“A girl,” my father sneered. “Of course you would produce a girl.”
“She will be Queen. She will be Queen after me, and I daresay that whatever I don’t manage to blot out that you brought on this country, she will erase entirely.”
“Do you imagine I will step aside for you? For her?”
“You have to. Your birthday has passed. And I can see that age has begun to eat away at you.”
He chuckled. “It is not age. But illness. It has long been said that I am too mean to die. I suspect soon we will see whether or not that is true.”
“Step aside now.”
“Have you not even a flicker of emotion for your father?”
“No,” I said, “and you are not shocked. You concealed my child from me, and I have told you that I brought your granddaughter back to the country and you have no emotion to spare for that except disdain over her gender. No, I have no emotion to spare for you. None at all. You had none to spare for me. You had none to spare for her. I will stage a coup. We can end this in blood if you like.”
“What if you didn’t like the blood that was spilled?”
“If that is a threat against my family, I will end you now with my own hand.”
“Do not speak of threats, Hercules, for we are more civilized than that, are we not? Political warfare is best waged with words and bureaucracy, don’t you think?”
“The war is won. Engaging in a battle with you is a pointless waste of time. I marry Marissa in less than two weeks’ time. The original wedding date stands. And upon that wedding you will abdicate.”
“Will I?”
“Yes. Because if you don’t, trust that I will make public what has occurred with Lily. Trust that I will destroy whatever fragment of a reputation you have left in this world. What do you want in the history books, Father? That in your current state is your primary concern anyway.”
“I will require medical staff,” he said. “I will require a residence.”
“All to be provided,” I said. “I will send you off with the most lavish of severance packages. You will want for nothing, and to all the world it will look as if the Xenakis line has continued as it should. No one need know that I had to wrest it from you.”
“If I resisted, what would you do?”
“I would have the military on my side, Father, and I think we both know it. No matter your threats, the blood that spilled would be yours.”
My father was dying, and I knew that he was not fighting me because he wanted to extend his time as ruler, not when the tasks were clearly going to be too much for him and soon.
No, my father was fighting to avoid losing to me.
And that was why, whatever he said, I always would find victory.
Because I was not fighting a war of pettiness, but one for the people of my country.
“You have until the wedding to vacate this place. We will notify the Council that power is changing hands, and we will notify the press that my bride has changed. And we will come up with a suitable story for how I have only just now discovered my heir. And if you do anything that I do not care for in the meantime, that story will become more fact than fiction, and you will not like the results.”
I considered how much I was counting on my father’s ego to remain predictable as I made my way back to my home across the city.
He was a dying man, and many could argue he had nothing to lose. It was true enough. But for my father, legacy would always count in the end.
I wondered if it occurred to him that I had control of that legacy. Because whatever I told him while he drew breath I could change once he was gone.
The ultimate tragedy for a man who sought to control everything in his life, I supposed. A man who did not think he had to give deference to a son who was beneath him.
Not even my father could manipulate death. And once he was gone, he would have power over nothing.
The house on the hill was not my home.
I had never given much thought to homes.
The castle had always felt very much like my father’s domain, and like it was sadly tainted by the sins of the previous generations.
One thing my father would get to live to see, and it gave me an extreme amount of pleasure, was the joy that our people would feel when he was finally removed from the throne.
My wedding would be a cause for celebration in a way no one had anticipated.
And—something I had not thought of—Marissa would be a welcome bride, even though she was not from Pelion, by sheer virtue of the fact that she was the method by which my father was uninstalled.
In contrast to the darkness of the palace, my home was made of light. Windows and stark walls, and white marble on the floors.
Not because I was a creature of virtue so much as even devils got tired of hell.
I was so used to my staff being invisible and everything being in a certain order that the disruption in the white—Marissa’s figure and Lily’s small one—gave me pause.
“You’re back,” she said.
“Yes,” I said, battling against the warring responses to the sight of both of them that were occurring in my body. There was an ache when I looked at Lily and I did not know what to call it.
I knew what I felt for Marissa.
And I disliked very much the sensation that she was holding the most vulnerable part of me in her hand and guiding me around by it.
If she wanted to do that, she had to give me pleasure, rather than just attempts to manipulate.
“Have you not found everything to your liking?”
“Lily wanted to see more of the house,” Marissa said.
“It’s the biggest house I’ve ever seen. Is it the castle?” Lily asked.
“No,” I said, working to gentle my tone. “We will move into the castle after the...after the wedding.”
Lily’s eyes were shining. “You’re going to marry my mom.”
“Yes,” I said. “And she will be a princess too.”
Lily was enraptured, clearly captured by what to her felt like a real-life fairy tale. She wrapped her arms around her mother’s leg. “We’ll be princesses together,” she said.
Marissa, for her part, tried to force a smile and patted Lily on the back. “Yes. We will.”
“Can I go and get Nana?”
“Sure,” Marissa responded.
Lily bounded up the stairs, her dark curls bouncing behind her.
“What were you doing?” Marissa asked.
“You don’t care what I was doing,” I said. “Remember, I have permission to be with anyone I choose at any time I choose. Your edict, Marissa, not mine.”
“It was not a question of where your private parts were, Hercules, but your person.”
“I was speaking to my fa
ther,” I said. “And somehow I managed not to kill him.” I made my way over to the bar that sat in the corner of the living area and I poured myself some scotch. Crutches be damned, some things were better done with alcohol.
“I see.”
“It has never been a secret to me that he was a monster. But he kept my child from me, Marissa, and I cannot forgive that. I will not.”
“Why should you? If you had come back into my life simply telling me you had changed your mind... If you had known about Lily all this time, I would not have forgiven you. There are some things that are simply unforgivable.”
I thought of her, as she had been. Young and pregnant and alone. And for the first time, I could see clearly enough through my rage to truly think of her as a victim.
I had cast her in the role of defector for so many years. And then the shock of discovering that I had a child had...
It had undone my world.
And then it had put it back together with strange and new possibilities, and I had not been able to ignore the political implications.
“I’m going to need you,” I said.
Because it did no good for me to dwell on the past. On what might have been, and who she was to me. On how terrified she must have been. Alone and...heartbroken.
It didn’t sit well with me.
When I had touched her, I had known that I had crossed a boundary I normally would not.
Virgins were not something I had ever cared to trifle with before. There were too many unintended consequences.
But I had decided on some level that I would make Marissa mine, and so I had justified it.
And then, when she abandoned me, I had recast her in my mind in the role of scarlet woman somehow, even though I knew full well that she had never known the touch of a man before me.
Marissa.
No, there was no point in thinking of her that way. It was better to focus on now.
“Need me for what?”
“We have to speak to the press.”
“Why do you need me for that?”
“Because. Because I need to put a face to my new bride, for all the world to see. Because there is going to be an interest.”
“I’m exhausted,” she said.