CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Nikolai
“TSK, TSK.” ADELE clicks her tongue. Her mouth’s sympathetic purse only serves to make the triumph in her eyes more grotesque. Not for the first time I wonder just how she managed to capture my father’s heart. She hails from an old Edenvale family, aristocratic to the core, but besmirched by a long line of traitors who over time have betrayed our throne’s integrity to cut lucrative deals with Nightgardin, hoping to profit in the destabilization. A few of her ancestors’ heads decorated the palace bridge as a warning to other transgressors.
I flex my fist, wishing for an ancient ax and a chopping block.
“Naughty, naughty, Nikolai, leading that pathetic matchmaker on. I hope you had fun with your little game. I’m sure she’ll get over it in, oh, ten or twenty years.” She glances to Catriona, and they share the same tinkling, malevolent laugh.
I don’t know what the fuck to think. Two hours ago I was making love to a woman who I’d have sworn looked into my pitch-black soul and saw a man worthy of her heart. Now I’m being told it was a lie? That she was in it for a double fee. It’s not even the money that gets me this time. It’s that she kept her alliance with the queen rather than me. I’ve been enough of a royal idiot to be duped into thinking Kate had grown to care for me for my own sake.
Idiot.
Self-disgust roils through me. But I don’t allow a trace of feeling to reveal itself on my face.
Instead, I twist my own lips into a sneer. “Pity.” I ensure my words are ice, that they drip with scorn. “For a commoner, she was uncommon good fun.” I allow my gaze to fall on Catriona. Her white-blond hair. Her porcelain perfect skin and pale blue eyes nearly the same shade of water. Nothing warm or welcoming. No. Twin pools of an Arctic lake. I take my time scanning every inch of her perfect body. “Darling,” I drawl. “You didn’t need to fake a pregnancy to keep my interest. The way I recall, we have unfinished business. You promised me a backstage pass and never delivered.” I arch a brow.
“You bastard,” Christian says, lunging for me. The two guards, already returned, restrain him.
“I think you meant to say Your Highness.” I dust off my shirtfront. “I do believe the proper terminology in addressing your liege lord is Sire, Prince, Majesty. You could go for Your Most Exalted Worshipfulness for extra credit. You always were an ass kisser back in school.”
And he was. Perfect grades. Awards for chivalry. While my extracurricular activities consisted of fucking Miss Teatree, the student French teacher, in the back of my Rolls-Royce during lunch breaks.
“I am going to cut out your disgusting tongue,” he hisses.
“Your loyalty to your sister is commendable,” I answer easily. “But problematic. Because either she is lying, in which case you are a fool, or she is telling the truth, and you are threatening violence not only on your future king but also the father of your nephew. A child who will be the only one to carry on your noble line given your...dilemma.”
Christian stares at me with fire in his eyes. He contracted mumps during our school days, and the nurse told him he was probably sterile. A pity as it puts his small but highly coveted territory in jeopardy. Rosegate needs an heir. Edenvale needs to solidify the alliance. Despite the circumstances, it would be an advantageous match.
“My money is that you are a fool,” I say, turning back to Catriona. “How do you know that you are pregnant? Will you have me believe you are some sort of modern-day Princess and the Pea? That you can magically sense if my child is growing within you?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Adele snaps, beckoning to a butler who stands off to the side, holding a silver platter covered by a swan-shaped lid.
He hurries over and removes the lid with a flourishing bow. On the tray lies a pregnancy stick with two lines.
“I do not read hieroglyphics,” I mumble.
“Idiocy doesn’t become you. It’s obvious that’s a positive sign.” Victory is stamped on my stepmother’s every smug feature. “You coated her womb with your depraved seed. Time to do your duty.”
“A little baby,” Catriona says, her mouth curving into an uncertain smile. “A future king or queen. Plus, Rosegate will unite with Edenvale at last, and Nightgardin won’t ever have a chance of taking it over.”
My stepmother inclines her head as if truer words had never been spoken. What is her poisonous endgame? I have to think, but my brain is flatlining, my neurons only able to process one thing. That I let another woman pretend to care for me. That I let down my defenses and gave Kate entry into my inner keep.
My stepmother hates me, blames me for her daughter’s death, but why the fuck is she so intent on marrying me off to Catriona, or marrying me off period? I am not buying her giving a flying fuck over solidifying ties to Rosegate.
