Now

Six Weeks Later

Eliot said April is the cruelest month, but I can think of many crueler ones. January, when the holidays are over and the cold is hard enough to break your teeth on. November, when the skies go gray like they’ve forgotten how to be blue. March, with its muddy thaw and tree branches stark and skeletal.

But no month is crueler than October. Because October is the month I marry someone I don’t love for reasons I’m not sure I entirely believe in. October is the month when I take more steps that can’t be unstepped, weave more webs that can’t be unwoven. But what choice do I have? What choice have I ever had? There’s only ever been the choice between doing nothing and doing something, and goddammit, I’d rather choose something than nothing. I’ve chosen to do nothing long enough.

It’s a cold night tonight, and so quiet that I can hear the ash burning on my cigarette. So still that even the smoke refuses to move, hanging around me like a toxic fog.

I shouldn’t smoke, I know. It was a habit I kicked after the war. It’s just that I’m at war again, and this time with the man I love, and the first casualty is going to be my integrity. Twelve hours from now I’ll stand in a church and make vows I don’t intend to honor, make promises I could never keep, paint myself another face with lies and hollow words, just like Hamlet accuses Ophelia of doing.

Those that are married already, all but one shall live. The rest shall keep as they are.

I remember reading Hamlet aloud to Ash in Berlin, during some vacation we stole together during the war. My head in his lap, my bare feet hanging off the bed, acting out the voices and making him laugh at Polonius and sigh at poor Ophelia. Hamlet himself Ash could never understand, could never grasp why someone wouldn’t do what needed to be done right away.

“That’s why they don’t write tragedies about people like you,” I’d said, twisting up to look at him. “It’s too boring when the hero isn’t morally complicated.”

Ash looked amused. “Define morally complicated.”

“You know. Fatal flaw and all that. Hamlet’s passivity. Macbeth’s ambition. Oedipus’s pride.”

“Oedipus was trying to do the right thing by leaving Corinth,” Ash said. “Doesn’t that count?”

I glared at him. “Don’t be an idiot. His leaving Corinth set the entire prophecy in motion. He thought he could defy the gods! You don’t think that deserves a tragic end?”

He laughed then, the bare muscles of his stomach jerking against my face. I turned and kissed them, one by one, until I reached his navel, which I licked until he growled. And predictably enough, I ended up with his cock in my mouth and his hands heavy on my head, and after he came deep down my throat, he permitted me to lie on top of him and find release by sliding my cock against his muscular thighs. Even with that pathetic amount of friction, I still spent my load in a matter of seconds. Which then I had to clean up in the most humiliating way possible, of course.

I loved it.

But after all of that, and a quick shower and room service on top of it, it was clear Ash’s mind was still on the earlier topic, and when my head was back in his lap and his fingers were running through my hair, he asked, “So are there tragedies about people who don’t deserve it?”

“I said morally complicated, not evil. Most of the tragic heroes don’t really deserve the magnitude of what happens to them.”

“But if you try to do everything right,” Ash said slowly, “and try your hardest to be honorable always? Do those people get to avoid the tragic ends?”

I thought for a moment, mentally flipping through college textbooks and deciding. “No, I think it’s usually destined, no matter how good or brave the person is. Beowulf didn’t have a fatal flaw and he got bitten by a dragon. King Arthur for the most part is a just and fair king, but a single sin committed in his youth ends up being his undoing.”

“What was his sin?” Ash asked, fingers still running through my hair.

I closed my eyes, the sensation so pleasant and soothing that I worried I might drift off to sleep. “He slept with his sister.”

“It’s a good thing I only slept with your sister then.”

“Fuck you,” I mumbled.

He laughed again, and somehow ended up crawling over top of me, kissing my face and throat and chest, and that was the last we talked about fatal flaws and King Arthur.

And now here we are, in a tragedy of our own. Except we probably do deserve it.

I finish my cigarette and flick it onto the low patio where I’m standing. Behind me are bifold doors and rows of heat lamps and the silent bustle of the rehearsal dinner contained by glass. My rehearsal dinner, because I’m the groom, because tomorrow I’m getting married to the woman who sexually assaulted me and arranged for Greer’s abduction.

