by Olivia Gates
So now she had to live up to her promises. Live close to him for her girls’ sake, for his kingdom’s, playing her expected role for the world, while showing him nothing but neutrality and pleasantness. Even as she withered with futile yearning for him forever. As she would.
In spite of everything, she’d never stopped loving him.
No. It was far worse that that.
Inexplicably, she loved him now more than ever.
* * *
“You were married all this time, let us suffer through the scandal of your pregnancy, and you want me to calm down?”
Kassandra winced. Her father’s booming voice was loud enough it actually made the phone vibrate in her hand. Not to mention her brain shudder in her skull.
“Hush, Loukas, as if this is important anymore.” That was her mother on the other line of a five-way video call.
It had taken Kassandra four days after her last confrontation with Leonid to call her family, who mainly lived in New York but for two exceptions, to explain the whole situation and invite them to the coronation in three weeks’ time.
Only four out of the seven who made up her immediate family had been available. Her other two older brothers and another older sister texted to say they’d call as soon as they could. Now she was talking to her parents and two of her siblings.
“But Leonid Voronov... Now, that’s the relevant thing here!” her mother exclaimed. “How were you even able to hide your relationship? Hide him?”
Kassandra sighed. Leave it to her parents to each fixate on what they considered the issue here. Her father felt she’d shamed him socially for nothing, and would now make him look like the oblivious father his daughter had ignored in choosing a husband, and her mother was questioning her gossiping network and her own secret-divining prowess.
“What’s not making sense to me is that your breakup clearly happened after his accident.” That was her oldest sister, Salome, married with four kids and living in Greece since her marriage. “The Kassandra we all know wouldn’t have left the man she loved, at least loved enough to marry and submit to those convoluted cloak-and-dagger shenanigans to accommodate his desire for secrecy, when he’d just had a major accident.”
“Can’t you see you just answered your own question?” That was Aleksander, her year-younger brother, and almost her twin. “Voronov was the one who broke it off.”
“But why, for God’s sake?” Salome exclaimed as she rushed to stop her youngest, a four-year-old tornado by the name of Tomas, from dragging her laptop off the countertop. “At the time when he must have needed you most, when you needed to be with him...!” She put her son on the ground and focused back on her. “Say, it was around that time you discovered you were pregnant with the girls, wasn’t it?”
She’d already resigned to spending this conversation answering questions, and sighing. As she was now. “I found out just before his accident.”
“So he broke it off before you told him?” That was her father again, his voice like rumbling thunder. When she hesitated, he exploded. “He knew and still broke it off? And he’s back now expecting you to forgive him and give him every right to the girls? I don’t care who he is or who he’s going to be, this man doesn’t deserve to come near my daughter or granddaughters, and I’ll see to it that he doesn’t! I’ll kill him first!”
“Baba...” Kassandra parroted her siblings’ similar groans.
“Loukas!” her mother intervened. “You will calm down right this second. You’re not going to kill anyone, starting with yourself. I forbid you to have another coronary!”
Kassandra’s heart kicked. “Coronary! When was that?”
“See what you did, Rhea?” her father grumbled, looking like a petulant grizzly. “We agreed we wouldn’t tell her. Now she’ll worry herself silly when it was just a minor thing.”
“Minor?” her mother huffed furiously. “You call multiple balloon catheters and stents minor? How about keeping me on my feet and dashing around for days as you whined and grouched and made impossible demands until I literally dropped? Still minor?”
“Don’t mind them, Kass.” Aleks chuckled, the mellowest male in their pureblood-Greek clan, and the one who’d been fully Americanized. Almost. “They’re both back to peak condition, as you can see and hear, so don’t even start asking what happened. Their tempers have been more hair-trigger than usual since that hospital stay and we won’t be able to get them to stop if they start another episode in their Greek-tragedy love affair.”
Aleks had always joked that their parents’ dramatic fights were their way of spicing up a forty-plus-year marriage.
Looking positively murderous, her father glared at his son, then turned to her. “I’m bringing your uncles and cousins, even those from your maternal side, to take care of this man.”
“Whoa, you’re deeming to enlist my brothers’ and their progeny’s help?” Her mother scoffed. “After forty-three years, they’re finally good for something, in your opinion?”
Ignoring his wife, her father focused his wrath on Kassandra. “Russian king or billionaire or mobster or whatever that Voronov guy is...”
“He’s actually Zoryan, not Russian,” Aleks piped up.
“Whatever he is,” their father shouted to drown out his youngest son’s bedeviling, “we’re teaching him a lesson about being a man, one he won’t forget in this lifetime.”
Kassandra’s sigh was her deepest yet. “Congratulations, Baba. Now that you’ve detailed your plan to cause an international incident, you just made me revoke your invitation to the coronation.”
Paternal thunder broke over her again, making everyone grimace and groan. “You’re protecting him? He came back to you with puppy-dog eyes and all is forgiven? Not in my book. He needs to know the kind of consequences he faces when he messes with the Stavroses and their own.”
“So you’re drafting the Papagiannis in your war, but they don’t even get mentioned in the credits?” Her mother snorted.
