The jet was dropping closer to those lights below, and Pia felt something like panic clawing at her. Maybe that was why she didn’t wait for him to answer her.
“You can’t spirit me away to an island and keep me there, Ares,” she said instead. But if she was looking for some kind of softness on his face, there was none to be found. He could as easily have been carved from marble. “You know that, don’t you? That’s all well and good in the average fairy tale, but this is real life.”
“I keep trying to explain to you who I am,” Ares said quietly. Almost apologetically, which made every hair on her body feel as if it stood on its end. Because he was the least apologetic creature she had ever met. “I have never been a good prince, it is true, but I’m a prince nonetheless. And we have entered my kingdom, where my word is law. I am afraid that you will discover that I can do as I like.”
“But—”
“Call it a fairy tale if you like, cara mia,” he murmured. “If it helps.”
It did not help.
That panic continued to claw at her as the jet landed. As Pia was marched off—escorted, she supposed, and politely, but it all felt rather more kidnap-ish than it had before—and bundled into yet another gleaming car. This time they were driven along a precipitous coastal road that hugged the looming hills on one side and dropped off toward the sea on the other. They skirted around the side of the island, until they came upon what looked to Pia like a perfect fairy-tale castle.
Just in case she didn’t already feel as if she’d stumbled into the pages of a storybook already.
It rose as if from a pop-up children’s book, blazing with light as it sat up over the sea on a jutting bit of hillside. It even had turrets.
“What is this place?” she managed to ask, half-convinced she was still dreaming.
“It is the Southern Palace, as I said,” Ares said from beside her in the car’s wide backseat. “If, as I suspect, you are merely pregnant yet not with any child of mine, you will stay here only as long as it takes you to sign the appropriate legal documentation that asserts you have no claim to the throne of my kingdom. And never will.”
“I don’t want your throne. Or your kingdom.”
“Then it will all go very quickly.” He turned then, the light from the palace as they approached the first wall beaming into the car and making him gleam. Making him even more beautiful, which was unhelpful. “But if, by some miracle, what you say is true? Then allow me to be the first to welcome you to your new home, Pia. You can expect to be here for some time.”
“Once again,” she said, working hard to keep her voice calm when she felt nothing but that panic inside her, shredding her, “you might be a prince and this might be your kingdom—”
“There is no might, Pia. I am who I say I am.”
“Well, Eric,” she replied, glaring at him, “you cannot actually kidnap women and hold them captive in your palace, no matter who you say you are. I think you’ll find it’s generally frowned upon.”
Ares settled back in his seat as the car slipped into some kind of courtyard, then continued under a grand archway that led deeper beneath the palace. And if he was bothered by the name she’d used—the name he’d given her in New York—he didn’t show it.
“You are welcome to register a complaint,” he said after a moment, as if he’d taken some time to consider the matter. “In this case, your only recourse would be the king.”
And he let out a laugh at that, which was not exactly encouraging.
Still, Pia kept glaring at him. “Is he more reasonable than you? He would have to be, I’d think. You could take me to him right now.”
Ares laughed again. “My father is not a safe space,” he assured her. “For you, or anyone else.”
The car finally came to a stop. And Pia couldn’t help the sense of doom that washed over her then. It was that same clawing panic, and something more. Something that made her heart ache.
Ares exited the vehicle with an athletic grace Pia would have preferred not to notice, nodding at the guards who waited there.
Her heart in her throat, Pia followed him, climbing out of the car to find herself in yet another courtyard. She was surrounded on all sides by thick castle walls. Far above was the night sky, riddled with stars. And it had never occurred to her before that there could only really be turrets where there were steep walls all around. That turrets belonged to fortresses, like this one.
But there were no walls steeper and more formidable than the man who stood there, watching her much too intensely as she looked around at her lovely, remote, fairy-tale prison.