more price she would have to pay.
Sometimes, looking at him, it almost felt worth it.
“I don’t understand any of this,” she said, trying to keep her eyes away from him in the shadows of the back seat, because it was too painful. But it didn’t work. “You and I should never have met. You should never have told me that you were a virgin. All of this could have been avoided if you’d stood up to my father in the first place. It wasn’t your sin. It was your father’s.”
She shook her head, terribly afraid that the sobs that caught in the back of her throat might pour out now, whether she wanted them to or not. She felt jagged and broken and hurt, and she didn’t have the slightest idea what to do about any of it.
“You’re the bloody king, Orion. Surely you could have made this—made him—go away.”
His mouth twisted, and there was something so savage in his eyes then it made her heart skip a beat.
“It’s not my father’s sins that worry me,” he belted out. “It’s my mother’s.”
She gaped at him. He muttered something that might have been a curse, then dragged his hands over his face. Then he pressed the button that allowed him to talk to his driver and ordered the man to pull over to the side of the road.
When the car stopped, Orion threw open the door and the sea rushed in.
Calista was breathing too hard. As if she
’d been running all the way down the long island road from the villa instead of sitting in his car.
And she didn’t want to follow him out. She didn’t want to hear any more of his secrets. Because she’d told him he couldn’t trust her, but worse than that, she didn’t trust herself.
She was terrified, not that he would tell her more secrets that she would feel compelled to tell her father.
But that he would tell her enough of his secrets that she wouldn’t share them with her father.
And Melody would pay the price.
What would any of this have been for?
Calista could hear the crash of the winter sea against the rocks. She told herself that was what lured her out, crawling carefully from the car and closing the door behind her. And taking a moment, then, to lean against the side of the vehicle and wait for her eyes to adjust.
When they did, the stars were so bright in the night sky above her it took her breath away.
And when she angled her gaze away from the resplendent sky, it was to see Orion standing there on a flat rock overlooking the rocky shore, like a dark dream made real.
She was as drawn to him now as ever, she understood with a little jolt inside, no matter if it was against her will. Especially now he knew exactly how perfidious she was. The lengths she was willing to go.
The betrayer she’d become to fight a man who had made her in his image after all. Because all the whys didn’t matter. She’d sold Orion out.
Though, tonight, all the things she’d been telling herself for years to keep herself focused on felt flat inside her. Like paltry little excuses.
In order to save one person who mattered to her she’d lost another.
She didn’t know how she was meant to live with that.
He didn’t turn around to see what she was doing, and maybe that was why she felt so drawn to him. His certainty. How sure he was of himself, so that when he’d actually made love for the first time in his life, she would have sworn that he’d had decades of experiences.
She had let him get close to her. Close enough to shame her, and she didn’t know how she was supposed to cope with that. How she was supposed to carry on doing what she’d always done when she knew that this sickening current of self-disgust could just...bloom inside her the way it did?
“I’m sorry,” she whispered when she reached him.
But the December wind, cool enough to make her shiver, if not cold in any real sense, took her words away.
Orion was staring out at the dark water, as if he was fighting his own battle while standing still.
“What your father has on me is a portfolio of pictures,” he told her, matter-of-factly. As if it was part of some royal decree.
“You don’t have to tell me anything,” Calista said, feeling wretched. “Surely by now you should know better than to want to.”
“It’s an old roll of film, with twenty-four exposures. The portfolio contains both prints and negatives. Your father assured me that no copies had ever been made.”
“Even if there were, he likely would have found them and destroyed them,” she said, clearing her throat as she thought about the squalid little bargains Aristotle called “business.” “Because the value in a damaging image is lessened if there are copies. If anyone can have leverage, the leverage itself is lessened.”
She felt her face go hot when Orion slanted a look her way. “Yes, these are the sorts of things I learned at my father’s knee. Don’t act so surprised, Orion. Surely you didn’t think he sang us nursery rhymes?”
“The images are quite standard, really,” Orion continued, darkly. “King Max engaged in yet another threesome. But in this case, the photos feature the king and another man focused on particular shared acts. And the woman in question...”
He didn’t finish his sentence.
“No,” Calista whispered.
“The woman in question is my mother,” Orion gritted out, as if it hurt him. And that fury in him was a raw and pulsing thing. “She looks enthusiastic, but also as if that enthusiasm was chemically enhanced. And I can tell you that in the days leading up to her death—which, according to the date stamped on these pictures, was not long after the event—she would drink too much and say a great many things that made no sense. Then. They make more sense now.”
“Orion...”
