“A man like you is on a certain level,” she said, pulling herself up as straight as she could, despite the weight of her belly. And the far greater weight of her shame. “You must be aware of this.”
“You mean that I am the Crown Prince? Yes, Pia. I am aware of it. It is the sort of thing they tend to tell you from a very young age.”
“I don’t mean the fact that you’re a prince, although that’s part of it. I mean... You.” She waved her hand in his direction. Trying to take in all of it, all of him, as he lounged there. Golden, rangy and athletic, as if someone had come in and carved a god from marble and breathed life into the stone. “You are a beautiful man. You are meant to find a beautiful wife. No one would accept a queen like me for a man like you.”
Ares stared at her for a long while. As the panic and worry inside her intensified, she focused on strange things. Like the muscle in his jaw that clenched, seemingly of its own volition. Or the way his green eyes seemed darker. More dangerous.
“I will take it that what you are telling me is that you do not believe you are beautiful,” he said. Eventually.
Pia made herself smile, though she was terribly afraid that the humiliation of this might take her out at the knees. Or maybe she only hoped it would.
“My mother was widely held to be the most beautiful woman in the world. Yes, she had her issues. She was not always kind, or good. Or even polite. And judging by the pills and the alcohol she took at the end, she was also not very happy.” She blew out a breath, and hoped he couldn’t hear how it shook. “My brother thinks it was deliberate, but I don’t. For a while I thought maybe I pushed her to it, and my father, too, having fallen pregnant the way I did. But now I think it was an accident, because the one thing I know about Alexandrina San Giacomo is that she had no intention of going out with a whimper.”
Alexandrina had been an opera heroine, always. Any death scene she’d planned would have been long-winded, theatrical, and would have required a vast audience. Most important, she would have needed to make certain she stayed beautiful throughout.
Pia didn’t know when her certainty that she was to blame had...shifted. She suspected it had to do with spending all this time with Ares. All she knew for certain was that somehow, it had been a long while since she’d felt personal guilt about her parents’ deaths. One had been an accident. The other had been inevitable. Her pregnancy had nothing to do with either.
Which didn’t make it any easier.
She remembered that Ares was watching her. Waiting, all that leashed power of his coiled and tight.
“What my mother always had, what everyone knew and agreed on, was that she was beautiful. No matter how drunk, or tired, or under the weather. Men would stop in the street to stare. Sometimes they burst into song. Does that sound ridiculous?” She shrugged. “A serenade in the street was merely an unremarkable day in my mother’s life. I grew up knowing exactly what beautiful meant. And seeing exactly what it looked like.”
“I see.” Ares’s voice sounded almost...strangled.
“Do you?” she demanded.
Pia didn’t understand what was sloshing around inside of her then. It was too much sensation. It was too much emotion. It was too much.
And maybe Alexandrina had it right. Maybe it was better to make everything an opera. Because at least then you could be in control of when the curtain went up, when it went down, and everything in between. How funny that she’d never understood that until now.
She took the coverlet from around her, and tossed it aside, the way her mother would have. With flourish.
“Do you really see?” she demanded. “Look at this body, Ares. It was never much to begin with, and after this? It will be a different body altogether. Forever. It will never snap back. There will be stretch marks, everywhere. And that’s the least of it. I’ve seen pictures of my mother when she was pregnant. She looked like at any moment, someone might happen by and write a sonnet to her beauty.”
“Is this an argument you truly wish to win?” he asked.
“It’s not an argument. It’s reality. I’m not my mother, and I’m certainly not beautiful like she was.”
“I don’t know how to say this,” Ares said, as if he was choosing his words carefully. “But I cannot think of much I care less about than your mother’s supposed beauty.”
“It wasn’t ‘supposed.’ It wasn’t an opinion, it was a fact.”
“Your mother was a lovely woman,” Ares agreed, shrugging one shoulder. “But what of it? The world is filled with beautiful women.”