She reached over and placed her hand on mine. Something about the way she touched me, the way she looked at me, made me feel like I could do and say anything.
I took a deep breath and went into it.
“I was in the service, back when I was married.”
“Which branch?”
“Navy. Special ops. The job was everything I’d wanted back when I was some stupid kid who’d signed up for it. Job took me all over the world, let me get my hands dirty serving my country, and paid good money on top of it all. The problem came when a guy had a family. I got married young, more out of the fact that Shannon had accidentally gotten pregnant than anything else.”
I sighed, knowing I was speaking out of hurt. “No, that’s not right. We cared for each other deeply. But when Connor came along, nowthatwas a love like I’d never known before in my life. I was crazy about that little boy. He had my blonde hair and his mother’s brown eyes. But…I worked. I worked and did nothing else. I loved the job before, but now that I was providing for a family, I threw myself into it like crazy. All I cared about was making sure my boy had everything that he needed, that he never had to know poverty the way I did.
“But Shannon didn’t like it. She told me that she felt like she was taking too much of the burden of parenting, that I needed to be there too, not just my money. Maybe she was right. But the thing about us servicemen is that we’re all kinds of stubborn. And we’ve got no problem suffering when it comes to what we want. Sure, I was depriving myself of being there for my family, but it was because I loved them so damn much.”
I shifted where I sat, knowing I was getting to the hard part.
“One morning, the worst damn morning of my life, I woke up to a call from the local PD. They told me that there’d been an accident, that I needed to come home right then and there.”
She squeezed my hand harder.
“Turns out that Shannon, sleep deprived as all hell from taking constant care of Connor, had driven through an intersection and hadn’t seen a car coming the other way. She and Connor were both in the hospital. She made it. He didn’t.”
“Oh my God,” she said. “I’m so, so sorry.”
I nodded. “Thanks. I didn’t know what to do at first. I wanted to work, to take my mind off it all, but my CO didn’t let me. He said I couldn’t just stuff this one away, that I needed time to process it and grieve. Shannon blamed me, of course, saying that it was my fault she’d been running on five hours of sleep for the last seven years.
31
VICTORIA
It was a few days later, and I was on the phone with my father.
He wasn’t happy.
“You’re really putting me in a hard position, Victoria,” he said, his voice deep and booming and commanding even through a phone speaker. “People in the palace are starting to talk.”
I was in the kitchen, and the guys were all gathered in the living room. They were doing their best to not listen in, but I could sense that they were eager to know what my father had to say about the mission.
“So what? Since when do you care about gossip?”
“I care when it has to do with my own daughter. Sending you to Blanc Mont was easy enough to explain—you wanted some time away from the kingdom. But now that you’re all the way in America…people are wondering if you’ve abandoned them. And that’s to say nothing of the fact that you’re there with four strange men.”
A flourish of defensiveness ran through me.
“They’re not strange, you were the one that hired them! Besides, I’ve come to consider them my friends.”
There was a pause. I could sense that my answer hadn’t gone over well with Father at all.
“That’s not what was supposed to happen. Those men are mercenaries that I hired to keep you safe. You weren’t intended to become friends or anything else with them.”
“Father, I understand that you’re looking out for me. But you don’t get to tell me who I do or do not get to be friends with. Just because you view me as some pawn in the political game.”
“That’s not how I view you, Victoria. Not at all.”
I paused for a moment, choosing my words carefully.
“Let me ask you this, Father—when’s the last time you’ve let me leave the castle?”
There was a long silence, and I could sense that he was trying to figure out the answer.