Reign: A Royal Military Romance

by Roxie Noir

  Yelena’s turned her mouth down at the corners, and she puts one delicate hand over it.

  “I was so humiliated that I hadn’t been watching where I was going that I didn’t tell anyone. My foot turned bright red and swelled up, and I didn’t tell anyone. I didn’t want them to know I’d done something wrong, that I was anything but smart and capable, even at age seven. It wasn’t until my governess saw red streaks going up my leg that anyone realized I’d gotten blood poisoning,” I go on.

  I pause a moment, wondering if Yelena will connect the dots on her own, but she just looks at me.

  “If that had happened in the olden days, I’d be dead,” I finish. “But we have antibiotics, so I’m still here.”

  “What a stubborn child you were,” Yelena says, shaking her head. “I would never allow my child to be so stubborn.”

  I think she’s forgotten what we were talking about. She takes my arm again and we continue walking.

  “My dress for the ball is deep red,” she says. She’s already forgotten that I nearly died twenty years ago, or that everything was never perfect.

  Dear God, there’s a masquerade ball next week. It’s on my calendar, but I’d completely forgotten about it.

  Probably because I have thousands of better things to do than attend the ball Yelena talked my mother into hosting, I think.

  “Oh?” I say, because I don’t care and don’t know why she’s telling me.

  “Deep red with rhinestones on the bodice,” she says in her soft, sweet voice. “Your mother helped me choose it. It will look lovely with your uniform.”

  Finally, we go back inside. As sweet and kind as Yelena is, I’ve had more than enough. I tell her goodbye very formally, and she leaves the palace with her parents.

  Hazel disappeared long ago. She’s probably asleep by now, and I don’t blame her.

  Everyone else leaves slowly, and then it’s only my mother, my father and I in the formal drawing room, standing stiffly. My father looks at my mother and nods once, severely. She nods back.

  “I’m going to retire for the evening,” she says, kissing my father on one cheek.

  “Good night,” he says.

  “Good night, my dear,” she says, and then kisses me on one cheeks. “Sweet dreams, Kostya.”

  “Sweet dreams, mother,” I say, and she leaves the room.

  As soon as the doors close behind her, my father turns to me. I’m a half-inch taller than him, but we have the same eyes and similar faces, though I got my mother’s hair.

  “I will not have you chasing after that unmannered American girl again,” he says, his voice deadly quiet.

  Something clenches inside me at unmannered, even though he’s technically correct.

  “I was being hospitable,” I say.

  “You chased her down, leaving Yelena Pavlovna alone at the dinner table,” my father says, his voice coming close to a growl.

  That’s what this is about.

  “I thought you wanted us to have close relations with the Americans,” I say, even though I know full well that arguing with my father has never gotten me anywhere.

  “Don’t you disrespect me,” he says.

  Anger flares inside me, sudden and hot. That’s what he says when he doesn’t want me questioning him. When he’s being stubborn for the sake of being stubborn.

  But he’s the king. He can be as stubborn as he wants.

  I step forward and lower my own voice. I want to shout, but I can’t shout what I’m about to say.

  “The USF burned a dozen houses to the ground yesterday,” I say. “And today, you forced me to accompany you to the train station to meet that unmannered American girl instead of doing something about the threat.”

  “Meeting her at the train station was a formality,” he says. “Ignoring a good, well-born Svelorian woman to chase after a strumpet who can’t hold her liquor is pure folly, Kostya.”

  “You can’t ignore the USF forever,” I say.

  He looks me hard in the eyes, not backing down. I’m probably making this worse by pushing him on the matter, but I can’t help it.

  I spent years of my life fighting against them. I crawled through dirt and slept in mud to defend my country. I watched men who were like my brothers die at their hands.

  And now, when I could really be doing something about it, my own father is more concerned with my love life than the fate of his country.