I pull the silver cigarette case out of my suit jacket and light up another one. I’m not ready to go back inside just yet.

“You don’t have to do this,” comes a voice at my elbow. I turn to see my stepsister standing next to me in a sleek strapless gown, as if she’s incapable of feeling the cold. Which she might be. I always suspected she was part reptile.

But she’s a loyal reptile, even as she’s reaching for my case and pulling out a cigarette for herself. I offer her the lighter and she lights the cigarette and snaps the lighter shut with an efficient, elegant click.

“You don’t have to do this,” she repeats again, gazing steadily at me over the glow of the cigarette. “It’s not too late.”

“Morgan, she holds all of our futures in her hands right now. If I do this, I can protect you and Lyr and Ash. Not to mention that I can keep my image for the campaign clean.”

Morgan sighs, giving the ash on her cigarette a delicate flick. “I don’t know if we can campaign with her at all, not with how dangerous she is. Maybe we should take our chances with her going public.”

She blows a pretty stream of smoke over her shoulder, using it as an excuse to glance behind her. Seeing that we are mostly alone, she says, “What she did to you was unforgivable, and how do you know it won’t happen again? Are you planning only on drinking from sealed bottles inside your own house?”

“I can protect myself, Morgan—”

Her eyes flare a bright green, so like Ash’s that I have to look away. “Is this a male ego thing?” she demands quietly. “Because what she did to you does not make you weak, and it’s not weakness to try to protect yourself in the future.”

“I know that—”

“I don’t think you do,” she insists. “Look, the statute of limitations in D.C. is fifteen years, there’s plenty of time to—”

“Absolutely not.”

“If we can get Dr. Ninian to testify,” she continues over me, “or even just bring evidence against her, then we can get Abilene convicted.”

“And then what happens to my image? What happens to my child if she’s in prison?”

“Is it definitely your child?”

I study my cigarette for a moment before I take a long drag. God, how I had hoped, how I had prayed when I hadn’t bent my head to heaven for years—please don’t let the child be mine, I’d begged. Let it be anyone’s, fucking Melwas’s even, just please not mine. But I couldn’t ignore the one thing Abilene truly wanted, which was to feel close to Ash. I’m the closest she can get, the truest imitation, and it was stupid of me to have hoped for anything different. Of course it’s my child. Nothing else would have satisfied her, save for conceiving a child of Ash’s, and thank God that’s out of her reach. For now.

“Two different doctors of my choosing have independently run the tests. I’m as certain as I can humanly be.” And then I soften for a minute. “It’s a boy.”

Morgan examines me. “You’d get him, you know, if she was in prison. He’d still be yours.”

“Yes. But I’m not going to win an election with the mother of my child in prison. It’s just not how it works.”

“Do you want him? The baby, I mean?”

I suppose she’s asking because she more than anyone knows how easy it is to cover up a child’s parentage, but it’s all far too late for that. And besides, “I do want him, Morgan. None of this is his fault, and I’ve always wanted children. And maybe this is as close as I’ll ever come to having a child with Greer, having one with her cousin.”

Morgan shakes her head as she puts her cigarette to her lips. “I hope for your sake that he takes after you.”

“I’ll love him no matter whom he takes after,” I say, and then add, surprised to find that it’s true, “I think I already love him.”

“Then you’ll have to protect him from his mother after he’s born,” my stepsister says. “Abilene will use him as a tool, especially if she realizes that you love him. How are you going to live like that, Embry? Cut off from the people you actually love and trying to protect your son from his own mother?”

I look down at my hand, my jaw working as I have to admit, “I don’t know. I just know that this is the best move I’ve got with the pieces I have.”

“Abilene frightens me,” Morgan says after a minute. “More than I can say.”

“Me too.”

“What happens next?”

I finish my cigarette and grind out the embers on the patio with my gleaming Fendi dress shoe. “What happens next is I win that election. I keep Greer safe. And then I’ll know all of this has been worth it.”

