How had this happened? How had she lost her focus so completely?
But she knew. It was him. It was Orion.
He had gotten beneath her skin, and worse, into her bones. She couldn’t take a breath without feeling him there, and she knew there’d be no changing that. That no matter what happened here, or next week in her board meeting, or on Christmas Eve, or ever after, straight on into the future, he would stay right there.
Deep in her bones, always.
For good or ill.
The inevitability was almost comforting.
“What are you going to do?” he demanded, his beautiful face close.
She thought of all the years she’d put in. Her father’s handprint on her face. Her sister, so fiercely herself despite her parents’ horror that she had come out of the womb something less than perfect in their eyes.
“I will do what I have to,” she said.
And understood as she did that this thing between them, these last two weeks, was only the latest thing she sacrificed on the altar of this quest of hers.
“Be certain this is what you want,” Orion said, his voice like a bell deep inside her. He dropped his hands. “Because the truth, Calista, is that I am not so optimistic. No son of my father’s could be. And when I stop hoping for better, that is when, I am afraid, you will find me far less accommodating and far more uncompromising than you can possibly imagine.”
“Medieval,” she whispered, remembering their first meeting. She cleared her throat. “You can imprison me on Castle Crag if you must, Orion. But it won’t change anything. It can’t.”
“So be it,” he whispered, and there was a finality in his voice.
And when he turned and headed back to the car, away from the sea, the ring she wore on her hand felt heavy. Like iron.
Like prison bars, close and tight around her.
You have no choice, she told herself, again and again. She had to keep Melody safe.
Maybe Orion was right, and once she became his queen—if she became his queen—she would find herself able to decree her sister safe... But what if her father acted before then?
She would risk herself. But she refused to risk her sister.
“I have no choice,” she whispered, when there was only the December wind to hear.
And it seemed to her the sea itself laughed at her predicament, doused her in salt and recrimination, and then left her to the fate she’d made real with her own two hands.
CHAPTER TWELVE
ON THE NIGHT before his wedding, Orion stood in his office, there at the window with his back to the palace where he had always been most comfortable.
Not that anything could comfort him these days.
The royal city stretched out before him, the lights sparkling brighter than usual with holiday splendor, and more this year. Because tomorrow was the royal wedding, and the celebrating kingdom had no idea that their new king was anything but transported with joy at the prospect.
The way he might have been a week ago, it pained him to admit. And no matter the faintly sniffy headlines in some of the tabloids, which questioned the timeline the palace had given them about the king’s romance.
He knew those headlines were warning shots.
But it was the word romance that sat in his chest like a spot of pneumonia, gnarled and heavy, and worse by the day.
He found no peace in this view tonight.
Because instead of the kingdom he planned to save, all he could see was Calista.
He had barely seen her since that fateful last ball, when he had discovered what he should already have known—that she was as devious and untrustworthy as her father. That she could have turned her back on Aristotle and his schemes, but had chosen not to.
That she had made those choices despite what had happened between them.
That whatever it was that haunted her, she refused to share it with him.
It was that last that bothered him the most, loathe as he was to admit it.
They had run into each other once in the hallway of the family wing. She had been surrounded by a pack of seamstresses all dressed in black, a wild sort of look on her face—until she saw him.
She had gone silent. Still.
Haunted straight through, something in him had intoned, but he couldn’t help her betray him.
A man—a king—had to draw the line somewhere, surely.
He had stared at her, not certain what he was meant to do with all the unwieldy feelings inside him, now. He had wanted nothing more than to be the opposite of his father. And instead, it turned out that while his temptations might not level the kingdom—they might just level him. They might just lay him out flat all the same.
Neither one of them had spoken.
He had inclined his head. She had performed the expected bob of head and knee upon one’s first daily sighting of the monarch.
And he had wasted an entire day when he should have been sorting out cabinet ministers and putting out fires all over the kingdom, brooding about that interaction.
Another time, he’d heard her.
Calista and her sister, laughing together in one of the rooms where the staff was laying out her trousseau. He had stopped himself midstride, the sound of her laughter seeming to pierce straight through him.
He was an embarrassment to himself. A disappointment, certainly.
But none of that mattered as the days dragged by and he began to realize exactly what he was signing himself up for.
It had been better before. He had been fascinated, and that was far better than disappointed. He had to think that it was worse, now, to know how good it could be between them when it could never, ever be like that again.
He couldn’t unknow it.
But he wasn’t sure how he could live with it, either. Sometimes he would find himself in one of his meetings or ceremonies, suddenly seized with a kind of deep panic at the endless stretch of days before him. Days that would become months, then years. If he was lucky, he would keep this marriage of convenience civil, if chilly.
Year after year after year, as they both turned to stone.
Sooner or later, the vivid longing of these weeks would fade. He was sure of it. It would be like a dream he’d had once—never quite forgotten, but never repeated.
