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‘You let me believe that I would be safe here and the entire time, theentiretime, you were planning for me to take a job in another country!’
‘Henna, you earned that role, youdeservethat role.’ He was desperate for her to know that.
‘But the price of it is here! The cost of it is to know that you didn’t want me here!’ she threw at him.
Rage tore through him. Anger, frustration and helplessness. ‘You’re right, Henna, I didn’t want you here. Idon’twant you here.’ She reared back as if he had physically struck her. ‘How on earth am I supposed to find a fiancée when you are less than five corridors away from me? How am I supposed to be the king that I need to be when you are making me feel everything that I have spent years trying to forget? Tell me, Henna, because if you can make it happen then stay, by all means.’
He had shocked her into silence and he took full advantage. ‘Even before Öström, even before we kissed, even before Freya was engaged, I knew that you were more of a threat to me than anyone I had ever known. Even then I knew that you—alone in an entire palace of people—would see the truth. That my need to control everything is beyond trust, beyond betrayal—’ His breath shuddered in his lungs. ‘Because if I let myself feel for you, then how will I not be destroyed by the feelings I have for...for...my child?’ he demanded. ‘The decision that was made for me,without my choice, was done so that I could rule this country. That can and will only ever be my one purpose now.’
She stared at him, as if sifting through his words, seeing to his soul, and finding him wanting. ‘So you refuse to acknowledge your grief and loss and guilt and love and all the things that make us human, because you think it makes you a better king?’ she asked incredulously.
‘If that is what I need to do, then I shall do it.’
‘That is a poor way of honouring the loss of your child.’ Her words slapped him so viciously he took a step back, an irrevocable wound cutting into his heart. ‘You were a lost teenager then, isolated from the very people who should have helped you and vulnerable to your grief. So you hid it deep down, untouched and unacknowledged. I understand that. You weren’t strong enough then, but you are now. And you know better now.’
‘Get out,’ he whispered, with no less power in his words than the force of a tsunami.
And still she stood against him, immovable, her power that strong.
‘I am yourKing!’ he yelled.
‘And if you say that enough times, will you finally believe that it is an excuse for your manipulations? For taking the same choice away from others that you were denied yourself?’ she demanded, seeing straight to the heart of him.
‘Don’t,’ he warned.
‘Don’t what? Challenge you? Question you? Are you such an autocrat that you would rule by your will alone?’
He took a step back as she took one forward.
‘It is time for you to honour your pain and hurt and guilt. Use the support you have around you now, overcome it and be better for it. You deserve it, and so do they.’
He shook his head as if trying to ward off her words.
‘Can’t you see? If you did, then you would know that you are loved, that...thatIlove you,’ she said, her words penetrating the walls he was hastily building around his heart.
Aleksander shook his head and Henna tried to hold her heart together even as it slipped through her fingers like sand. The pain was incalculable, tearing and ripping at her even as she stood before him.
‘You don’t,’ he replied.
She let out a helpless laugh. ‘It’s not something you have the power to control this time, Aleksander.’
A look of determined sincerity passed over his features. ‘I know,’ he said, as if finally admitting a limit to his authority. ‘But I was telling the truth. You don’t love me. You love the boy who found you in the maze, who introduced you to his sister. That boy, he was funny and charming and easygoing, but I am not that boy any more. What happened to me changed me on a fundamental level.’
If he had been angry, if he had hurled accusations or manipulated her words, she would have something to fight against. But this? This was a surrender she didn’t know what to do with, and no matter how much she tried she couldn’t stop the pain pouring from her heart like life blood.
‘You have built a dream around me and it’s time for you to wake up,’ he said, his words and tone gentle but so unbelievably destructive.
Tears filled her vision and he reached out for her, but she pulled away before he could make contact. She wanted to deny it, she wanted to refuse what he was saying was true, but could she? Yes, she had looked and looked for the boy who had given her so much, but had she been so desperate that she had made it all up? Imagined the man she had fallen in love with? Had she done it again and built herself a future around a man she thought would never hurt her?
Her chest ached and her head hurt and she looked deep into her heart and knew the truth. ‘I told you that I loved you because you deserved to know. But I deservemore,’ she said, and turned from the room and the man she loved, but not before she saw the look of devastation in his eyes.
Henna slipped through the quiet Palace, most of her belongings already packed and sent ahead to her hotel. She retrieved her bag and coat from her now empty suite and a taxi was waiting for her at the staff entrance. She didn’t turn, didn’t pause, didn’t slow as she made her way towards the car waiting on the gravel driveway. And as the clock chimed midnight from within the Palace, Henna didn’t even look back. The past was gone and only the future lay before her, even if it broke her heart.
CHAPTER TWELVE
ALEKSANDERSTAREDATthe door Henna had left through for what felt like hours, his mind spending every second of that time replaying what she had said, what he had said...why it had happened and how. Two steps ahead—he had always been two steps ahead, but this time he was very much behind.
Even though he knew that there could never have been another outcome, his mind processed an infinite number of scenarios that might have ended differently. If he hadn’t said... If she’d just... Each one made his head and heart hurt more and more.
