He did.
Corporate life clearly suited her. He felt a pang of regret that she was going to have to step away from it—and then reminded himself that she was the one who had crowed over the fact that he was supposedly in her pocket.
She was still a blackmailer’s daughter, sent to do his nefarious bidding.
Why did he struggle to remember that?
“I agreed to marry you,” she said, looking as dangerous as her shoes. She folded her arms over her chest and glared at him. “I didn’t agree to be hounded by your staff. Or to be fired from my job. Or to have packs of reporters hounding me day and night, while we’re on the topic.”
“What did you imagine marrying a king would entail?” he asked quietly. Not exactly roughly. “Did you truly believe that the Queen of Idylla would have a day job, Calista? Punch a time card and live for Fridays?”
Her mouth fell open. Orion had the distinct impression that he’d shocked her, and he was reminded, somehow, of her panic the night of their first ball.
“Explain to me how that would work,” he suggested, mildly enough. “Your colleagues would be going home as usual while you head to the palace.”
“But...”
“It is obvious that it cannot be,” he said, when she only gaped at him. “I must tell you, Calista, I don’t think you really thought this through. That is a pity, and I do feel for your predicament, but I’m afraid it will not help you any.”
“That sounds like a threat.”
“Only if you wish it to be.”
He wanted to touch her. He didn’t know how he didn’t. How he kept from running his fingers over her overbright, faintly swollen cheek. How he had managed to convince himself that he was coming here to help when the truth was, he’d only wanted the excuse to be near her again. Who was he fooling?
“I wish my father had never...”
She was wise enough not to finish that sentence. And Orion’s smile felt strange on his face. Misshapen, perhaps.
“I wish the same thing,” he told her, aware as he said it that it was no longer quite as true as it had been. No longer as true as it should have been. He would have to deal with that at some point, too. But her eyes were the color of the sea in summer, and it turned out he was far weaker than he’d ever imagined. “Still, we are here despite our wishes. And I will be moving you into the palace where you belong. Today.”
CHAPTER SIX
“I DON’T KNOW what you’re going on about,” Calista’s younger sister, Melody, said in her usually practical, matter-of-fact way. “Not only would I very much like to live in a palace, I would consider it a lovely holiday away from our father.”
Most of Calista’s things were packed. Her mother had overseen that personally—mostly so she could veto anything she didn’t feel was appropriate for the next Queen of Idylla—and Calista had left her to it. There was no arguing with Appollonia when she was in what Melody called her royalist fugue.
All that was left was the library. Calista had to content herself with sneaking a few of her favorite books into a satchel, muttering angrily about her fate all the while.
As ever, Melody was unsympathetic.
Calista glared at her, hoping that Melody really could feel other people’s gazes on her skin like knives as she liked to claim. Sure enough, her sister smiled. She was sitting cross-legged in her favorite armchair, over near the great fire that Calista had personally made certain was lit each day. It wasn’t as if their parents spent any time in this library. Aristotle and Appollonia Skyros didn’t have time to read when there were worlds to ruin and monarchies to worship.
This library had been installed in the house because libraries were expected in the stately houses of Idylla. Calista and Melody had claimed it ages ago and it had been theirs alone, the two of them.
Calista had hated her time in her father’s house, and she and Melody had told each other their complicated, glorious daydreams about getting out of this house. Getting away from him. Getting to live as they liked, far away from here.
But now that it was happening, notably not as planned, she felt hollow inside.
“I don’t understand any of this, to be honest,” Melody continued, clearly choosing to ignore Calista’s mood the way she often did. “I’d love to be a queen. Who wouldn’t? Mother was carrying on about all the dresses and the jewels, but I think I’d enjoy the power.”
“The Queen of Idylla is a consort, not a ruler,” Calista snapped.
And she curled her hand tight over the jewel she wore. The astonishing jewel King Orion had placed there himself that she should have wrenched off and tossed back at him at the first opportunity.
Instead, to her great shame, she had yet to take it off.
Not even once.
“The consort of the ruler is still closer to being the ruler than we are,” Melody pointed out. “I’d take it in a heartbeat.”
She did not add: But I’ve never been asked. She didn’t have to add it. They both knew full well how their father felt about the daughter he seemed to think had been born blind purely to spite him.
“You should come with me,” Calista said fiercely. “I don’t feel right about leaving you here. We both know what could happen. It’s already bad enough with the minders he keeps hiring to bully you.”
But when Melody shrugged, Calista wasn’t surprised.
“Then it happens. Of the two of us, Calista, I’m a little more at peace with my fate. And my prospects, such as they are. You don’t understand that there’s a freedom in being ignored and underestimated.”
“You shouldn’t have to be at peace with anything. You shouldn’t have to be stuck here, either, constantly under threat of being shipped off to some institution if you displease our father—”
“You went to university,” Melody said, though she was grinning. “Really, if you think about it, what’s the difference?”