Salome raised her hand like a student seeking to be heard in a raucous class. “Didn’t you notice the little detail that he came back with something more than a wagging tail? He’s making your granddaughters princesses and your daughter a queen, for God’s sake.” She turned her eyes to Kassandra, the implication clearly just sinking in. “Oh, God, I can’t wait to tell everyone here we’re going to be European royalty!”
“Is Zorya a European kingdom, or is it counted as Asian?” Aleks mused the pragmatic curiosity on purpose, Kassandra was sure, to amplify her father’s fury.
Ignoring him, Loukas Stavros leveled a glare at his firstborn, as if Salome had just called him a dirty name to his face. “I care nothing about what he offers. My granddaughters and daughter are already princesses and a queen without him.”
Aleks chuckled. “As are all girls to their fathers, especially Greek fossils. Lighten up, Baba, this is the twenty-first century and your daughter is a world-renowned celebrity and businesswoman. She can take care of herself.”
“And I don’t care what she is to the world. To me, she is and will remain my little girl and I’ll take care of her as long as there’s breath in my body.”
“You won’t have many of those left if you keep hollering like that,” her mother grumbled.
Kassandra raised her hand. “I knew I’d regret telling you anything, so thanks, everyone, for proving me right.” She turned her gaze to her father. “If taking care of me means bringing the Stavros and Papagianni testosterone mob to Zorya to ambush Leonid, I’ll have immigration revoke your visas at the airport and send you back on the first flight home.”
Eyes widening at her threat, knowing she didn’t make them lightly, her father pretended to laugh. “You’re worried we’re going to rough him up or something, nariy kyria? Nah, we’ll just take him aside and...convince him of the error of his ways. I’m sure he’ll be a bette
r husband and father after our talk. This is men’s stuff, so leave it to the men.”
“Fine.” As her father’s face started relaxing, macho triumph coating his ruggedly handsome face, Kassandra added, “I’ll have them send you home with heavily armed escorts from the CIA and its Zoryan equivalent.”
Before her father went off again, she raised her voice, looking at her mother and sister. “About the estrogen posse... I’ll leave instructions that the authorities are to sift you from your male components and let you through. But only if you promise you won’t ambush Leonid yourselves, if for other purposes.”
Salome burst out laughing. “After seeing the latest footage of him on the news today? No promises.”
Her mother chuckled in agreement. “Don’t be stingy. Let the women have some crumbs of your fairy-tale king. You’re going to have, and eat, his whole cake, forever.”
After that overt innuendo, her parents left the conference call to continue their argument in private. Her siblings had dozens of questions for her, each according to his or her interests.
She detailed the hectic preparations for the coronation, and the sweeping changes Leonid was implementing as he transitioned Zorya back to a sovereign state and kingdom. But whenever Salome asked about their relationship, she steered the conversation to Leonid’s blossoming relationship with the girls. She wasn’t about to tell her sister she’d resigned herself to a lifetime of co-parenting the girls with Leonid as polite strangers.
Not that that was accurate. He wasn’t one. She had no idea what he was, had been going insane, constantly exposed to the suppressed emotions and hunger that blasted out of him.
Either she was imagining it, or what she sensed was real. But even if it was, by now she knew he had made up his mind never to act on those feelings, had zero hope he ever would.
For now, she managed to end the call without letting her siblings suspect this whole thing was the furthest thing from a fairy tale, or even an actual reconciliation. Or that she’d never been more miserable, hopeless and confused in her life.
She’d resigned herself to being so for the rest of her life. For the girls, and for the larger-than-life destiny she by now believed was their birthright.
* * *
Later that night, after disappearing all day, Leonid materialized like clockwork to have dinner with her and the girls, and to share in all their nightly rituals.
After they put their daughters to bed, he headed out of the wing, saying little, seeming anxious to leave her, alone and unappeased on every level, for another endlessly bleak night.
As he reached the door, she cried out, “Leonid!”
He stiffened, as if her voice was an arrow that had hit him between the shoulder blades. Then he turned, his movement reluctant, his gaze apprehensive.
“I thought I could go on like this,” she choked. “But I can’t. You never gave me a straight answer and I have to have one. However terrible it is, it will be far better than never knowing for sure where we stand and why, and going nuts forever wondering.”
In response, there it was again, that corrosive, devouring longing in his eyes.
“You can’t keep looking at me like that! Not when you never let me know what it means!”
He only squeezed his eyes shut. But it was too late. She’d seen that look, could no longer doubt what it was.
Her voice rose to a shriek. “If you want your daughters to have a mother and not a wreck, you must put me out of my misery. Tell me what the hell is going on.”
His gaze lowered, and she thought he’d escape her again, leaving her to go insane with speculation.
Then he raised his gaze and she saw it. The severe aversion to coming clean. And his intention to do it. At last.
Still saying nothing, he walked toward her. But instead of stopping, he bypassed her. Feeling like a marionette, she followed him until he reached the master bedroom.
After closing the door behind them, he half turned to her. “There’s something I need to...show you.”
Then he started to strip.