“She was concerned about gaps in her memory. She was...fragile, and she refused to eat or drink anything she did not prepare herself. I can only assume now that she was given something in her food or drink that was laced with the sort of drugs that create enthusiasm where there is none.”
Calista let that sink in, though it made her stomach lurch. “And you think it was your father...?”
“Does it matter?” His voice was a vicious slap against the wind. “Whether my father slipped her a drug to make her compliant, or merely took advantage of it when he must surely have known better—does it really matter which? What degree of monster he was? And as I allow my outrage and sickness over this to turn around inside me, I must ask myself why it is that every other photo I’ve ever seen with him in various sexually explicit scenarios, I never questioned the enthusiasm of the participants. Only when it suited me.”
“Because your poor mother...”
“Yes. My poor mother.”
Orion shook his head, looking sick and furious and tired, suddenly. It made the rocks beneath Calista’s feet seem to sway, because this was Orion. He was the rock, and it had never occurred to her that he could go weary.
It made her want to fight anything that might come at him, even if it was her.
“I’m not even certain that the kingdom would bother to react to yet another explicit photograph of my father,” he said after a moment or two. “But I cannot bear to think of my mother being tarred with the same brush. Not to mention, the fact that there are pictures of one such event would lead to the inevitable speculation that it was not a one-off. And that would lead to questions about parentage. Bloodlines.”
“You can’t have that,” she whispered, flushing with a shame so deep and hot she was surprised she could still stand.
“The truth of the matter, Calista, is that I am sick unto death of the excesses of my father’s reign,” Orion said, and she had never heard him sound so dark. She had never felt that darkness inside her, too. “I felt this way before it affected my direct family and I only feel it more strongly now. And yes, I am willing to marry the daughter of a man who trafficked in those photographs to prevent them ever getting out. I still am. Whatever that makes me.”
Calista thought it made him a hero. Possibly even a saint.
She was afraid to put words to what it made her.
“I wish...” Her tongue felt thick in her mouth. She had no idea what to say, only that everything hurt and she hated herself. And this, because after a lifetime of being certain that she was nothing like her father, she was. She’d proved it. Maybe she had different reasons, but the end result was the same. “I thought I wasn’t tainted by him. But he is like an infection in the blood. It doesn’t go anywhere. It will only twist in you until it wrecks you, over time.”
“That is a choice.” Orion’s voice was clipped and harsh, but his eyes blazed. “Do you think I don’t know the temptation to become just as dark and dissipated as the man who bore me? Do you think I don’t ask myself daily if it would have been easier to follow in his footsteps? It’s a choice, Calista. You have chosen to become your father. That’s on you, not him.”
“You don’t understand.”
“Then tell me.”
And the most astonishing thing by far was that he shouted that.
As if this was the same thing as what happened to him in that bed they shared.
King Orion Augustus Pax, losing control.
And this time, Calista took no satisfaction from it. This time, he made her shudder
and feel like weeping, and not in any kind of delight.
“I—”
His hands were on her shoulders then. His face in hers.
“Do not tell me what you cannot do. Just do it, or do not.” His grip tightened. “I have seen the tension in you from the very start. Did you think I would miss it somehow? You want so badly to be bulletproof. To care as little about the people you come into contact with as your father does. But you’re not him, Calista. You don’t have to do the things he does.”
She felt that everywhere, half indictment, half wish.
She thought it might take her to her knees, but his hands gripped her shoulders, and she stood.
Because like it or not, she always stood. And did the horrible things no one else could—no matter what it cost her.
“I have spent my entire life working hard to get myself into a position where I can change things,” she heard herself say, as if she could possibly explain herself to this man she was terribly afraid she might love.
This man she had already betrayed.
“In a week, you will become capable of simply moving your little finger and changing whatever you like, as queen. Or did you forget that when you marry me, the only person with more power than you in all the world is me?”
“That doesn’t count,” she threw at him, feeling desperate and despairing, all at once. “That’s what he wants. Don’t you understand?”
“Are you concocting some doomed attempt to make your father feel things like a normal human being?” His eyes blazed still, that terrible gold. “From sad experience, Calista, I can tell you it won’t work. I tried to talk to my father once, man-to-man. It only served to entertain him.”
She let out a sound that was not quite a sob. “I don’t want to talk to my father. I want to crush him.”
“And then what?” Orion demanded, his fingers pressing into her skin. “When you rise to take his place, what will become of you?”
She shook her head, but it didn’t occur to her to pull away from him. Not yet. Or maybe she couldn’t.
Maybe, despite everything, she didn’t want to.
Christmas in the King's Bed Page 14