The cogs in my dulled brain begin to creak back to life. Doubt slides up my spine like a serpent. I used condoms with Catriona. She said she was also on birth control. If Kate was working with Adele, why not Catriona, too?
If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck...
“The wedding will be in three days’ time,” Adele says. “A very private, very legally binding ceremony.”
The queen might be crafty, but she isn’t exactly a rocket scientist. And about as subtle as a doorpost.
“I don’t think so.” It takes all my strength not to gnash my teeth. “I know I’ve been nothing but a crushing disappointment to your selfish motives, so just add this latest mistake to my tab.”
I turn away, thoughts reeling. If Catriona is carrying my child, I can’t abandon her or the innocent baby, but I can’t marry her. I’ll order a blood test and then figure things out. Even if the ache of betrayal floods my body as I think of the woman who just disappeared into the night, I know it was real for me, so much so that I can barely breathe thinking it was all a game for her. I want to fall to my knees and scream. I want to find a wall and punch it until my fists run with blood.
Love is my curse, never my salvation. When Father dies, I will sit on the Stone Throne, but my heart will be as impenetrable as a block of uncut granite. Perhaps Catriona will bear my bastard, but she will never be my queen.
X. I need X. He’ll know what to do. Even if it is to get me mind-numbingly drunk until today is blacked out of memory—he’ll know.
“I will make you happy,” Catriona says, putting the perfect quaver in her voice. She’s such a drama queen that I’m half tempted to give her access to the throne, just to watch the spectacle.
“Sweetheart, there is only one reason why I stuck my dick in you. Fine, two. But the primary reason was this... I was trying to find out if your brother was selling me out to the tabloids again.”
“What are you bloody talking about?” Christian yells.
“Every time I went out in the past year, images would appear of me online and in the print media. Despite my reputation, I do value discretion when it suits me. I knew someone in my entourage was spilling the proverbial beans. Squeaking to the press. But it was you all along. You were the little mouse.” I’m unleashing the asshole attitude that’s made me infamous, going full scale royal prick.
There is no one that I can trust. I am as I have always been—alone.
Catriona presses a hand to her heart. “How could you accuse me of such base behavior?”
My shoulders shake with my cold laugh. “The minute Christian found me with you, I knew it wasn’t him. He was so upset. Then nothing leaked afterward. Except there was an attempt to sell something to a national magazine, wasn’t there?”
She blanches. If she was pale before, now Catriona is a living ghost.
“X intercepted the messages. You were going to sell a tell-all exposé to the highest bidder. Did you think that texting your brother to come find you in my bed was going to force him to badger me to marry you? Or that you’d achieve notoriety as my lover?”
Catriona draws her hand back and slaps me hard on the cheek. “You are a monster. No wonder Victoria ran off with Damien. You can’t love. Your heart is complete and utter stone.”
“Enough!” Adele commands in her usual imperious tone. “Someone escort my sniveling future daughter-in-law back inside the palace. And her brother, before he murders the heir to the throne.”
The crowd clears, and within minutes it’s just my stepmother and me.
“Why are you doing this?” I ask at last, breaking the silence. No more pretense. I just want answers.
“I’ve waited for this moment a long time,” she purrs. “Ever since I buried my daughter in the cold, hard ground.”
And I believe her. I just don’t believe that is the whole truth. But do I trust this inner voice, the same intuition that whispered that I should take a chance on Kate? The one that has led me back here, to this black place of pain and bone-crushing loneliness? Victoria hurt my heart. Kate detonated it with the precision of a lobbed grenade. It will never be whole.
As I begin to search for answers, one truth is certain. Not only will I never marry, I will never love again.
Kate
A heavy gated door scrapes across stone as it slams shut behind me. I stumble into the cold, dank cell and stare with wide eyes back at the man who just threw me in here.
“X,” I say, my voice shaking. “Why?”
He stares at me without expression, and my fear starts to morph into something fierce. I throw myself at the bars separating me from him, shaking them to no avail.
“I care about him—so much! You know I do.”
My heart beats wildly in my chest. I can’t even say it to X, that I love Nikolai. But he watched me get carted away thinking I betrayed him because I was too afraid to tell him the truth.
Because I’m a fool to have ever thought I could bridge the divide between his world and mine.
“This—this is all the queen,” I continue. “She told me she would choose his bride, that if I didn’t comply my sister’s business would be ruined. You know she has the power to do that. You know she set this whole thing up!”