Her stupefaction wavered into deeper bewilderment when she realized he wasn’t exactly stripping. Turning sideways, brow knotted, face darkened with pain-laced consternation, he left his shirt on, took off his shoes, his belt, undid his zipper, let his pants drop before kicking them away.
Straightening, he finally turned to face her.
But long before he had, with each inch he exposed, her confusion had turned to shock, then to horror.
One of his legs was a map of livid, hideous scars, where massive tissue had been lost, where fractured bones had torn through muscles and shredded skin, and surgeries had put it all back in a horribly disfigured whole.
His other leg was...gone.
Nine
His leg.
Leonid had lost his leg.
In its place, there was a midthigh prosthesis with a facade that resembled his previously normal leg, looking even more macabre than his remaining, mutilated one for it.
All the instances she’d noticed his difficulties in moving, his discomfort, his pain, came crashing back, burying her in an avalanche of details. Then the wheel of memory was yanked to a stop before spooling back at a dizzying speed to that time in his hospital room. New explanations to his every word and glance, making such perfect sense now with hindsight, thudded into place, decimating everything she’d thought she’d known, until she felt everything in her brain falling in a domino effect.
The wheel shot forward through time again, to the moment he’d reappeared in her life. The way he’d avoided coming near. Stepped away every time she had. Their time on the jet, undoing his clothes only enough to release himself. Not lying down with her, so she wouldn’t find out.
But she should have.
Nausea welled, the bile of recriminations filling her up to her eyes. That she hadn’t even suspected the significance of what she’d noticed, what she’d felt from him, that she’d been so disconnected from him, so wrapped up in her own suffering and loss, she hadn’t felt his.
Every thought and feeling she’d had, toward him, about him, built on that obliviousness, came back to lodge in her brain like an ax, shame hacking at her.
But it wasn’t only because he’d lost a limb. Leonid’s loss cut so much deeper than that. His legs, both of them, had been more than a vital part of his body. He’d used them like so few on the planet ever had, turning them through discipline and persistence into supreme instruments, catapulting himself to an almost superhuman level of physical prowess and achievement.
But—oh, God—he hadn’t only lost his supremacy, he’d lost the ability to walk and run like any other average human being.
And she hadn’t been there for him. He’d been alone through the loss and the struggle back to his feet. Such as they were.
Now he was reversing the painfully stilted process of exposing his loss to her, putting his pants and shoes back on, the difficulty with which he found something so simple shredding her heart to smaller pieces. And that was when she was still shell-shocked. When it all sank in, it would tear her apart.
Not that what she felt mattered. Only he did.
Numb with agony, mind and soul in an uproar, she watched him as he walked to the room’s sitting area, his every step now taking on a whole new meaning and dimension. Reaching the couch by the balcony with her favorite view of the grounds and the sea, he sank down as if he could no longer stand.
When he finally raised his eyes to her, they were totally empty, like they’d been when he’d first come back.
“That’s your answer, Kassandra. From the look on your face, it’s even more terrible than anything you’ve imagined.”
Fighting the muteness to contradict his catastrophically inaccurate analysis, she choked, “It’s...not...not...”
“Not terrible?” His subdued voice cut across her failed efforts to put what raged inside her into words. “There’s no need to placate me, Kassandra. I know exactly how my legs...my leg...and the prosthesis look. They’re both right out of a horror movie, one from a Frankenstein-like one, the other a Terminator-like one. It’s perfectly normal you’re appalled.”
Objections burst out of her, her anguish at the way he perceived his injuries, her indignation that he thought the way they looked was what horrified her. But they only sounded in her mind. Out loud, she couldn’t say one word.
Keeping his dejected gaze fixed on her no doubt stricken one, he exhaled as he heaved up again. “Now you’ve had your answer, I hope everything is settled.”
Her muteness shattered. “Settled? Settled how? You think showing me this answered anything?”
His teeth made a terrible sound. He said nothing.
More realizations bombarded her. “Was that why? Why you broke it off with me in the past, why you didn’t take me up on my offer now? For God’s sake, Leonid, why?”
“What do you mean, why? I just showed you.”
“I see no answers here. Absolutely none. What do your injuries and loss have to do with anything between us?”
He looked away, as if to hide his response to her feverish response. She teetered up to her feet, approached him. Her heart broke into tinier pieces as he pulled farther away, as if unable to bear her proximity, guarding against her possible touch.
She stopped advancing, stood trembling from head to toe. “If you think you’ve given me an answer, the answer, all you’ve done is give me more maddening questions. So just tell me, Leonid. Everything since the accident. Please.”
He appeared about to evade her again, then she sensed something crumbling inside him. That...dread of laying everything inside him bare before her.
Heading back to the couch, he sat down heavily. Wincing, supersensitive to his every move more than ever, she followed him, sat far enough away to give him the space he needed.
Then he talked. “Everything started before the accident. While I was training, I realized our arrangement had only been satisfactory because we were together almost every day. Being apart from you made me realize I wanted to be with you, all the time, all my life. I wasn’t sure if you felt the same, but I was going to risk it. I was going to propose.”