  “I’m not ignoring them,” he says. “They’re a small threat, and small threats burn themselves out. But you need a wife and an heir, Kostya. A Svelorian wife and a Svelorian heir. And don’t think I’ll give permission for anything else while I’m still drawing breath.”

  Then he turns on his heel and walks out, leaving me alone and furious in the drawing room. Maksim the second glares down at me from the wall, and I glare back at his portrait, my hands clenched in fists.

  A few days pass. My father doesn’t budge, even though the reports keep coming, and they keep getting worse. Houses and farms burned. People killed. Good, hardworking people whose only crime was living in the wrong place.

  It’s small-scale, yes. But this is like a few drops of rain before a storm. I was on the ground there for a long time. I can feel it.

  He refuses to let the news channel or the newspapers report on the deaths and destruction, saying it’s only a few people, or we’ll take care of it. I meet endlessly with generals and people who’ve come from the north. I try to send a battalion, organize some kind of protection for the people under threat.

  My father says he’ll consider my suggestions.

  I hardly see Hazel. She and her parents are being whisked around Velinsk, a picture-perfect coastal town, full of charming stone houses that line the cliffs, cobblestone streets, outdoor cafes, and beautiful white beaches. There’s no wonder the summer palace is here, and no wonder that other wealthy Svelorians come here to get away.

  I avoid her. Not because of what my father said. A bride and an heir are the last things on my mind right now. For either to matter, there needs to be a Sveloria.

  No, I avoid Hazel because I can’t stop thinking of her ass in those ugly spandex pants. Because I can’t stop thinking about what she might look like naked. I can’t stop wondering whether she’s got freckles everywhere or just her face.

  I can’t stop wondering what she tastes like, or what she sounds like when she comes.

  Two nights in a row, I jerk off thinking about her body underneath mine, her breath coming in short, soft gasps.

  I’ve had women before. I’ve been in relationships. I’m a prince, not a monk.

  I just have things besides pussy to worry about, and I’ve never met a woman incredible enough to be worth the distraction.

  There’s never been a woman I had to be with.

  Still, it’s been a long time since I jerked off thinking about anything besides porn. Worse, jerking off isn’t helping at all. Usually it releases some pressure, gets my mind off sex for a while, but not now.

  I’m still watching her for too long across a room. Still watching the shapes her lips make as she talks, listening for her loud American laugh.

  It’s a problem. I’m the head of my father’s small council. I’m his advisor, Minister of Military Affairs, and Lord of the Realm. I’m an important state figure.

  I cannot sleep with the daughter of the American Ambassador, and I especially can’t now.

  7

  Hazel

  I manage to behave myself for several days. It probably qualifies as a miracle.

  It helps that my parents and I don’t attend any more formal events with the royal family, so at least I can’t embarrass myself in front of Kostya any more. He’s already had to rescue my drunk ass once, and even though he was very polite about it, the fact remains: I made a spectacle of myself, and his father sent him to do damage control.

  We only catch glimpses of each other. Walking down hallways in opposite directions. On either end of a big room. Him in the garden, me on my
balcony, enjoying the sun. I do my best to ignore the way my insides twist when we make eye contact.

  The king seems intent on making our stay at the Summer Palace as pleasant as possible, and his office arranges outing after outing for us.

  We stroll through the beautiful seaside town of Velinsk, which is almost impossibly charming. Like the palace itself, it mostly went without being noticed by the Soviet Union, so it’s still quaint and lovely, unspoiled by the brutalist architecture that so many other towns sprouted during that time.

  A friendly, English-speaking tour guide takes us up and down the coast, past beautiful cliffs filled with sea caves, past pristine white-sand beaches unreachable except by boat. We have champagne picnics and cook fresh fish over a fire.

  Another day, we visit the roman ruins in the town. It was only ever a small outpost, but the Romans maintained a presence there through the fall of the Byzantine Empire. Now the ruins are stark and beautiful, no more than a few low walls, columns without a roof.

