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Radu’s expression remained the same. Lada stood, throwing her hands in the air. “What do you want?”
“I know,” he said.
“What do you know?”
“About you and Mehmed.” He said Mehmed’s name as he always had, like a prayer. But this time it was laced with despair and longing. Lada turned her head defensively, picking up a candle from its stand and playing with the flame.
“What do you think you know?”
“You do not deserve him.”
Slamming down the candle, Lada spun on Radu. “Perhaps he does not deserve me! I asked for none of this! How can you judge me for finding some measure of happiness in—” She stopped, searching her brother’s face. It was there, as plain as the stars in a cloudless night sky. Perhaps it had always been there. She sat back on the bed, all fight and fire extinguished.
She had heard rumors of this type of thing. Jokes and bawdy stories from Nicolae and the Janissaries about men who loved other men in the manner of a woman. It had never made sense to Lada, but then, she had never loved anyone the way she knew her brother loved Mehmed.
Had always loved him.
With knife-sharp clarity, her own feelings of powerlessness and loneliness since being taken from Wallachia rose within her breast. How, then, must it feel to want a someone as much as she wanted a something, and to know that someone would never want you?
“I am sorry,” she said, unmoving and emotionless because she did not know how to express what she understood.
Radu’s anguish was palpable, choking her from across the room. “You do not love him.”
Lada shook her head. She did not know what she had with Mehmed, only that it buffered her against despair. She would not give that up. “I care about him.”
“You care about how he makes you feel. You cannot love him.”
Radu was quivering, fists clenched, consumed with his feelings. This love would break him. Unless Lada broke him now. It would not be the first time she had allowed him to be beaten down in order to protect him.
She spoke with all the bitterness of the truth, each word a lash against Radu’s heart. “He will never love you. He will never look at you the way he looks at me. You cannot have this, Radu.”
They locked eyes, neither moving. Finally Radu slumped to the floor, long legs folded up to his chest, hands over his face. “You have no love to give him, and I have no love he will accept. What are we supposed to do?”
Lada leaned forward, a hand outstretched. Then she curled it into a fist. She could not comfort him, could not fix this. He would need to be stronger. That was the only solution. “Get up. Stop pitying yourself. We are leaving, and things will go back to how they were before.”
“We can never go back.” Radu looked up at her with empty eyes, and the truth of his words rang through her like a bell. It was true. There was no going back from Radu’s feelings, no going back from what Lada had let happen between her and Mehmed. Perhaps this had all been a mistake.
“Get dressed!” she snapped, overwhelmed and angry.
“No.” A cold distance settled over his face as his square jaw tightened.
“We will not wait for you.”
“I am not coming.”
Exasperated, Lada began pulling clothes at random from the large armoire. “You are worthless. What will you do? Stay here?”
“Yes.” He stood—straight, taller than her—then stepped close enough so that she had to bend her neck back to look him in the eyes. He stared down at her, and the little brother she had dragged through life was now entirely gone. “You have both been so busy learning tactics and studying battles, you have failed to see the truth of where thrones are won and lost. It is in the gossip, the words and letters passed in dark corners, the shadow alliances and the secret payments. You think I am worthless? I can do things you could never dream of.”
Lada stumbled back. His words hit the precise tender spot she had been avoiding touching. “But—we have to stay together. We are all we have against this empire.”
Radu opened his door, looking above her head. “Your mistake is in assuming we both view them as an enemy.”
Rage and disgust spat from her lips. “You cannot mean that. We are Wallachian.”
“You are Wallachian. I am home. Get out.”
Lada could think of nothing else to say. She wanted to hit him, to pin him to the ground until he relented like when they were children. But this was not the child she had known. She did not know this man. She had lost Radu somewhere along the way, and she did not know how to get him back.