* * *

The next morning is busy for everyone but me. Abilene, being an event planner, has planned a spectacle that would shame the Royal Family, something far from the elegant and restrained affair Greer insisted Abilene plan for her. No, this wedding is showcasing money and power—something both our families have in abundance—and the attention to detail is, I have to admit, masterful.

Too bad it’s all for a farce.

When Ash and Greer married, it was one of the worst and best days of my life. The heady combination of heartbreak and fucking before the ceremony had me whirling, the fevered hour I spent with the bride, the hour afterwards with groom as he kissed and bit me. It had been almost a full year since Ash and I had fooled around, excluding our kiss under the mistletoe, and it had been six years since I’d touched Greer like that. My body threatened to explode with it all, and as Ash wrestled me up against the wall in the small church dressing room, my body did explode.

Ash, stop, stop, I’m going to—

Yes, you are, little prince, I want you to. My dress shoes had slid against the carpet in between his legs, his mouth had been everywhere, licking every last trace of his bride off my face, and his hips had been angry and forceful against mine, his massive cock impressively thick and hard even through all the layers of our tuxedos. And it was in this grinding tangle of tuxedo-clad limbs and hot mouths that I came, right there in my pants.

Ash had been delighted, keeping me pinned against the wall with his teeth and powerful hips, panting through my every moan and shudder as if it were him who was coming and not me.

I want your cock to belong to me again, he’d growled then. I don’t want to miss a single orgasm of yours ever.

I’d been dizzy, flooded with too many hormones to think clearly. Ash, you’re getting married.

Weddings are promises, he’d said cryptically, and then ordered me to clean myself up. And so I’d stood through his wedding ceremony and endured his wedding reception, certain that day had been my last taste of paradise, and I was forever banished from the garden. Little did I know that the garden had been waiting for me all along, and that night when they let me inside their honeymoon suite, when we vowed together with words and flesh that we’d be married in this more elemental, important way, I realized that all along Ash had planned on this, on finally anchoring us to him in a way that fit our world best. As always, he’d found the most generous and vulnerable way to care for the people he loved.

And here I am, about to burn all of that down.

It is funny, I think as I pull the tuxedo out of the cleaner’s bag and start dressing, that even though I know I’m butchering everything we hoped and wished for that night, I’m still resentful that I’m alone before my wedding. Ash should be here. Even if it were to scowl at me, growl at me, mark me until I bled, I’d take it, because I’m so lonely without him and Greer, and I’m scared of what I’m doing today.

This is for Greer. This is for everyone, I remind myself. I have very good reasons for doing this.

Just.

It hurts.

As I’m sitting down to pull on my shoes, the door opens without a knock, and I don’t bother looking up. Out of all the women in my life, Greer is the only one who would knock, which means that it’s either my mother or my sister or my future wife, and therefore someone I’m not really in the mood to see.

“Embry,” Vivienne Moore says, and I sigh and look up at my mother.

“Yes?”

Vivienne Moore clicks over the marble floor to sit at dressing table nearby, perfect as always in a beaded dress of silver, her rich brown hair pulled back into a severe knot. Gray threads artistically through the rich brown, and the fine wrinkles near her eyes only make her look more stately and graceful. There are no smile lines around her mouth of course, because Governor Vivienne Moore only smiles for cameras and donors.

“Mother, I’m supposed to come seat you. That’s how it works.”

My mother glances up at the clock hanging on the wall. “We have fifteen minutes. I wanted to speak to you privately before we went out.”

I finish knotting my shoelaces and stand up. “If you’re here to talk me out of this, don’t bother. Morgan already tried.”

“I wouldn’t be so foolish,” my mother says calmly. “This is the only way to clean up the mess you’ve made, and the best chance you have at protecting your future. But I need to know a few things first.”

“There’s nothing to know—”

Vivienne Moore holds up a hand and I fall silent. “Please. Firstly, I need to know that you’ll send that baby to me the moment you feel he’s unsafe. Yes, I see you bristling at that, and no, I’m not insulting your ability to protect your son. I’m reaffirming it—if that baby is in any danger at all, the safest place is across the country, with his grandmother. Understood?”

