Don’t be silly, she snapped at herself then. Of course he can’t. You’re just looking for more ways to feel guilty.
Because whatever else happened, there was no way Achilles Casilieris would allow the sort of deception Valentina was neck-deep in to take place under his nose if he knew about it. She was certain of that, if nothing else.
“This is what I know about life,” Achilles said, his voice a silken thread in the quiet of the penthouse, and Valentina had to repress a little shiver that threatened to shake her spine apart. “You must live it. If all you do is wall yourself off, hide yourself away, what do you have at the end but wasted time?”
Her throat was dry and much too tight. “I would take your advice more seriously if I didn’t know you had an ulterior motive.”
“I don’t believe in wasting time or in ulterior motives,” he growled back at her. “And not because I want a taste of you, though I do. And I intend to have it, glikia mou, make no mistake. But because you have put yourself on hold. Do you think I can’t see it?”
She thought she had to be reeling then. Nothing was solid. She couldn’t help but put her hand out, steadying herself on the back of the nearest chair—though it didn’t seem to help.
And Achilles was watching her much too closely, with far too much of that disconcerting awareness making his dark gaze shine. “Or is it that you don’t know yourself?”
When she was Princess Valentina of Murin, known to the world before her birth. Her life plotted out in its every detail. Her name literally etched in stone into the foundations of the castle where her family had ruled for generations. She had never had the opportunity to lose herself. Not in a dramatic adolescence. Not in her early twenties. She had never been beside herself at some crossroads, desperate to figure out the right path—because there had only ever been one path and she had always known exactly how to walk it, every step of the way.
“You don’t know me at all,” she told him, trying to sound less thrown and more outraged at the very suggestion that she was any kind of mystery to herself. She’d never had that option. “You’re my employer, not my confidant. You know what I choose to show you and nothing more.”
“But what you choose to show, and how you choose to show it, tells me exactly who you are.” Achilles shook his head, and it seemed to Valentina that he moved closer to her when she could see he didn’t. That he was exactly where he’d always been—it was just that he seemed to take over the whole world. She wasn’t sure he even tried; he just did. “Or did you imagine I achieved all that I’ve achieved without managing to read people? Surely you cannot be so foolish.”
“I was about to do something deeply foolish,” she said tightly. And not exactly smartly. “But I’ve since come to my senses.”
“No one is keeping you here.” His hands were thrust deep into his pockets, and he stood where he’d stopped, a few steps into the living room from those elevator doors. His gaze was all over her, but nothing else was touching her. He wasn’t even blocking her escape route back to the guest room on this floor.
And she understood then. He was giving her choice. He was putting it on her. He wasn’t simply sweeping her off into all that wild sensation—when he must have known he could have. He easily could have. If he hadn’t stopped in the car, what would they be doing now?
But Valentina already knew the answer to that. She could feel her surrender inside her like heat.
And she thought she hated him for it.
Or should.
“I’m going to sleep,” she said. She wanted her voice to be fierce. Some kind of condemnation. But she thought she sounded more determined than resolved. “I will see you in the morning. Sir.”
Achilles smiled. “I think we both know you will see me long before that. And in your dreams, glikia mou, I doubt I will be so chivalrous.”
Valentina pressed her lips tight together and did not allow herself to respond to him. Especially because she wanted to so very, very badly—and she knew, somehow, that it would lead nowhere good. It couldn’t.
Instead, she turned and headed for her room. It was an unremarkable guest room appropriate for staff, but the best thing about it was the lock on the door. Not that she thought he would try to get in.
She was far more concerned that she was the one who would try to get out.
“One of these days,” he said from behind her, his voice low and intense, “you will stop running. It is a foregone conclusion, I am afraid. And then what?”
Valentina didn’t say a word. But she didn’t have to.
When she finally made it to her room and threw the dead bolt behind her, the sound of it echoed through the whole of the penthouse like a gong, answering Achilles eloquently without her having to open her mouth.
Telling him exactly how much of a coward she was, in case he hadn’t already guessed.
CHAPTER SIX
IN THE DAYS that followed that strange night and Achilles’s world-altering kiss that had left her raw and aching and wondering if she’d ever feel like herself again, Valentina found she couldn’t bear the notion that she was twenty-seven years old and somehow a stranger to herself.
Her future was set in stone. She’d always known that. And she’d never fought against all that inevitability because what was the point? She could fight as much as she wanted and she’d still be Princess Valentina of Murin, only with a stain next to her name. That had always seemed to her like the very definition of futility.
But in the days that followed that kiss, it occurred to her that perhaps it wasn’t the future she needed to worry about, but her past. She hadn’t really allowed herself to think too closely about what it meant that Natalie had been raised by the woman who was very likely Valentina’s own mother. Because, of course, there was no other explanation for the fact she and Natalie looked so much alike. Identical twins couldn’t just randomly occur, and certainly not when one of them was a royal. There were too many people watching royal births too closely. Valentina had accepted the story that her mother had abandoned her, because it had always been couched in terms of Frederica’s mental illness. Valentina had imagined her mother living out her days in some or other institution somewhere, protected from harm.
