Page 42 of King's Heir of Hate

It had been a great kindness, Tadeo had decided. He would have argued about it, had anyone dared ask.Not all kindnesses feel good, he would have said.There is no law that insists it mustfeelwarm and fuzzy, only that it do what it is meant to do.

But now…

He thought of his child, his son, still nestled deep inside Esme’s belly. He thought of the nights he’d spent smoothing his own hands over her belly, murmuring to the child within.

Tadeo had not met his son yet and yet try as he might, he could not imagine telling that child that he could not be sad at a funeral. His own mother’s funeral, no less. Even if he and Esme remained as much at odds as they were now forever, he would not expecther childto react stoically to her passing.

Even if Esme behaved in ways Tadeo did not like, how could that possibly dictate the behavior of her own child in the face of her death?

These thoughts tore at him. He felt a kind of fissure open up inside him, yawning wide, and he had the strangest feeling that there would be no closing it again. That there would be no repairing this.

He just didn’t know what that meant.

When he heard footsteps, he schooled his expression to the expected neutrality—but was pleased when he saw that it was Arturo. Possibly even relieved.

“It grows late,” the most loyal of all the servants in the palace said, and whatever expression Tadeo had on his face, Arturo would never appear to notice it. “Would His Majesty care for dinner in his rooms, perhaps?”

Tadeo didn’t move. He couldn’t seem to look away from the portrait of his parents now. It was like it was calling to him. “You remember my parents better than I do. You were here when my father was growing up.”

Arturo did not change his own expression by so much as the faintest twitch. “It has been my great honor to serve three generations of the Santiago family, Your Majesty.”

“All I know are stories.” Tadeo ran his hands over his face. “Stories in the papers, stories from my father.” He looked at the old man. “What do you remember? What really happened?”

He didn’t know, until he said the words out loud, how much seemed to ride on the answer.

For a long moment, he thought the other man wouldn’t reply. Arturo had been in the palace for so long that he was, in many ways, the finest example of royal protocol there was. It was possible he would think that he had no business discussing such matters and therefore would not. It would not matter if the King himself commanded him to do so.

But after a moment he cleared his throat, and when Tadeo looked at him again, he had a curious look on his face.

That fissure inside Tadeo…widened.

“Your father was a strange boy,” Arturo said after a moment, which was perhaps the last thing Tadeo would have expected anyone to say about King Hugo. “Oddly still. Decent to all, if robotic. But one does not speculate about such things, not if one wishes to remain in the palace. I watched him grow up and he was always the same.”

“He valued constancy,” Tadeo said, agreeing.

He realized he was frowning and forced himself to stop.

The older man looked at him, a canny sort of light in his gaze. “Did he value it, or was it all he was capable of?” he asked, in his quiet way.

And something inside Tadeo went terribly still.

He had a sudden flash of memory then. It was something he had overheard his mother say when he was very young.

Tadeo had been playing in a part of the palace where he’d been told many times not to go. He’d heard his mother with her voice raised, which usually meant she was talking to his father.Just because you can’t feel anything doesn’t mean you should dictate to the rest of us who have the full spectrum of human emotion, she had thrown at the King.

In return, he had heard his father’s slow, measured tones, but not the words he’d used.

His mother had responded with a wild laugh.I would never wish to be like you, she had said.I would rather die.

Tadeo had known better than to get caught listening to his elders without their knowledge. He’d ducked back down one of the servants’ stairs and had hurried away.

Now, here in the portrait room, Arturo shifted from one foot to the other. “I cannot excuse what your mother did extramaritally,” he said, and sounded as if he was being very careful. Almostjudicious. “But I will tell you that it was done deliberately. To prove a point.”

“I don’t know what that means,” Tadeo managed to get out, though his jaw felt like granite.

“My understanding is that her first affairs were in private,” Arturo continued in that same, measured tone. “And the King, may he rest in peace, did not care at all. He only cared when her affairs were public. Because what he cared about was not the infidelity, if you catch my meaning. It was that other people knew of it.”

Tadeo felt himself getting…overly warm. As if he was sweating. As if he wasflustered.