Calista tossed her favorite Jane Austen collection into her bag, which was already pushing her capacity to lift, much less carry. There was no point arguing with Melody when she was in this mood. She knew that. Her sister was the last person on this earth who would ever think of herself as a victim, and there was no use trying to convince her otherwise. Still, she couldn’t quite get her head around what it would mean for her sister to live here unsupervised with their parents and the questionable aides he insisted loom about the place to “help” with Melody.
Nothing good.
And if her parents made good on the threats they liked to make about shipping Melody away—To find her true potential, Aristotle sometimes said, when what he meant was, Where her existence can no longer plague and shame me—it would break Calista’s heart. Because she knew, even if Melody pretended not to, that the three years Calista had spent in Paris pretending she’d never heard of Idylla or Skyros Media bore no resemblance to the life Melody would lead if their parents succeeded in institutionalizing her.
But it was as if Melody could read all of Calista’s thoughts and feelings in the air between them. She stood up from her chair, then came over. She took Calista’s shoulders in her hands and held them there. Tightly.
And it was a good thing to remember that Melody was no wilting violet. Her hands were tough. Strong.
So is she, Calista told herself. And if you don’t trust her to take care of herself, are you any better than our parents?
“Go,” Melody said, gently but firmly. “You could even try enjoying yourself, for a change.”
Calista blew out a breath, fighting to steady herself against a wave of emotion she couldn’t afford. And shouldn’t have had in the first place, as this was all a great farce. She wasn’t really leaving her childhood home to go live with her husband-to-be, who happened to be the king. This wasn’t a real engagement and it wouldn’t be a real marriage. Why should she suffer real emotions?
She was still on the b
oard. Her plan was still in place whether she went to the office or not. Her revenge—and Melody’s freedom—was within reach.
“Enjoy myself?” She tried to laugh. She tried to stop feeling. “You do know where I’m going, don’t you? I’ve been fired from my job and now I have to go play pretty princesses.” She wanted to make an immature gagging sound, but restrained herself. “I will likely die, Melody, stifled to death by boredom and inactivity.”
“You’ve been working feverishly, day and night, since you were eighteen. I don’t think that learning how to be a queen sounds particularly boring, if I’m honest, but even if it is—it has to be more entertaining than spending the whole of your life figuring out ways to thwart Father.”
“I don’t want to thwart Father,” Calista said softly. “I want to destroy him.”
And that was just a start.
Melody smiled. “And you will. But I don’t see why you wouldn’t look at all the avenues available to you now. Instead of the one you decided on when you thought it was the only one around.”
Wouldn’t that be lovely? Calista entertained a quick, beautiful fantasy of throwing her problems straight at the feet of the king, who could surely help her when no one else could....
But her father had something on him, too. Her father was the poison in everything.
You could try... something in her whispered.
Calista pulled away from her sister, then, and threw a couple more books into the satchel that already felt like a ton of bricks. And she tried very, very hard to keep her little surge of hope out of her voice. “All this royal nonsense is nothing but a distraction. It’s not an avenue toward anything.”
Melody sighed. “Once again, Calista. You will be the consort of the king. Any way you look at it, that’s a more powerful position than vice president to a pig. If I were you, I would stop viewing the palace as an obstacle and start looking at it as an opportunity.”
Calista couldn’t believe that anyone could help her. But she had been willing to try—or think about trying—when the car the king had sent arrived to deliver her to the palace a few hours later.
“You remember what we’re doing here,” her father told her right before she left his house, pulling her aside as the palace staff loaded up the last of her things. He gripped her arm in that way she particularly didn’t like, because it hurt. Though it had been years since she’d given him the satisfaction of wincing.
She didn’t now, either.
“By here, I assume you mean the palace,” she replied, not quite airily. “Not here as in right here in my childhood home.”
It was a mark of how intense her father was about all this that he didn’t sneer or slap her. He only gripped her a little harder and moved her closer.
“It’s your job to find something we can use against him, Calista,” he growled at her, his face in hers. “Don’t get your head turned by that fancy ring he gave you. That’s window dressing and nothing more.”
But she remembered Orion storming around that corner in the Skyros Media offices, as if he’d fully intended to charge her father and take him down. She remembered that look of dark fury on his royal face when he’d seen her father’s handprint on her cheek. Maybe she really could ask him to help her. Maybe he was the only one who could help...
“What are you talking about?” she asked, no longer pretending to be the least bit airy. “I’m marrying him because you want me to. A total stranger, who I have nothing in common with, because he’s the king. I thought that was what you wanted. I thought that was all you wanted.”
