Ares. Her prince.
Her jailer.
And whether he was prepared to accept it or not, the man who’d gotten her pregnant.
“I don’t want to be here,” she told him. But quietly.
“I do not want women wandering about the planet, telling people that I have left them pregnant when I have taken great care never to do such a thing,” he replied, almost too easily. “Life does not often give us what we want, Pia.”
“If you insist on keeping me here for the moment, I want an exit strategy. I want to know how and when and—”
“If I were you,” Ares said, his voice low, “I would be very careful about making any demands.”
He moved one finger, and a smartly dressed woman appeared before them as if by magic. “This is Marbella. She will be your chief aide. If you have any questions, you may address them to her.”
And he didn’t wait for her answer. He simply strode off, princely and remote, his footsteps echoing against the stone until they disappeared.
Pia watched him go, much longer than she should have, and then turned to face the woman who waited at her side.
If she expected a friendly chat, or even a smile, she was disappointed. The other woman bowed slightly, then beckoned Pia to follow her as she set off in a completely different direction into the palace. Each room they passed was more fanciful than the last. Everything was open, airy. Though it was dark, Pia could still sense the ocean all around them. The seething. The whispering. As if it was just there, around the next corner, out of reach—
Marbella led her down a very long corridor that opened up this way and that into galleries and salons, all of them lit up and done in bright, cheerful sort of colors that she imagined did nothing but encourage the sun to linger.
“Who lives here?” she asked after they’d walked a while.
“The Southern Palace has been the preferred retreat of the royal family for centuries, madam,” Marbella replied with severe formality. “His Highness is the only member of the family who uses it with any regularity these days, though even he has not been here in some time.”
“Does that mean no one else is here?” She thought about what he had said by the car. “Is the king here?”
She thought the other woman stiffened, but that seemed unlikely, given how straight she already stood. “His Majesty resides and remains in the Northern Palace, madam.”
Pia nodded sagely, as if she knew the first thing about Atilia, its geography, or its palaces.
Marbella led her on until they reached a beautiful suite of rooms that was to be Pia’s for the duration.
Pia did not ask how long that duration was expected to last.
Inside her suite, she found a selection of clothes laid out for her use, that she supposed had to have been flown in from somewhere. She flushed, trying to imagine how Ares had come by the measurements. Had he measured her while she slept? Or did he simply...remember her? And had only added a bit of pregnancy weight to his estimate?
It was amazing how red her face could get at the slightest provocation.
She was grateful when the other woman retreated, leaving her to a glorious set of rooms that she suspected overlooked the water, not that it mattered. A prison was a prison, surely, no matter the view.
Pia took out her phone, was delighted to find she had service, and quickly pulled up what she could find on the kingdom of Atilia. And better still, the Southern Palace.
The palace where she sat was on the southernmost island of the kingdom. What population there was here was spread out across the island in the small villages dotting it. The palace, on the other hand, had been carved out of the side of the mountain as a kind of folly for a long-ago queen. It looked like a fairy-tale castle, but it was, as Pia had felt when she’d looked around, a nearly inviable fortress. There was the Ionian Sea in front and a mountain in back, with only one road in and out.
If anything, she’d been underplaying what was happening here.
The man who had impregnated her was a prince. She had hardly had time to take that on board. But in case she’d had any doubt, the castle put it to rest. Everything he’d said to her was true.
Ares was a prince. The prince. And he had every intention of holding her here.
Until and unless he felt like letting her go.
She was still in her funeral garb when the doctors came, an hour or so later. They’d set up their own makeshift exam room in the palace, and Pia thought about fighting it. Because she, after all, knew what the test was going to say. Surely there had to be a way to keep this from happening. She could refuse to submit herself to the examination...
But she knew without asking, or trying, that there was little point. Ares would keep her here either way until he had his answers. No matter what those answers were.