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For a moment she didn’t know what he meant. Then she remembered. Blackmail. Her vile, grasping father and this thing she’d become to counter him. To fight him—all while appearing to have surrendered to him long ago. All to save her sister no matter the cost to herself.
Her throat was so dry she thought it might catch fire.
“I’ll be fine,” she replied, though her lips still felt stung and stained from his. Her pulse had taken on a hectic life of its own, and the noise from outside the car as it began to slow in its final approach to the opera house seemed to batter against her.
Like real blows.
Orion reached over and took her hand. For a moment her heart seemed to seize inside her chest. But instead of lacing his fingers with hers or caressing her in some way—which she assured herself she would have shaken off at once—he fiddled with the ring he’d put there instead. It was the ring of the Queens of Idylla, after all. Every school-aged child knew that and could identify it on sight.
What they didn’t, couldn’t know was that the ring itself was warm against her skin. Or that the stones caught the light from the street outside, sending fragments and patches of illumination dancing about in a shimmering splendor.
The light caught his profile, too. The same profile that would soon grace the Idyllian currency, slowly taking his father’s place. He looked like precisely what and who he was, the product of centuries of royal blood. As if the throne of Idylla was superimposed on his skin.
That should have horrified her, surely.
But it didn’t.
And when he didn’t speak, his fingers on that ring as if that was all the statement necessary, Calista felt as if the bottom of the car fell out from underneath her. As if she was suddenly tossed out into the cobbled streets, unable to gain purchase or find her feet or evenbreathe.
The chanting and cheering outside grew louder. And she knew no one could see her inside the car, with its tinted, no doubt armored windows. But even so, she couldn’t seem to make her lungs work the way they were supposed to. And she felt dizzy all over again, but this time it was from nothing so pleasant as a kiss.
Because it hadn’t occurred to her until this very moment that as fake as she wanted to treat their engagement, or even their marriage, that was the private reality. That was what was between them because they knew the truth of things.
But there was going to be a huge public reality she couldn’t control.
Calista had been so busy focusing on how best to ignore the whole marriage thing while she pursued her own ends that she’d neglected to think about what it was going to mean to announce herself engaged or even adjacent to...Orion Augustus Pax. The bloody king.
Her attitude in that private salon the day she’d first met him struck her, then, as hilariously idiotic. If not actively suicidal.
The truth was, she wasn’t a public person. Her father was notorious, and that was about as much public attention as she’d ever wanted. It had led to snide comments at school. The odd sharp word. But mostly, the many people her father offended went after him, not her.
Unlike many of her peers, Calista wasn’t the sort who constantly had her picture in the society pages. Nor did she parade about Europe, from yacht to club to charity ball. She had always been too busy working. And the irony wasn’t lost on her that her life’s work was in a media company that existed almost entirely because it procured pictures of others and made them public whether they wanted those moments shared or not.
Maybe because of the things Skyros Media had done, Calista had always preferred to stay behind the scenes.
She felt herself begin to sweat as the car rolled to a stop.
Outside, there was a loud, endless roll of noise, like the wall-sized swells at sea. She tried to make herself breathe, but she couldn’t seem to get any air much deeper than the back of her throat.
“Is it always like this?” she managed to ask.
Faintly.
“I am the king,” Orion replied, mildly enough, though she had the feeling those grave hazel eyes saw far too much of her internal battle. “Better they should greet me with expressions of joy than the howls of hatred they used to greet my father. Don’t you think?”
“I was never the sort of person who chased around after the royal motorcade,” she made herself say in a sharper sort of voice, though she was still but a shadow of her usual self. “So I can’t say I ever paid much attention to the cacophony one way or another.”
He only looked at her. Until she couldn’t tell whether the noise outside was the crowd or if it was inside her, somehow. As if it was part of that singing thing that seemed to connect them, heating as it sang, until she felt scalded straight through. Or maybe she had already been scalded, her skin stripped away so shefelttoo much, despite her best efforts. Maybe one royal kiss had rewired her brain—by burning it up into ash and need and noise.
Or maybe you need to get a hold of yourself, she told herself sharply.This whole thing is nothing but a distraction.
“Isn’t this where you tell me I don’t have to do this if I don’t want to?” she asked before she thought better of it.
His mouth firmed then, forming a hard, stern line. And she couldn’t decide if she found that comforting or insulting, but it didn’t matter.
Because the look in his eyes matched the shape of his mouth and pinned her to her seat.
“But that is the rub, is it not? You do have to do this. As do I. That is the nature of blackmail, I think you’ll find. So tawdry and revolting. One is ever forced to do detestable things.”