She’s right, as defensive as I feel about it. I give her curt nod.

“Second, I need to know this purely for my own curiosity. That video of you and Greer Galloway Colchester…was it real?”

I flush, hating that I’m thirty-six and my mother makes me feel like a teenager. “Mother, that’s private.”

She stares at me with blue eyes that match my own. “I suppose that’s my answer, then. It was easy enough to see that you were in love with her, but whether the consummation actually happened, I couldn’t perceive. The third question, however—the one I’ve asked myself for years—is the most important one. Are you in love with Maxen Colchester?”

“Mother.”

“Both at the same time?”

“Mother.”

She lifts a shoulder. “It’s not unheard of, and I’ve encountered stranger things. But how on earth do you plan on running against a man you love?”

I lean against the window frame, looking out onto the pretty churchyard outside. “Because it’s the right thing to do.”

“I don’t approve,” she says, standing. “This is all far too disheveled for my liking. Sloppy. I can’t be certain that any of us will come out unscathed.”

She extends an arm and I thread it through my elbow. “Still,” she says as we leave the dressing room, “you have all the help and power at my disposal. We’ll see you through this, Embry. Somehow.”

* * *

I don’t pay attention to most of the things said during my wedding ceremony. None of it is important, none of it means anything. It’s a stark act done out of a need to survive, and I treat it as such. Like killing hostiles during the war or smearing a perfectly nice political opponent. I don’t enjoy it, I find it distasteful and repulsive even, but the choices have been taken away a long time ago. It’s this or a future I have no control over, and I’m done with that.

I will control what happens next.

The only part of the ceremony that rouses me from my stupor is Morgan’s voice from the lectern as she gives a reading from Ephesians, one of those readings that’s at almost every wedding. “For this reason,” she is saying in her deliberate, cool voice, “a man will leave his father and his mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh. This is a profound mystery—”

Her voices fades in my mind, and for some reason I am thinking of my own voice quoting soft in a Berlin hotel, this was sometime a paradox, but now the time gives it proof. I did love you once.

Fingers in my hair, a firm stomach against my cheek. He still loves Ophelia.

How do you know?

Because he’s cruel to her. The fingers had tightened in my hair to prove his point. The strongest love comes with pain.

Two soldier boys in love. The princess they both wanted. How close we were to our happily ever after, how near it seemed. And now…

I recite vows that mean nothing, and I don’t bother to pretend they mean anything. My face is blank as I say the old words, my voice is toneless as I look into Abilene’s eyes and promise to care for her in sickness and in health. She is both sickness and health all at once. She looks the perfect flush and bloom of radiant motherhood now—at five months pregnant, her slender form perfectly showcases the plumping nest of our child, her skin glows, her hair shines, her lovely face tips into a beatific smile—but her eyes betray the truth. They flash between lifeless and all too lively, between heartless and an emotional mania that unnerves me.

There’s none of that mania today, not for me. I’m beginning to think that I bore her, that the deep pool of her hatred is kept in reserve for Greer, her animated obsession kept in reserve for Ash, and all I’ll get from her now is the lazy satisfaction that she won a crucial battle.

Not for the first time in the last two months, I consider the irony of leaving Ash so I could keep Greer safe, all while I’m marrying the greatest threat to her safety I could possibly imagine. But that only stiffens my resolve to control this, to keep Abilene close. If she’s close, then I can keep an eye on her. I can stop her from hurting Greer again.

A Sanctus is sung, we kneel, we take communion, we stand and finally the kiss. I hear the shutter of several cameras as my lips touch hers. Her skin is warm to the touch, her lips soft with whatever lipstick she’s painted on, and her breath is pleasant, scented with some kind of mint. I have no physical reason to hate every instant of the contact, and yet I do. I pull away too fast, and I see the irritation flick over her face before she schools her expression back into a happy smile. I might pay for this later.

The rest of the day is as detestable as the ceremony, but I manage to achieve an anesthetic sense of distance about it all, a dull dispassion that more or less keeps me sober and pliable as the photographers take their pictures at the church and we head for the reception venue (a large flat boat on the Potomac, filled with too much champagne and too many people I’d rather not see.)