  I ask how much archaeological work has been done on them, and the tour guide just shrugs. Behind a low wall, I find a single empty wine bottle lying on its side and wonder if the ruins were cleaned up for our benefit.

  Velinsk isn’t big, and we cover most of the town in a few days. The people seem bright, happy, and wholesome, and they all speak excellent English.

  One evening, sitting in a cafe and sipping strong Turkish coffee, I look at a map of town. Once, it was split into quarters — the Russian quarter, the Svelorian quarter, the Roma quarter — but they’ve done away with that.

  All except one sliver of town. On the outskirts, to the northeast, away from the coast, is the Shadow Quarter. The tour guides haven’t taken us there. They haven’t taken us anywhere near there, though we’ve been to nearly every other part of town.

  I take a sip of coffee and frown at the map.

  “What’s over here?” I ask the tour guide, tapping the Shadow Quarter with my index finger. He looks at it, and I see a frown pass over his face quickly.

  “That’s the old industrial section of town,” he says. “It was built up under Soviet rule. They wanted to make Velinsk into a fishing town, so they built a few sardine canneries on the outskirts. But they were abandoned when something else closer to home drew their attention away.”

  He smiles, but it’s not a smile that reaches his eyes. It’s a learned smile.

  I don’t let it bother me, because it’s obvious by now that smiling doesn’t come easily to the Svelorian people, and it’s nice that he’s trying.

  “The Svelorian people did not exactly clamor to get Soviet attention back on themselves, so the canneries remained abandoned. It’s a very tedious, boring part of town. There’s nothing to do there,” he says.

  “Can we go?” I ask.

  “Why?” he says.

  “I’m curious,” I say. “I haven’t learned much about the Soviet occupation here.”

  “Frankly, we’d rather forget it happened,” he says evenly.

  He takes a sip of his coffee. My parents have both finished theirs, and they’re listening politely.

  The tour guide and I look at each other. I can’t tell if he’s hiding something or if I just can’t read his expression.

  “It’s also the most dangerous part of town,” he says, finally. “The unsavory element tends to congregate there, and I can’t have the U.S. Ambassador getting mugged, can I?”

  I lean back in my cafe chair. It hadn’t even occurred to me that Velinsk had an unsavory element, it’s so charming and picturesque.

  “I see,” I say, and smile. “That makes sense.”

  I’m still curious. Tell me I can’t go somewhere and it’s the first thing I want to do, but I drop it. For now.

  A calm silence settles over the four of us for a moment, and a gentle, salty breeze blows through. My father leans forward over the table.

  “Who laid out the streets in Velinsk?” he asks, always an academic at heart. “Was it the Romans, or did they follow pre-existing pathways?”

  The tour guide launches into the history of city planning in Velinsk, and I finish my coffee. It’s actually pretty interesting.

  When I get back to my room late that afternoon, the first thing I see is my empty backpack, very neatly propped on top of the dresser. Instantly, I know that the housekeepers at the palace have taken my dirty laundry to be washed.

  I hate being waited on, and I’ve been trying to avoid it. The first day I was here, I left some dirty clothes on the floor, only to return to my room to discover that they were in the hamper, my shoes neatly tucked away in the closet, my used towels replaced with fresh ones.

  That was the last time I left anything out of place, especially dirty underwear, because the thought of someone else picking that up after me actually makes me a little nauseous. But I thought that my backpack was safe in the closet, joint hidden at the bottom and all. Honestly, I kind of forgot about it. I’ve been wearing the clothes that my parents had shipped from Boston.

  There it is, though. Empty and on top of the dresser.

  Well, I’m not arrested yet, I think. So that’s a good sign.

  Not that they’re going to arrest the Ambassador’s daughter, I think.

  I grab my backpack and look inside. Nothing. I stick an arm in and fish around for a while, explore the hole into the lining where the passport got lost, but there’s still nothing.

