by Kendrick, Sharon; Lawrence, Kim; Crews, Caitlin; Milburne, Melanie
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 shoul
d 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 whether 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.
She chided herself for that instantly. It felt defeating. Despairing. She was anonymous and free and unremarkable, standing on a city street. Nobody in the entire world knew where she was. Nobody would know where to look and nobody was likely to find her if they tried. Valentina couldn’t decide if that notion made her feel small and fragile, or vast and powerful. Maybe both at the same time.
She didn’t know how long she stood there. She ignored the first few calls that buzzed at her from Natalie’s mobile tucked in her pocket, but then realized that standing about speaking on her phone gave her far more of a reason to be out there in the street. Instead of simply standing there doing nothing, looking like she was doing exactly what she was doing, which was looming around as she waited for somebody to turn up.
So she did her job, out there on the street. Or Natalie’s job, anyway. She fielded the usual phone calls from the office and, if she was honest, liked the fact that she had somewhere to put all her nervous energy. She was half-afraid that Achilles would call and demand that she return to his side immediately, but she suspected that she was less afraid of that happening than she was hoping that it would, so she didn’t have to follow this through.
Because even now, there was a part of her that simply wanted to retreat back into what she already knew. What she’d spent her life believing.
Afternoon was bleeding into evening, and Valentina was beginning to think that she’d completely outstayed her welcome. That Erica was in one of the other places she sometimes stayed, like the one in the Caribbean Natalie had mentioned in a text. That at any moment now it was likely that one of the doormen in the surrounding buildings would call the police to make her move along at last. That they hadn’t so far she regarded as some kind of miracle. She finished up the last of the calls she’d been fielding, and told herself that it had been foolish to imagine that she could simply turn up one afternoon, stand around and solve the mysteries of her childhood so easily.
But that was when she saw her.
And Valentina didn’t know exactly what it was that had caught her eye. The hair was wrong, not long and coppery like her daughters’ but short. Dark. And it wasn’t as if Valentina had any memories of this woman, but still. There was something in the way she moved. The way she came down the block, walking quickly, a plastic bag hanging from one wrist and the other hand holding a phone to her ear.
But Valentina knew her. She knew that walk. She knew the gait and the way the woman cocked her head toward the hand holding her phone. She knew the way this woman carried herself.
She recognized her, in other words, when she shouldn’t have. When, she realized, despite the fact she’d spent a whole summer afternoon waiting for this moment—she really didn’t want to recognize her.
And she’d been nursing fantasies this whole time, little as she wanted to admit that, even to herself. She’d told herself all the things that she would do if this woman appeared. She’d worked out scenarios in her head.
Do you know who I am? she would ask, or demand, and this woman she had always thought of as Federica, but who went by a completely different name—the better to hide, Valentina assumed—would… Cry? Flail about? Offer excuses? She hadn’t been able to decide which version she would prefer no matter how many times she’d played it out in her head.
And as this woman who was almost certainly her mother walked toward her, not looking closely enough to see that there was anyone standing down the block a ways in front of her, much less someone who she should have assumed was the daughter she knew as Natalie, Valentina realized what she should have known already. Or maybe, deep down, she had known it—she just hadn’t really wanted to admit it.
There was nothing this woman could do to fix anything or change anything or even make it better. She couldn’t go back in time. She couldn’t change the past. She couldn’t choose Valentina instead of Natalie, if that had been the choice she’d made. Valentina wasn’t even certain that was something she’d want, if she could go back in time herself, but the fact of the matter was that there was nothing to be done about it now.
And her heart beat at her and beat at her, until she thought it m
ight beat its way straight out through her ribs, and even as it did, Valentina couldn’t pretend that she didn’t know that what she was feeling was grief.
Grief, thick and choking. Dark and muddy and deep.
For the childhood she’d never had, and hadn’t known she’d missed until now. For the life she might have known had this woman been different. Had Valentina been different. Had her father, perhaps, not been King Geoffrey of Murin. It was all speculation, of course. It was that tearing thing in her belly and that weight on her chest, and that thick, deep mud she worried she might never find her way out of again.
And when Erica drew close to her building’s green awning, coming closer to Valentina than she’d been in twenty-seven years, Valentina…said nothing. She let her hair fall forward to cover her face where she leaned against the brick wall. She pretended she was on a serious phone call while the woman who was definitely her mother—of course she was her mother; how had Valentina been tricking herself into pretending she could be anything but that?—turned into the building that Valentina had been staking out all afternoon, and was swallowed up into her own lobby.
For long moments, Valentina couldn’t breathe. She wasn’t sure she could think.
It was as if she didn’t know who she was.
She found herself walking. She lost herself in the tumult of this sprawling mess of a bright and brash city, the noise of car horns in the street, and the blasts of conversation and laughter from the groups of strangers she passed. She made her way back to the park and wandered there as the summer afternoon took on that glassy blue that meant the hour was growing late.
