She pushed the door open at the top of the stairs, and I followed her in. “Lily,” she said, “Hercules would like to speak to you.” There was a tremor in her voice for the first time. And if I had been a different man, I might have felt some uncertainty along with it.
But I could not afford to waver. Not ever. And I could not afford sympathy in any measure.
Lily looked confused. Curious. Her dark eyes swept over me, and even amid the confusion, even in her youth, I could see an imperiousness there. Inherited, I knew.
Lily.
What would her name have been if I had been there? Her name would have been a family name. Aphrodite or Apollonia, perhaps.
Lily was so simple.
It sounded like something that could be easily crushed, and everything inside of me rebelled at that. But when I looked back down at the child and her steady expression as she looked me full in the face with an ease that men found next to impossible at times, I knew the name suited her well.
Because her enemies would never know that she was made of steel at her core. They would be distracted and confused by her apparent softness, and they would never see her hit coming.
I would teach her to hone that. I would teach her all she needed in order to ascend the throne of Pelion. She was young enough that it was not too late, and I might have missed her earliest years, but I would not miss anymore. I kept my gaze on Lily, because this discussion was between us, and only us.
“I have something I wish to speak to you about,” I said, trying to decide if I should loom over the child or crouch down and meet her eyes.
I was a prince. I did not crouch. It was near to a bow, and I wasn’t entirely sure my body could form such a submissive posture.
But speaking over her as I was didn’t seem right either.
And so for the first time I could remember, I bent a knee.
“Your mother and I were...” How the hell did you explain such a thing to a child? I had no idea. Did she even know a man and woman had to know each other in order to reproduce? And I could not say something that would cast her mother in a negative light. That was just diplomacy. She was on her mother’s side. Clearly, she would not take kindly to an interloper telling her that her mother was anything less than perfect. So I would have to select my wording carefully. Not out of deference to Marissa, but out of care for my particular political mission.
With a four-year-old.
My child. My daughter.
It was something I could not fathom still. It settled on my skin like a crackle of electricity, rather than sinking in.
“We knew each other for a time,” I continued. “And we were...separated. I had to go back to my country, and you moved away from here.”
She scrunched up her face. “You talk funny. Is it because you’re from another country?”
It was not a question I expected, and one that came in slightly from left field, given the direction my line of speaking was headed.
“Yes,” I said. “I imagine so.” Though, I did not think I had a very marked accent. I’ve been told my English was nothing short of excellent.
“Okay,” she said, apparently satisfied by my admission.
“I am from a country far away,” I continued. “Across the ocean. An island in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea. It’s beautiful. You see, I had to return there to see to business because I am a prince.”
“A prince?” Her eyes got round.
“Yes,” I said, satisfied that that statement had landed anyway. “And I have just discovered something, Lily. You are my Princess. You’re my daughter. I...I’m your father.”
And then she did something I couldn’t have anticipated.
I didn’t realize that children felt emotion in that way, but she demonstrated to me that I knew nothing. Her face crumpled, almost immediately, and the sound that came out of her tiny body was almost inhuman. A high-pitched wail that pierced my heart, pierced any defense I thought I might have had. And then she wrapped her arms around my neck and held me, as if I weren’t a stranger. As if I weren’t a man who had stormed into her grandmother’s house and made all manner of threats to her mother.
I went stiff, completely uncertain of what to do. And for the first time, I looked to Marissa. Her expression was neutral, but there were tears in her eyes. I tried to straighten, but Lily would not let me go. So I wrapped an arm around her and stood, holding her against me as she wept. “Your mother told me that I had to ask you,” I continued, “if you want to come with your mother and live with me in my castle.”
I realized how truly unfair a line of questioning that was, and also realized that by asking me to go and speak to Lily, Marissa had not set me up for failure. Her motive had not been selfish, not at all. Because anyone would know that a four-year-old would not have the willpower to turn down such an offer.
She lifted her head, wiping at her eyes with closed fists. “What about my nana?”
“Your nana can come too,” I said. “It’s a very big castle.”
I didn’t know how I’d come into the position of negotiating details of something so delicate with a preschooler, but there I was.
“Mommy,” Lily said, her voice plaintive. She reached for Marissa.
Marissa stepped forward, and I transferred the warm weight of the child to her.
It was a strange thing, one that I imagined normal parents did.
Mine certainly never had. There had been no affection spared for me in my youth. I imagine my mother had felt inclined to give it to me, but my father had not allowed it.
And I...
I had spent so much time planning for what it would be like politically when I had an heir that I had never once spared a thought to what kind of father I would be.
Only what kind of king I might be.
But Lily was not a hypothetical—she was very real, and seemed to need something from me that I could not quite fathom, but knew I had to find it in myself to give.
“It’s true,” Marissa said, brushing Lily’s hair back from her face. “Everything he said is true. You’re a princess. If you want to be a princess, it means moving away from here. Aw
ay from our home in Boston. Away from what we know. But I’ll be with you. And...you were born a princess, Lily.” Her voice broke. “You were born a princess, and whether you go to Pelion or not, you’re still a princess. But everything that your father has belongs to you too. And it wouldn’t be right for me to ask you not to have it.”
It was clear to me that Lily didn’t understand Marissa’s impassioned speech. But I did. I appreciated how difficult this was for her, even though it couldn’t affect my ultimate action.
Lily’s expression was serious, and she looked at me with luminous eyes. “Daddy?”
The word hit like a bullet. I felt as though it had ripped its way through my chest and torn my heart utterly into pieces.
The heart that I didn’t realize had been quite so vulnerable, or quite so...
Quite so able to feel.
This child was innocent. Of everything.
Of what had happened between her mother and me, whether it was subterfuge on the part of Marissa or not. Of the royal lineage she had been born into.
She had no control over any of it, and I knew exactly what that felt like.
Except when my father had taken me in hand, they had been the hands of a monster, and there had never been any question that I call him something so affectionate as Daddy.
But this child was handing me trust. A moniker of affection that I had done nothing to earn, and I feared might never.
I felt utterly and wildly adrift in that moment, in a way that I had only ever done two other times in my life.
The first time I had seen Marissa—when it hadn’t even been sexual in nature—and when I had come back to discover she was gone.
“Yes,” I said, my voice less than steady, which was unacceptable.
And yet we were not in the throne room. Not before the press.
It was just me and this child. My child.
And Marissa.
“I want to go with you,” the little girl said, while simultaneously tightening her hold on her mother.
“Then we will go together,” Marissa said, holding even more tightly to Lily. “We will go together.”