  Maybe the joint got stuck in my dirty laundry, I think, half-shrugging to myself.

  Hopefully the women who do the laundry are having a great time getting high, not getting into trouble.

  Feeling guilty that someone else did my laundry, I open the dresser drawers. Everything is very neatly organized, even my underpants, which makes me feel a little squirmy inside.

  When I open the last one, there it is. Sitting on top of the t-shirt my best friend gave me before I left for my Europe trip that says:

  Good girls go to heaven

  Bad girls go everywhere

  Maybe they thought it was a hand-rolled cigarette, I think.

  Well, why’d they hide it for me then?

  In any case, crisis averted for now.

  I’ve gotten into the habit of having happy hour with my parents in their suite before dinner. The dinners aren’t formal now. There are still more courses and forks than I’m used to, but the other people there are others who work in the government or at the palace, not actual royalty. I don’t think they’re even highborn.

  When I knock on the door this afternoon, it’s just my dad, because mom’s off somewhere in a meeting about exports and tariffs or something.

  “It’s good for her to have something important to do,” he says, handing me a glass of wine. “She’s starting to get a little stir-crazy.”

  I roll my eyes.

  “Be nice, she’s your mother,” he says.

  We both drink.

  “But between me and you, she could stand to learn to relax,” he says, with a smile. “We don’t need an itinerary for going to the beach.”

  “Did she really make you a beach-going itinerary?” I ask. “When? This trip?”

  My dad puts one elbow over the back of the couch where he’s sitting, opposite me, and sighs.

  “She’s gonna give me hell if she knows I told you this,” he says.

  “My lips are sealed,” I say.

  “This was a couple years before you were born,” he says. “We drove up to Maine from Boston for a weekend getaway, just the two of us. I pick her up outside her apartment, help her put her bags in the trunk, and when we get back in the car, she hands me a sheet of paper.”

  I start giggling.

  “How old were you?”

  “About your age. Maybe a year or two older, twenty-six or twenty-seven,” he says.

  “So she’s always been this way.”

  I couldn’t be less surprised. The level of organization that my mom’s achieved has to be inborn.

  “Your mother has actually loosen
ed up some, believe it or not,” he says. “Anyway, the title of the itinerary was Relaxing Beach Vacation. Underneath that, she’d included the objective enjoy ourselves.”

  I laugh so hard I snort.

  “Did you achieve the objective?” I ask, between giggles. “Did you hit all your relaxation benchmarks in a timely fashion?”

  “I believe we vacationed to her satisfaction,” he says. “It helped that large chunks of each afternoon were simply scheduled as unstructured free time.”

  “Oh, my God,” I say, still laughing helplessly. “God, of course they were.”

  We sit there, laughing and drinking, for a few more moments. Then I remember what I wanted to ask him.

  “Dad,” I say. “Quick question and you can’t tell Mom.”

  “The tooth fairy isn’t real,” he says, and I roll my eyes. That’s his standard answer when I say I’ve got a question, even though it hasn’t been funny for about fifteen years.

  “How illegal is pot in Sveloria?” I ask.

  He raises his eyebrows.

  “Asking for a friend,” I say quickly.

  He gives me his I-can’t-believe-you’re-asking-this look, tipping his head a little to the side and looking exasperated through his thick-frame glasses.

  I smile innocently and shrug.

  “I believe it’s technically illegal but not really enforced,” he says.

  I nod. He looks into his wine glass.

  “I’ve also gotten more than a few whiffs of it walking around outside at night,” he says.

  “So, if my friend maybe accidentally found a joint in her bag, she doesn’t necessarily need to flush it down the toilet and waste perfectly good Amsterdam weed?” I ask.

  “Your friend probably doesn’t need to flush it,” he says. “Particularly if your friend can be discreet, and if she’s a guest of the crown.”

  I nod.

  “I’ll pass that on,” I say.

  “Did your friend happen to carry this weed through customs in a dozen different countries?” he asks.