But the existence of Natalie suggested that Frederica was instead a completely different person from the one Valentina had imagined all this time. The woman who now called herself Erica had clearly not wasted away in a mental institution, all soothing pastels and injections and no ability to contact her own child. On the contrary, this Erica had lived a complicated life after her time in the palace that had nothing to do with any hospital—and though she’d clearly had two daughters, she’d taken only one with her when she’d gone.
Valentina didn’t entirely understand how she could be quite so hurt by a betrayal that had happened so long ago and that she hadn’t known about until recently. She didn’t understand why it mattered so much to her. But the more she tried to tell herself that it was silly to be so bothered, the more bothered she got.
It was only when she had gone round and round and round on that almost too many times to count that Valentina accepted the fact she was going to have to do something about it.
And all these years, she’d never known how to go about looking for her mother even if she’d wanted to. She would have had to ask her father directly, the very idea of which made her shudder—even now, across an ocean or two from his throne and his great reserve and his obvious reluctance to discuss Frederica at all. Barring that, she would have had to speak to one of the high-level palace aides whose role was to serve her father in every possible way and who therefore had access to most of the family secrets. She doubted somehow that they would have told her all the things that she wanted to know—or even a few of them. And they certainly would have run any questions she had past her father first, which would have defeated the purpose of asking them.
> Valentina tried to tell herself that was why she’d never asked.
But now she was tucked up in a lethally dangerous billionaire’s penthouse in New York City, away from all the palace intrigue and protocol, and far too aware of the things a man like Achilles could do with only a kiss. To say nothing of his businesses. What was an old family secret to a man like Achilles?
And even though in many ways she had fewer resources at her fingertips and fewer people to ask for ancient stories and explanations, in the end, it was very simple. Because Valentina had Natalie’s mobile, which had to mean she had direct access to her own story. If she dared look for it.
The Valentina who had seen her own mirror image in a bathroom in London might not have dared. But the Valentina who had lost herself in the raw fire of Achilles’s kiss, on the other hand, dared all manner of things.
It was that Valentina who opened up Natalie’s list of contacts, sitting there in her locked bedroom in Achilles’s penthouse. She scrolled down, looking for an entry that read Mom. Or Mum. Or any variation of Mother she could think of.
But there was nothing.
That stymied her, but she was aware enough to realize that the sensation deep in her belly was not regret. It was relief. As if, in the end, she preferred these mysteries to what was likely to be a vicious little slap of truth.
You are such a coward, she told herself.
Because it wasn’t as if her father—or Valentina herself, for that matter—had ever been in hiding. The truth was that her mother could have located her at any point over these last twenty-seven years. That she hadn’t done so told Valentina all she needed to know about Frederica’s maternal feelings, surely.
Well. What she needed to know perhaps, but there was a great deal more she wanted to know, and that was the trouble.
She kept scrolling until she found an entry marked Erica. She thought that told her a great deal about Natalie’s relationship with this woman who was likely mother to them both. It spoke of a kind of distance that Valentina had certainly never contemplated when she’d thought about her own mother from time to time over the past nearly thirty years. In her head, of course, any reunion with the woman she’d imagined had been locked away in a pleasantly secure institution would be filled with love. Regret. Soft, sweet arms wrapped around her, and a thousand apologies for somehow managing to abandon and then never find her way back to a baby who lived at one of the most famous addresses in the world.
She wasn’t entirely sure why the simple fact of the woman’s first name in a list of contacts made it so clear that all of that was a lie. Not just a harmless fantasy to make a motherless child feel better about her fate, but something infinitely more dangerous, somehow.
Valentina wanted to shut down the mobile phone. She wanted to throw it across the small room and pretend that she’d never started down this road in the first place.
But it occurred to her that possibly, she was trying to talk herself out of doing this thing she was certain she needed to do.
Because Achilles might have imagined that he could see these mysteries in her, but what scared Valentina was that she could, too. That he’d identified a terrible weakness in her, and that meant anyone could.
Perhaps she wasn’t who she thought she was. Perhaps she never had been. Perhaps, all this time, she’d imagined she’d been walking down a set path when she hadn’t.
If she was honest, the very idea made her want to cry.
It had been important, she thought then, sitting cross-legged on the bed with the summer light streaming in from the windows—crucially important, even—to carry on the morning after that kiss as if nothing had changed. Because she had to pretend that nothing had. That she didn’t know too much now. That she didn’t think of that kiss every time she looked at Achilles. She’d gone to work, and she’d done her job, and she’d stayed as much in his presence as she ever did—and she thought that she deserved some kind of award for the acting she’d done. So cool, so composed.
