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“Maybe to disaster. Maybe to hell.”
“How does it feel where you are now?”
“Like hell,” he responded. “Like I’m a foolish man staring at a fairy tale asking it for answers.”
“Sounds to me like you don’t have any further to fall. And I need you to be functional. So sort yourself out.”
“Are you advocating for love and happy endings now?”
Matteo laughed, shaking his head. “Hell no. The opiate of the masses in my opinion. But if you wish to join the masses, Javier, then I won’t stop you. And if it is what Violet wants, then all the better that she didn’t marry me. Because I would never be able to give it to her.”
“Are you such a hypocrite that you would advocate for me what you don’t believe you can have for yourself?”
“Not a hypocrite. Just a king. A word of advice. Javier, you were not born to be the King so don’t take on the responsibilities that I carry. Take on your own. You’re a warrior. And you were born to be. That is your position in this country. And the difference between you and our father was always compassion. It was the sight of that little girl being married off that changed you. That made you see. It was always compassion that made you better. It was always caring. Because a man who is in and of himself a weapon ought to have that sort of counterbalance, don’t you think? In my estimation, love will make you stronger at what you do.”
“And for kings?” Javier asked.
“A king should not be vulnerable.” Matteo turned, then paused for a moment. “But it might be the only thing that keeps a beast from being dangerous. If you are so worried about hurting others, perhaps you should think about that.”
And with that, his brother left Javier there, sitting in the bottom of the dunge
on holding on to the book. And he knew that he would find no answers there. None at all. No. The only answers for who he was, who he might become, who he needed to become, lay with Violet.
If only he could find the strength in himself.
But perhaps, until then, he could borrow strength from Violet.
Suddenly the fairy tale made sense in a way that it had not before. His fingertips burned, and he opened up to a page with an illustration of the giant, hulking beast having his wounds tended by the delicate maiden.
Perhaps he was too focused on the transformation.
Perhaps he had not looked enough at what the story was really about.
As she said, almost every culture had a version of this tale. And in it, the beauty was seen by the reader to be the weak one. Put up against a dangerous beast.
But he was the one who changed. He was the one who transformed, because of the power of her love.
In the end, it was the beauty who held all the power.
In the end, it was her love that made the difference.
And so, he would have to trust in her power. Trust that, like in the story, she was more than able to stand up to the challenge of loving him.
He was the one who had to find his strength.
She had already proven that she had more than enough for the two of them.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
SHE HADN’T GONE back to California.
Her social media efforts had begun to create more tourism in Monte Blanco, and she was working with the tourism bureau and local business owners on strengthening the market. She was still involved in her own company, with her VP holding down the fort on the local level back in San Diego.
She had begun spending more time in the city. She had rented office space and had begun working in earnest on her project to bring work to Monte Blanco. Specifically for women. She was in talks to figure out manufacturing, something that she was arranging with Livia, and she had already hired a few women that she had met at a local shelter to work on data entry.
She was having to do some training, and she had hired people to do that as well.
And all of it was helping distract from the pain in her chest, though it didn’t make it go away.
