Page 165

And wondering how to go on.

Because there had never been any doubt they were in love. They had said so before. But he had never said it quite like this.

She had been sure it hadn’t made it through the past two years, no matter how her own heart might have lost its place inside her at the sight of him.

“If you love me, then prove it,” she said, and there was too much in her voice then. Raw. Vulnerable. Bitter, perhaps.

All of that longing and nowhere to put it.

Vesuvius blinked. His head tilted slightly to one side. He frowned and there was something…astonished all over him, then.

“Aeryn. What do you think is happening here?” He gestured around, taking in the room where they stood. Maybe her house. Maybe all of Chicago and this endless night. “I have proved it. I am proving it, by coming here at all.”

She shook her head. “I just think—”

“Aeryn.” His voice was even more intense, and his gaze felt like fire. “I left my kingdom. My people. My throne. I left all of it—for you.”

Chapter Nine

It wasn’t lost on Vesuvius that they were standing in his daughter’s bedroom and he still had not met her. He felt as if it had been a lifetime since he’d come to this place, but of course it had only been a handful of hours.

Yet the most important hour, he had to think, was this one.

Because now she knew that he remembered everything. Now there were no more possible pretenses between them, and he was glad of that. Because now—finally—he could explain.

“I had every intention of marrying Sintia,” he told her. She winced, slightly, and he regretted that, but the time for pretense, or attempting to protect her from the truth of things, was past. It had to be. “I don’t say that to hurt you. And I certainly don’t say that because I was remotely pleased with the notion. As you are well aware. Marrying Sintia represented the final step in giving myself over completely to the kingdom.”

She blew out a breath and then retreated to sit in that rocker again. He trailed after her but stood at the window, looking out at those piles of snow and the streetlights doing their best to shine anyway.

And he kept going, because he couldn’t help but think that this was his chance. The last and only chance. “You wouldn’t know this, but I practiced small forms of rebellion when I was younger. When I was at university with Saviero, and our other friend, Kyriakos.”

“He is a prince, yes,” Aeryn said. “I’ve seen pictures of you three together.”

Kyriakos was the reigning Prince of Zaccaria, and as he thought about it, Vesuvius found it somewhere in the neighborhood of amusing that all three of them had ended up, reluctantly, on thrones none of them wanted or would have chosen. But it was a high probability that he was the only one who would abandon his. And had.

“The three of us were not well behaved,” he told her. “Thanks to Saviero, we were discreet. And Kyriakos took any blame if we failed to be as discreet as necessary, since at the time he was a spare who had no hope of ascending, and that was how we managed to experience all manner of things that would have set the tabloids ablaze if they’d known.”

He shook his head, unable at the moment to access the young man he’d been then. It seemed several more lifetimes away.

“No one expected me to settle down when I was younger, not even when I first became king, and I took full advantage of that.” He reached out a hand to touch the frozen glass and drew a pattern there. Words he could not say the way he wanted to, not yet, but all on top of each other so only he could read them. “But there was mounting pressure the older I got. Some of it was organic. Everyone likes a love story, of course, and kingdoms in particular enjoy them. It pleases the people to have a fairy tale to hold onto, I think, and I had always understood that one day, it would fall to me to provide that fairy tale. And the older I got, the more impatient people grew for wedding bells and talk of the great love story that must clearly exist between Sintia and me. Because modern-day kingdoms are built on stories, and political unions arranged without the participants’ input do not tell a story anyone wishes to hear.”

He sounded harsher than he’d meant to, then. Though that didn’t make it any less true.

Aeryn made a noise. “But you didn’t love her. She was chosen for you.” And he liked that she sounded offended by that, though he doubted she knew it.

“I did not love her,” he agreed, solemnly, holding Aeryn’s green gaze in the predawn darkness. “What is more important is that she never loved me, either. And I have reason to believe that she was largely responsible for a lot of the less organic concern about my marital status. Because, of course, the only power she had was deferred. She had to wait until she became my queen before she could wield any of it. So she wielded the only thing she could, while she waited. The media.”

In the pantheon of regrets that Vesuvius carried around inside of him, the fact that he had been too busy ignoring Sintia to truly grasp what kind of games she was playing ranked pretty high. He could have stopped it years ago. And if he had, who knew? Perhaps the great pressure he’d felt to follow the path that had been laid out for him long ago would have been different.

But that was not how it had gone.

“She spent years campaigning and keeping herself at the forefront of the popular imagination,” he told Aeryn now. “She didn’t care what sort of attention she got, because it led to the same place. Whether she was pitied because I made her wait, or reviled because how much could I truly care for her if it took me so long to get over my so-called cold feet, or even if I was the one they hated because of my perceived treatment of her. She loved all of it. She used all of it. She had no compunction.”

“I have never heard a story about her that made me think that she was at all likable,” Aeryn said, sounding as if she was choosing her words with care. “But I could never tell if that was simply my own jealousy at play. Because I always knew that you would marry her. You never claimed otherwise.”

“I truly intended to,” he agreed, and hoped she could see that he was not happy about that. That he never had been. “Two years ago, the wedding date was set. It might as well have been carved in stone. There was no pretending it wasn’t happening any longer. And for a while, I thought that perhaps I could hold onto you anyway. It was pure selfishness.”

She sighed as she looked up at him. “I would like to agree, because there is a part of me that wants to make sure you truly and deeply feel how hard all of that was for me. But the truth is, I wanted to hold on to you, too. For the same selfish reasons.”