Still he stands, arms crossed, impassive as ever.
I pace, shivering in the damp air, tears pouring along my cheeks. When X says nothing, I collapse onto a stone bench at the rear of the cell and let out a bitter laugh.
“I didn’t think places like this were real, you know. Castles? Sure. But dungeons? This is the stuff of fairy tales,” I tell my emotionless captor. “But I never expected to be the princess. I only ever wanted to take care of my family.”
I meet X’s stare. There is no sign that he’s even heard a word I’ve said, yet I swear I see a twinkle in his eyes that wasn’t there before.
“The money?” I say, my voice steady now because even if Nikolai won’t hear me out, he will know the truth. “My sister and I live and work out of our small apartment. Every cent that doesn’t go toward our monthly payments, toward food or keeping the business afloat—it goes to the elderly care center where our grandmother lives. And now it will go to the hospital that’s keeping her alive. That’s where I’m supposed to be now, X. Please. Let me go to her.”
X’s jaw tightens, the only sign that any of this is getting through to him.
I open my mouth to say something more but am interrupted by what sounds like a sack of potatoes hitting the stone floor.
X looks to his left, and his features finally relax.
“You have three minutes to decide if you trust me, Miss Kate. Three minutes to decide if you are willing to put your life in my hands.”
I rise from the stone bench and make my way to the iron gate that separates me from him, pressing my face against the bars so I can see what X sees—a burly palace guard slumped on the floor next to a stool, an empty beer stein tipped over next to him.
“Yes, I drugged his ale.” X waves a hand. “It won’t be the first time he’s fallen asleep on watch, but it is the first time it’s of my doing. He’ll be lucky not to piss himself with relief when he wakes to find he hasn’t been caught.”
The corner of his mouth quirks ever so slightly into the hint of a grin, and my heart surges with hope.
“You don’t need to prove your love, Kate. Not to me,” he says, his voice a firm whisper. And just like Nikolai calling me Kate somehow made me know that what we had was real, X doing the same—dropping that ridiculous Miss—tells me I can trust him, too.
“I’ve known of your family’s situation since the king and queen hired you,” he goes on. “But the prince—he has been in the dark, and you are one of those responsible for keeping him there.”
My breath hitches, and I swallow back a sob. He is right. Nikolai hid nothing from me, but I hid my life from him. Even if it was for my own protection, I betrayed his trust in doing so.
I nod. “This isn’t my world,” I tell him. “I’m out of my depth. And as much as he means to me—as much as my silly secret wish has been for him to choose me—I knew it was a fool’s errand to think he could ever truly be mine. I must think about my family right now. And Nikolai—” I stutter on the next thought, but it is the only way. “Nikolai must marry Catriona. If she’s carrying his baby, he must.” I swallow hard against the ache in my chest, against the cavern that will replace my heart after my next words. “Tell the queen I forfeit my fee. Tell Nikolai. I will not cause trouble for the prince. I just need to get to my family.”
X nods somberly at me. “Queen Adele plans to leave you here until after the wedding.” My whole body begins to shake as his words sink in.
Another tear slides down my cheek. “When will that be?” I ask.
X clears his throat. “Three days’ time,” he says. “I hope you understand I had to bring you here. The prince’s safety depends on it.”
I glance around my cell and shudder not just at the thought of being locked here for three days or of losing Nikolai—but that such cruelty exists in the queen’s heart.
“Father Benedict is working tirelessly to find a loophole,” X continues. “If this baby is not Nikolai’s—and if there is a way out of the decree—he will find it within these three days. If I let you go, though,” he says, “the queen will expedite the wedding, and Nikolai will have no chance at true happiness. But if you trust me—if you trust that my one and only mission is to protect my prince—then you can leave here tonight.”
I wipe the tears from my face, my hands now covered in dirt from the filthy cell bars. I’m sure I look as frightened as I feel, but I don’t care. I don’t care about anything but protecting my family and the man that I love, even if he will never know my true feelings.
Everything inside me trembles so hard I fear my bones will shatter. But I hold my head high and look straight into X’s unwavering stare.
“I trust you,” I say. “For Maddie. For my grandmother. For Nikolai, all whom I love. I trust you, X.”
He pulls a small vial from his coat pocket and hands it to me through the bars.
“Then drink.”