“You do not look quite the part of the happy bridegroom,” came his brother’s drawling voice from behind him.
Orion sighed, but turned to face him all the same. “Should I be turning cartwheels down the corridors of the palace?”
“Not looking murderous might be a start.” Griffin’s gaze swept over him. “Where is your lovely bride-to-be? Sequestered somewhere around here, presumably? Surrounded by the usual passel of women and dreams of her special day, one assumes?”
Even if Calista had not been her father’s weapon, she would still be Calista—but Orion did not allow himself to succumb to the urge to defend her. Not tonight.
“My bride-to-be has not shared her plans with me,” Orion said instead. “Then again, I did not ask.”
Griffin blinked at that, standing behind the chair he usually preferred to lounge in. Orion watched as his brother tapped his finger against the back of the chair, as if contemplating something. Deeply.
The world must have ended.
“If you’ve come here to give me marital advice,” Orion said softly, “don’t.”
Griffin smiled. Faintly. “What marital advice could I possibly have to give? The closest I’ve been to that blessed state was witnessing our parents’ union. Not exactly the sort of thing that would turn a man’s thoughts to marital bliss, was it?”
Orion’s smile felt thin and mean on his mouth. “You have no idea.”
“If you are holding on to something that affects us both, out of some misplaced sense of duty,” Griffin replied, in much the same tone Orion
had used, “I will remind you that I’m not a child.”
Orion knew that too well. But he also knew that he could have quite happily lived out the rest of his life without knowing what had happened between his parents. Or what had caused his mother to make the choices she had.
Why should he ruin what scant good memories Griffin had, too? He didn’t see the point.
“I will always do my duty,” he said instead, and felt far more tired than he had when he’d used to make such statements. When they had been hopes and dreams instead of simple facts. “I made that promise to you years ago. And to the rest of the kingdom.”
“Yes, yes,” Griffin murmured. “No one doubts your commitment, brother. What I do wonder, though, here on the eve of your wedding to a woman so unworthy of you that it is almost laughable—”
“You are speaking of my queen,” Orion growled, all steel and menace, and only then recalled that he did not plan to defend her. Not tonight. But he had already started, so he kept on. “I will not have it. Not even from you, Griffin.”
His brother looked as if he wanted to laugh, but wisely did not.
Instead, he nodded. “Understood. But while you are busy being on her side, whether she deserves it or not, know that I’m on yours. And not because I want your job, because I don’t. I never have and I never will.”
“I am aware.” Orion thought his voice was too harsh, then. Too rough, but he had lost the ability to moderate it. “It’s maddening, if you must know the truth. Younger royal siblings are supposed to want nothing more than to usurp the heir’s position, with all the usual sniping and backbiting.”
“I would rather die.”
Orion smiled despite himself. “This I know.”
And the two of them looked at each other, then away. It might have been an embrace, had they been different men.
“Tomorrow I will stand at your side and welcome your new queen to our family and this kingdom,” Griffin told him, his voice as solemn as his gaze was uncharacteristically serious. “I represent the entirety of the royal family besides you, and so I can say with certainty that she will be supported. As long as you wish it.”
Orion thought of Calista. Beautiful, faithless Calista.
He thought of the betrayal she had already enacted, and the others that were sure to follow. And he had lied to Griffin. He knew that Calista was not in the palace tonight. He had been informed when she left and with a single phone call, he could determine where she was now—but did he really want to know?
Orion would have asked himself why he was bothering to protect her, but, of course, he knew.
Because he loved nothing more than exercises in futility, particularly if it came with a side dose of martyrdom. Except possibly the one woman who had ever gotten beneath his skin.
But he said nothing of these things to his brother.
“I wish it,” he said. “I want her supported, no matter what.”
Griffin nodded. And turned to go, but Orion stopped him.
“But while we are discussing duties in support,” he said.
“I promised you that I would do my bit to stabilize the kingdom,” Griffin replied, a bit tightly. “I haven’t forgotten.”
“I’m glad to hear it. Part of why I’m getting married is so that there can be no more gossip. No more innuendo. No more dating, Griffin. No more scandalous exploits. The next woman you are connected with I will expect you to marry, do you understand me?”
He thought there was something in his brother’s gaze then. Griffin looked...arrested, perhaps.
But he only swallowed, hard. Then nodded.
“As you wish, brother,” he said gruffly.
Orion turned again once Griffin left and found himself scowling out into the dark, past the lights of the city, down to where the nearly full moon danced along the waves of the Aegean.
The moonlight made a silvery path across the water, and he wished he could figure out a path through the mess this had all become as easily.
He had no idea how long he stood there, but when he heard the door to his office open again, he sighed.
“I have already told you,” he began, turning with every expectation of finding his brother there again.
But it was not Griffin who stood there.
It was Calista.