“What I want is leverage over the palace,” Aristotle told her harshly. “It was easy enough to find some on King Max. King Orion is harder—but we’re not wasting prime positioning like this. You’ll find something. You won’t rest until you do. Do you understand me, girl? Because if you don’t, it won’t be you who suffers. I’ll have your sister put away.”
He had danced around that threat for years, but he’d never come out and said it like that before. So flat and matter-of-fact. So ugly and unmistakable.
Her head spun.
“You don’t mean that,” she said, though she knew better to argue.
“I will have her sanctioned and committed, girl,” her father growled at her. “Her only use to me is the power it gives me over you, and believe me, I have every intention of using it. Test me, Calista. I dare you.”
She thought her stomach might betray her, and swallowed, hard, to keep the panic down. To keep any further arguments to herself, because there was no point antagonizing him. There never was. But it was as if she couldn’t help herself.
Because she couldn’t allow anything to happen to Melody. But she just didn’t see how she would do what her father wanted her to do. She didn’t see how she could possibly find leverage on a man like Orion, so stalwart and good, damn him.
Of course he can’t help you, she told herself. No one can help you.
Her father must have sensed a counterargument brewing, or worse, an appeal to the better nature he didn’t have. He pinched her to stop it before it happened, hard enough to bring tears to her eyes. That was his farewell gift to the daughter he’d sold.
She had the whole ride over from her father’s house to wait for the stinging to subside. And she had that little gift with her—bruising up nicely—when the palace staff ushered her, with no little pomp and circumstance, to the rooms she was told had been set aside for her use in the family wing.
“Quite an honor, madam, I don’t mind saying,” the stuffy butler had intoned down the length of his impressive nose.
Inside, alone, Calista had sat there in one of the sitting rooms. It was easily the most elegantly appointed room she’d ever beheld. And it made her feel lonelier than she ever had in her life.
She had no reason to imagine that would ever change.
Not when none of this was real, or hers. And when her brief was to gather incriminating information on the king while she was here so her father could continue to wield his repulsive influence. Or thought he could continue—until she took his company out from under him, which might be more difficult to pull off than she’d anticipated if she was locked up in the palace...
But her own self-pity was too much for her to bear. She wiped at her face, annoyed to find she’d actually let a few tears fall. She wandered through her suite until she found the bathroom and splashed water on her face until she felt a bit more like herself.
Feeling sufficiently pulled together, she went back out into the main hallway, and stopped. Because she came face-to-face with three officious-looking men.
“My goodness,” she said mildly. “Have I already run afoul of the palace guard?”
“The palace guard would be armed, madam,” said the one in the middle, with a bristling mustache. “We are His Majesty’s private secretarial staff.”
“Thank you,” she murmured sweetly. “But I don’t need any dictation at present.”
And the three of them managed to look as if they might have swooned from horror, died from it and been resurrected, all without actually moving a muscle.
“We are here to see to your education, Lady Calista,” intoned the mustache. “You will be married to His Majesty in only a matter of weeks. And unless I’m mistaken, you know very little indeed about palace life, royal etiquette, or any number of other things that will fall under your purview as queen and consort.”
“Funnily enough,” Calista said, glaring straight back at him, “the job was sold to me as a pretty simple one. Make an heir and go about my business. And as far as I’m aware, the making of heirs, even royal ones, doesn’t involve a crowd.”
But the mustache only smiled.
Pityingly.
And that was how, a week later, Calista found herself actually looking forward to the first of the December holiday balls.
Her parents had practi
cally had to throw her in the car and drag her to the palace before, but now she was already here in the palace. And she was so sick and tired of being followed around by the Trinity of Doom that she’d claimed she needed significantly more time to get ready than she actually did, and more, had actually taken that time. Because it turned out that the only thing better than a week at the spa—something she’d dreamed about but never done—was taking advantage of all palace life had to offer when it came to preparing for grand occasions.
A lovely, lengthy massage until the shoulders that were usually in her ears felt like butter. Her hair styled theatrically and her makeup applied just so. And a set of attendants to help her into a sumptuous gown that made her look like she belonged in a Disney movie.
It was almost enough to lull her into a false sense of security and well-being. It was almost enough to make her imagine this all might be real...
Almost.
She waited for Orion the way she always did, in that private salon of his that was now down the long hall instead of across town. She stood where she usually did, though it felt oddly intimate that she’d simply...walked here. Without a wrap, as she hadn’t gone outside. She knew that the palace was a huge, sprawling complex, and yet the fact they now shared a roof seemed to lodge beneath her skin like its own pop of heat.
Don’t be ridiculous, she chided herself.
But when Orion entered the room, at last, in all his kingly splendor, their eyes seemed to meet as if tugged together by magnetic forces. And then they held.
Calista told herself that she needed to hold on to her panic and fury about what was happening. That if she didn’t, she would have no choice but to let go and lose herself in all that grave hazel.
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