So utterly unbothered by the fact she now knew how he tasted.
And she tried to convince herself that only she knew that she was absolutely full of it.
But one day bled into the next, and she’d found that her act became harder and harder to pull off, instead of easier. She couldn’t understand it. It wasn’t as if Achilles was doing anything, necessarily. He was Achilles, of course. There was always that look in his eyes, as if he was but waiting for her to give him a sign.
Any sign.
As if, were she to do so, he would drop everything he was doing—no matter where they were and what was happening around them—and sweep them right back into that storm of sensation that she found simmered inside her, waiting. Just waiting.
Just as he was.
It was the notion that she was the one who held the power—who could make all of that happen with a simple word or glance—that she found kept her up at night. It made her shake. It polluted her dreams and made her drift off entirely too many times while she was awake, only to be slapped back down to earth when Achilles’s voice turned silken, as if he knew.
Somehow, this all made her determined to seek out the one part of her life that had never made sense, and had never fit in neatly into the tidy narrative she’d believed all her life and knew back and forth.
Today was a rare afternoon when Achilles had announced that he had no need of her assistance while he tended to his fitness in his personal gym because, he’d gritted at her, he needed to clear his head. Valentina had repaired to her bedroom to work out a few snarls in his schedule and return several calls from the usual people wanting advice on how to approach him with various bits of news he was expected to dislike intensely. She’d changed out of Natalie’s usual work uniform and had gratefully pulled on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, feeling wildly rebellious as she did so. And then a little bit embarrassed that her life was clearly so staid and old-fashioned that she found denim a personal revolution.
Many modern princesses dressed casually at times, she was well aware. Just as she was even more aware that none of them were related to her father, with his antiquated notions of propriety. And therefore none of them would have to suffer his disapproval should she find herself photographed looking “common” despite her ancient bloodline.
But she wasn’t Princess Valentina here in New York, where no one cared what she wore. And maybe that was why Valentina pulled the trigger. She didn’t cold-call the number that she’d found on her sister’s phone—and there was something hard and painful in her chest even thinking that word, sister. She fed the number into a little piece of software that one of Achilles’s companies had been working on, and she let it present her with information that she supposed she should have had some sort of scruple about using. But she didn’t.
Valentina imagined that said something about her, too, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to care about that the way she thought she ought to have.
In a push of a button, she had a billing address. Though the phone number itself was tied to the area code of a far-off city, the billing address was right here in Manhattan.
It was difficult not see that as some kind of sign.
Valentina slipped out of the penthouse then, without giving herself time to second-guess what she was about to do. She smiled her way through the lobby the way she always did, and then she set out into New York City by herself.
All by herself.
No guards. No security. Not even Achilles’s brooding presence at her side. She simply walked. She made her way through the green, bright stretch of Central Park, headed toward the east side and the address Achilles’s software had provided. No one spoke to her. No one called her name. No cameras snapped at her, recording her every move.
After a while, Valentina stopped paying attention to the expression on her face. She stopped worrying about her posture and whethe
r or not her hair looked unkempt as the faint breeze teased at it. She simply...walked.
Her shoulders seemed to slip down an extra inch or two from her ears. She found herself breathing deeper, taking in the people she passed without analyzing them—without assuming they wanted something from her or were looking to photograph her supposedly “at large” in the world.
About halfway across the park it occurred to her that she’d never felt this way in her life. Alone. Free. Better yet, anonymous. She could have been anybody on the streets. There were locals all over the paths in the park, walking and talking and taking in the summer afternoon as if that was a perfectly normal pastime. To be out on their own, no one the wiser, doing exactly as they pleased.
Valentina realized that whatever happened next, this was the normal she’d spent her life looking for and dreaming about. This exact moment, walking across Central Park while summer made its cheerful noises all around her, completely and entirely on her own.
Freedom, it turned out, made her heart beat a little too fast and too hard inside her chest.
Once she made it to the east side, she headed a little bit uptown, then farther east until she found the address that had been on that billing statement. It looked like all the other buildings on the same block, not exactly dripping in luxury, but certainly no hovel. It was difficult for Valentina to determine the difference between kinds of dwellings in a place like this. Apartment buildings, huge blocks of too many people living on top of each other by choice, seemed strange to her on the face of it. But who was she to determine the difference between prosperous New Yorkers and regular ones? She had lived in a palace all her life. And she suspected that Achilles’s sprawling penthouse wasn’t a far cry from a palace itself, come to that.
But once she’d located the building she wanted and its dark green awning marked with white scrollwork, she didn’t know what to do. Except wait there. As if she was some kind of daring sleuth, just like in the books she’d read as a little girl, when she was just...that same old motherless child, looking for a better story to tell herself.
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