For a moment his mind blanked out. At first glance, she looked cool, impenetrable. She wore a sleek corporate outfit that made his mouth water. A pencil skirt that hugged her figure and a silk blouse that showed absolutely nothing of her beautiful breasts, yet made him so hungry for a taste of them that he thought he might shake with need. Another pair of those gloriously high, impractically dangerous shoes that did things to her calves a man could have written whole sonnets about.
Even her blond hair was ruthlessly controlled, wrenched back into something conservative and appropriate.
She looked absolutely ruthless from head to toe—except for her eyes.
They were as aquamarine as ever, blue and green and wild tonight.
Hectic, even.
“What are you doing here?” Orion asked coolly. “I assumed you had already made your choice. A week ago.”
She moved farther into the office, her hands clutching the strap of the bag over her shoulder, another sign that she was not as controlled as she wished to appear.
Though he dared not hope.
Hope had already gotten him in enough trouble.
“I did.”
Calista stopped, there on the other side of his desk, and he watched as she swallowed. Hard. And hated the part of him—that terrible weakness in him—that wanted to vault over the desk and hold her to him, as if he could somehow protect her from danger when the danger was her.
“Then I assumed we would march into our royal marriage the way most do,” he said, when it appeared she planned to say no more. “With cold reserve. A pretense of civility, when necessary. And after you provide me with an heir, we can repair to completely separate lives.”
Orion told himself he was imagining the look of misery on her face then, the one that matched the misery in him at the very notion—because of course he was imagining it. Because any possibility of something different between them was gone. She had said so herself.
It was his burden to bear that he had broken his vow and lost himself in the process. He had the rest of his life to mourn his one and only loss of control.
Or to dream about it in Technicolor detail, more like, a voice in him whispered.
“Tonight I went to the Skyros Media offices for the annual board meeting,” she told him, and he had the sense she was picking her words. That she was walking on eggshells he couldn’t see.
He frowned. “I thought you were fired.”
“From my position as vice president, yes.” She nodded. “But years ago, in an effort to cheat more effectively on his taxes, my father transferred shares of the company to members of the family. My sister sold me hers long ago, for a single shiny penny. My mother gave me hers in a lovely show of entirely feigned maternal support when I was promoted to vice president, something she has long regretted. That gave me, in total, forty-five percent of the company. My father has never concerned himself about that, because I’m so obedient. A tool for him to use, as I believe you put it so succinctly.”
She loosened her grip on the strap of her bag, and shifted it off her shoulder, then set it down on the desk that stood between them.
There were so many things Orion wanted to say to her, but something about the too-still way she stood, and that look on her face, kept him from it.
“I have worked for years to get to this meeting,” she told him, her voice quiet, but racked with some emotion he couldn’t name. “And finally, after years and years of near misses, setbacks, and disappointments, it was all finally going to happen. I managed to convince just enough members of the board to th
row their lot in with mine. That would put me at fifty-one percent. Meaning, a controlling interest in Skyros Media. My first act would be a vote of no confidence in my father, which he would not survive. I intended to reject him from his own company by the end of the year.”
“Why?” Orion asked, his throat so tight he wasn’t sure the word would come out right.
“Because I want my sister safe,” Calista said fiercely. “That has always been my first and foremost priority. He has threatened me with her all my life. If I misbehaved, he would have her minders lock her in her room, without food. If he was truly angry at me, he might slap me—but he’d leave her black-and-blue. And if I didn’t tell him what he wanted to know about you, Orion...” Her voice wavered then, but she lifted her chin. “He told me he would send her to an institution. For life. Kicking him out would mean substantially reducing the amount of time, money, and energy he can dedicate to bullying me and her.”
“You are discussing the sister-in-law of the King of Idylla,” Orion reminded her, raising his brows, even as a rush of sympathy moved in him for her predicament—when he would have said he could never forgive her for betraying him in the way she did. “I will make it a law, if you wish, that your sister must remain free.” He shook his head. “Why did it not occur to you that all you needed to do was ask?”
“Because I was so close,” she threw at him, and she sounded much less composed, then. “My whole life was leading to tonight, and I thought it was nothing more than a strange tangent that I was suddenly thrown in your path. What did I care if my father wanted to marry me off? Soon enough what he wanted wouldn’t matter. I could break off our engagement. I could divorce you. I didn’t really care what I did, when you were just a figurehead to me. Just a king. Not a person, Orion. And not when Melody was the one who would suffer if I lost focus.”
He stayed where he was, every muscle in his body tense, focused on her so intently he should have been worried it would rip him asunder.
But all he could manage to think about was her.
“I never expected...you,” Calista whispered. She looked away then, blinking rapidly. And he wondered if that sheen in her gaze was what he thought it was when she looked back at him again. When he was sure she would have sworn she never cried. “But then, last week, it seemed that everything was...”
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