He kept trying to wake up. From this wretched nightmare. From this horrendous thing he didn’t know how to navigate. He couldn’t.
One night he’d gone to bed a teenage boy with nothing more pressing on his mind than driving his new car, the crush he had on an adviser’s daughter, the pressing concern about when and how he might lose his virginity, and he’d woken up a king.
This reminded him of that singular, altering moment in his life.
That his life was forever changed in the space of one breath.
He no longer had Circe in the palace, or in his life; for all that it had been challenging, it had been something. The lack of her left a cavern behind.
The funeral had been beautiful and well attended. There were many guests staying in the palace in the aftermath of it. Diplomats and dignitaries from all over the island, minor royals, politicians and celebrities from countries far and wide.
And as always his sister, Emerald, was here, along with her husband, Andrei, who was also the head of Onyx’s guard.
If he wanted to sit and take comfort in friends, he could.
And yet in this moment he wanted only solitude.
Craved it.
So when he heard the door open, tension washed through him. He turned and squinted into the darkness.
Just as a small figure slipped into the room, blond hair in a tumble, her face obscured in the dim light. She was dressed in black, as all the guests had been. As he was.
She looked up, but he still couldn’t make out her features. “Oh. Your Highness. I’m sorry.”
“No need to apologize,” he said. “I can take my leave.”
He moved away from the fireplace, and the woman moved nearer to him. Her movements tentative.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
This was a different apology to the first. That had been about her worry she’d interrupted him. This was different.
Her voice was low and husky. A function, perhaps of the fact that she was trying to keep quiet in the stillness of the room.
He couldn’t see her expression, but he could hear the earnestness in her voice. A sweetness he’d not heard from anyone else. A sincerity that felt unique. “I know that it’s been said to you a hundred times. But I would say it a hundred more. I’m… I’m so very sorry for your loss.”
Ithadbeen said to him. A hundred times was perhaps understating it. He’d been wrestling with it for days. Circe’s parents, her sisters and brother, deserved sympathy far more than he did. They knew her. In many ways, Onyx knew he’d never scratched the surface of her, and perhaps doing so wouldn’t have fixed anything.
But this felt different. It felt like something he could accept. It felt like sympathy that was somehow created for him, and matched him in a way he couldn’t explain. It was balm for him in the moment.
She was small, this woman, short, petite and very slim. She moved closer to him, the top of her head barely reaching his chest. An emotion too large for him to name began to grow at the center of his chest. A bitter regret that was something other than grief.
The woman lifted her hand and touched his face. Everything in him went still. This was the first time he’d been touched by someone other than his family for at least two years. That part of his marriage to Circe had been resolutely dead even before she’d gone. What they’d been trying to keep intact was a partnership for the sake of the country.
The idea of there being any sort of romance between them long gone.
That futile hope he’d had as a young man when he’d taken her as his wife—
Perhaps that was the source of the shameful relief that he’d felt. This sense of being free that made him feel an enormous streak of guilt.
He was a man.
He had been nothing but a king, a husband whose wife recoiled at his touch, for so many years, and now this woman’s hands were on his face reminding him that beneath all of that, he was a man.
This woman that he couldn’t even see clearly.
Her blond hair was curly, the firelight making a halo around her, her features obscured. He didn’t know her. If she was someone that he knew then she would’ve been recognizable even in this light.