Abilene is far from perturbed by my detachment. If anything, she seems amused by it, perhaps marking it as some sort of victory. I don’t care. I don’t care what she thinks or what anyone else thinks or whispers about. All I want is for this beastly day to be over.

It’s only once, as we’re doing the first dance, that I see her mask slip a bit. She slides her hand around the back of my neck to pull me closer.

“I saw you booked another room for yourself at the Four Seasons.”

“Don’t worry,” I reply. “I’ll be discreet about our sleeping arrangements.”

“You know there’s no need, right?” She looks up at me with eyes the color of fading light between trees, an ominous, lifeless blue. “I’m already pregnant with your child, Embry. Greer is lost to you. Why not take pleasure where you can? You certainly didn’t seem to mind fucking other people a year ago.”

It’s true. When Greer and Ash were falling in love for the second time, I’d kept my bed warm with an almost grim relentlessness. But it brought me no real relief then, and I know it won’t bring me any relief now, because it’s not what I really need. What I need is mythological and painful and holy, an ecstatic mix of lust and grief and eternity that only Ash and Greer can give me, and if I can’t have that, then there’s nothing for me in the impersonal fucks I used to have. I would feel no better after than I had before, and I might feel worse, the cheap transaction tawdry and pale when contrasted with my sweaty, golden memories of Ash and Greer.

“No, Abilene. You’ve won enough. You won’t win that as well.”

She sighs. “Fine. Have it your way for now; just remember I have an entire honeymoon to change your mind.”

God, that sounds unbearable. I’m technically unemployed at the moment, but I wonder if I can find a plausible reason to cut our trip short. Create enough photo ops to slake the press’s thirst for gossip about the First Lady’s cousin and me, and then vanish back home and spend my days looking at my mother’s lake instead of my new wife.

The reception mercifully ends, and we take a limousine back to the Four Seasons, Abilene scrolling through her phone for social media mentions of our wedding, seeming satisfied with what she finds. I stare out the window the entire way, promising myself a bottle of gin when I get back to my hotel room. I won’t even bother with a glass.

Abilene’s assistant has already checked us in, and some lackey of Vivienne’s has furnished me with the key to my solo room. We make a production of getting into the elevator together, but part ways after a couple of floors.

“Are you sure?” Abilene says as the doors open and I am about to step out.

I look back at her. She’s not purring or cooing or preening or anything as obvious as that. She’s asking in the same tone of voice she might ask a business partner or colleague. Almost indifferently. It’s only that weird twilit hue in her eyes that reminds me that her motives and feelings will always, always be too slippery for me to grasp. Assuming indifference on her part carries its own danger.

So I keep my voice polite when I say, “Yes, I’m sure. Sleep well,” and step off the elevator. It’s only after I hear the gentle lumber of the doors closing and the ding of the elevator leaving this floor that I can breathe for the first time since I woke up this morning.

At least until I turn a corner and see Ryan Belvedere leaning against my doorframe, his thumbs flying over his phone screen. I’m so starved for Ash and Greer that even just seeing his personal assistant has my breath stitching under my ribs.

“I’m flattered, but it’s not really customary for the groom to fuck someone from his old job on the wedding night.”

Belvedere looks up with a smile at my joke, his floppy dark hair brushing the top rims of his glasses. He impatiently shakes the hair out of his face. “Congratulations, Mr. Moore.”

“How many congratulations do you think are in order, given that you’re standing outside of my private room?”

“Fair point. I’m sorry I couldn’t come to the ceremony, by the way.”

“You have a demanding boss.”

He nods. “He sent me here.”

Hope lifts in my chest, refuses to settle its wings. “He did?”

“Yes. He’d like me to take you to your wedding present.”

Now hope is stirring somewhere else, somewhere lower and deeper. I have experienced the kinds of wedding presents Ash likes to give.

“And where are we going?”

Belvedere smiles and tilts his head toward the service stairs, where I presume a discreet car is waiting. “To the White House.”