The King’s Until Midnight
Millie Adams
Chapter One
King Onyx of Basiliawas no stranger to the cruelty of life. That it was unjust and often took people far before their time was nothing new to him.
Death might be inevitable, but it was no less shocking.
No matter how degraded his relationship with his wife had been, to lose her to a sudden medical event two days prior, and to have already buried her today was still a pain that overtook his entire body.
It was a tangle of guilt and sadness that he wasn’t sure if he would ever be able to fully undo.
There was no fixing anything, not now. Any hope he’d had that he and Circe could fix their fractured marriage was dead now. Along with his wife.
In the blink of an eye, everything was changed. Gone. Everything.
They’d been intent on trying for a child, on improving things between them.
It was the promise of an entire future, wiped away, and the unrelenting pain that he felt over that was more than he had ever imagined.
And yet at the same time, the hardest part of his life was now erased, and that felt cruel to even think.
He tightened his hand into a fist and turned away from the roaring fireplace looking around the dimly lit, desolate library.
He was, now and always, a king before he was anything else. He couldn’t give in to this strange, sinking despair in his chest that also wound itself around a feeling of…freedom.
There was no freedom. A woman was dead. His wife was dead. The future of the kingdom now in turmoil.
He could see Circe as she’d been, magnetic and angry and distant, smart and prickly and alive.
What a waste.
What a terrible, tragic waste. That much he did believe. Deeply in his soul. Because for all that he and Circe hadn’t even liked each other in the end, she had been a vibrant woman.
Well-liked by the people for her fiery ideals and opinions, for her beauty and her sense of fashion and fun.
Onyx and Circe had found it difficult to communicate with each other, to put it mildly. There hadn’t been a spark between them, nothing to even make the growing bitterness between them exciting. At least if there had been a spark they might’ve found compatibility in bed. But no. Circe made it clear she didn’t enjoy sex with him, rebuffing him more often than she accepted his advances, and he could understand it.
They were emotionally distant. While he’d longed to try to find some closeness in the bedroom, she’d needed the closeness to even begin. But she’d never wanted that closeness either.
He hadn’t wanted a divorce. That kind of scandal was antithetical to what he wanted to bring to Basilia.
He wanted to be like his father.
A man who had done right by his country and his family until his very last breath.
What did right even look like now? He wished he had his father with him so that he could ask. So he could have asked him when a convenient marriage should begin to turn to love, or at least like. So he could have seen what his parents’ marriage looked like later, and asked about the changing nature of love, of duty.
He stood there, his jaw clenched.
The truth was, Circe had been an honorable queen who had helped him with what he wanted even when they didn’t mesh.
In spite of the difficulty in their marriage, she had stayed. She had agreed to give him his heir. They’d been discussing methods, and had decided to go with in vitro to give them the best chance. She’d been on hormones and he’d felt a deep anguish that maybe that had caused the aneurysm. After all, it was the only thing that had changed.
The doctor assured him that wasn’t the reason but he had trouble believing it. Then, he had no clarity at all. He had nothing but a pain that sat at the center of his chest howling.
Guilt. Relief. Anger. Denial. Stages of grief that he’d never even seen listed, winding themselves around each other and moving in and out of order.
