Page 37 of King's Heir of Hate

Esme moved farther into the room. He felt some kind of wave move all the way through him, rocking him. He thought that if she touched him, he might actually explode.

But she didn’t come in close. She stopped a few feet from him, making him wish he’d positioned himself behind that intimidating desk.

“Have you considered the possibility that your mother wasn’t the Whore of Babylon, Tadeo?” she asked. He couldn’t help but notice that she seemed perfectly calm. So calm and unruffled it made him want to get his hands on her to mess her up, just a little bit. Just enough. She also wasn’t done, and he did not want to hear a single word of this. “Maybe she was in love with a man who acted like an iceberg. Maybe she did what she needed to do to keep from freezing to death.”

Tadeo felt everything seem to slosh about, making him feel something like drunk. Or dizzy. Maybe both. He held his hand up as if she was advancing on him when he could see that she stopped. “Don’t you dare—” he thundered at her.

But Esme only nodded. “Welcome to your actual emotions, Tadeo,” she said, and she didn’t even sound satisfied or smug. Only that samesad. “This is calledfeeling things. I know you’re not used to it. But you can’t keep pretending they don’t exist.When all along, they’ve been right here, just waiting for you to acknowledge them.”

She turned her back on him, and there was no way she couldn’t hear the way his heart was pounding so hard against his ribs. He thought they might crack into pieces. She kept going, walking across the room and sitting down in one of the chairs that helped form a little seating area by the windows.

“Why don’t you tell me when you’re ready to admit that you have just as many emotions as anybody else, after all,” she invited him. “I know you don’t want to. I know you object to being human. But Tadeo. Isn’t your heart pounding?”

He’d known it. He’dknownshe could hear it.

Esme nodded, and he realized that a traitorous hand had risen up and was pressing against his chest.

But then again, she already knew.

“That’s not a heart attack,” she told him gently. “Those are emotions. Tadeo, I can’t believe you don’t remember how they feel, because I know you knew this once. I was there.” She leaned forward in her chair, her gaze seeming to spear straight through him. “That’s how you know you’re alive.”

Chapter Ten

ESME HOPED THAThe couldn’t tell that she was holding her breath.

She doubted that he could. He looked soundone. As she watched, Tadeo seemed to implode, right there before her eyes. Right there on the carpet before that massive, imposing desk that made her think of monoliths and mysterious henges, not monarchs.

If she listened hard, she was fairly sure that she could hear himexploding—

But he didn’t. Not quite. She watched his nostrils flare. She watched him stand straighter. A moment passed. Then another. And she began to realize that she was watching him wrestle himself under control again.

He was rendering himself unto ice. Esme was watching him make himself into a sculpture that resembled him, but wasn’t him. Not the real him. Not the him whofeltand laughed, danced and loved. Not the him who had been soaliveand so potent that the real truth was, she’d never recovered from the loss of him.

And it wasn’t the first time she’d seen him do this.

“This is what you did in Boston,” she said, and felt a kind of trembling deep inside—a terrible recognition. She could remember the sense of dislocation, of betrayal. How could he stand there and look like the man she’d loved and who’d loved her back so deeply and yet somehow…not be him at all any longer? How was that possible? “I watched you do it. You stood there in that living room in your Beacon Hill town house with allthat wood and the sunshine pouring in and you turned yourself into an ice sculpture right in front of me.”

She remembered the wood floors, old and scarred and beautiful. The sun pouring in like it was any day, even a good day, somewhere else. And all too well did she remember the stranger staring back at her from the face of the man she’d been so in love with, it actually hurt.

It still fuckinghurt.

“You always defer to the theatrical,” Tadeo told her after a moment, and he even sounded like ice now. As if all he had to do was set the temperature gauge inside himself and sooner or later, no matter what, he would freeze. “I’m not a sculpture. There’s no ice involved. I am merely making certain that I’m always in control of myself.”

He did not have to say,You should take note of this skill and try it sometime. It was implied.

“Control is feeling your emotions and choosing not to be governed by them,” Esme told him, using her own control then. Not to act like a different person, but to make sure she washerself. “It’s not pretending you don’t have any emotions at all and shoving them away inside of you, so that the very hint of one is a catastrophe.”

He stared at her so long she wondered if she needed to worry about frostbite. “You will forgive me if I do not intend to take advice from a woman who threw herself into a lake to make a point.”

Esme shrugged. “Similarly, I am not about to be shamed by an automaton. My emotions have never interfered with the duties that I perform. But you can’t say the same, can you?”

He stood straighter as if he’d been shot. As if she’d shot him through the heart when, to her recollection, it was the other way around.

“I have never failed to do my duty,” Tadeo ground out, outrage in every syllable.

“To your country,” Esme agreed. She leaned forward in her chair. “But what about your duties to me? I am your queen. I am your wife. I will shortly be the mother of your child. Don’t you think you owe me more than all these rules and regulations you dream up purely so that you won’t have tofeelsomething?”

He scowled at her, but she counted reactions as victories.