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Melody smiled. “And you will. But I don’t see why you wouldn’t look at all the avenues available to you now. Instead of the one you decided on when you thought it was the only one around.”
Wouldn’t that be lovely? Calista entertained a quick, beautiful fantasy of throwing her problems straight at the feet of the king, who could surely help her when no one else could....
But her father had something on him, too. Her father was the poison in everything.
You could try...something in her whispered.
Calista pulled away from her sister, then, and threw a couple more books into the satchel that already felt like a ton of bricks. And she tried very, very hard to keep her little surge of hope out of her voice. “All this royal nonsense is nothing but a distraction. It’s not an avenue toward anything.”
Melody sighed. “Once again, Calista. You will be the consort of the king. Any way you look at it, that’s a more powerful position than vice president to a pig. If I were you, I would stop viewing the palace as an obstacle and start looking at it as an opportunity.”
Calista couldn’t believe that anyone could help her. But she had been willing to try—or think about trying—when the car the king had sent arrived to deliver her to the palace a few hours later.
“You remember what we’re doing here,” her father told her right before she left his house, pulling her aside as the palace staff loaded up the last of her things. He gripped her arm in that way she particularly didn’t like, because it hurt. Though it had been years since she’d given him the satisfaction of wincing.
She didn’t now, either.
“Byhere, I assume you mean the palace,” she replied, not quite airily. “Not here as in right here in my childhood home.”
It was a mark of how intense her father was about all this that he didn’t sneer or slap her. He only gripped her a little harder and moved her closer.
“It’s your job to find something we can use against him, Calista,” he growled at her, his face in hers. “Don’t get your head turned by that fancy ring he gave you. That’s window dressing and nothing more.”
But she remembered Orion storming around that corner in the Skyros Media offices, as if he’d fully intended to charge her father and take him down. She remembered that look of dark fury on his royal face when he’d seen her father’s handprint on her cheek. Maybe she really could ask him to help her. Maybe he was the only one whocouldhelp...
“What are you talking about?” she asked, no longer pretending to be the least bitairy. “I’m marrying him because you want me to. A total stranger, who I have nothing in common with, because he’s the king. I thought that was what you wanted. I thought that was all you wanted.”
“What I want is leverage over the palace,” Aristotle told her harshly. “It was easy enough to find some on King Max. King Orion is harder—but we’re not wasting prime positioning like this. You’ll find something. You won’t rest until you do. Do you understand me, girl? Because if you don’t, it won’t be you who suffers. I’ll have your sister put away.”
He had danced around that threat for years, but he’d never come out and said it like that before. So flat and matter-of-fact. So ugly and unmistakable.
Her head spun.
“You don’t mean that,” she said, though she knew better to argue.
“I will have her sanctioned and committed, girl,” her father growled at her. “Her only use to me is the power it gives me over you, and believe me, I have every intention of using it. Test me, Calista. I dare you.”
She thought her stomach might betray her, and swallowed, hard, to keep the panic down. To keep any further arguments to herself, because there was no point antagonizing him. There never was. But it was as if she couldn’t help herself.
Because she couldn’t allow anything to happen to Melody. But she just didn’t see how she would do what her father wanted her to do. She didn’t see how she could possibly find leverage on a man like Orion, so stalwart andgood, damn him.
Of course he can’t help you,she told herself.No one can help you.
Her father must have sensed a counterargument brewing, or worse, an appeal to the better nature he didn’t have. He pinched her to stop it before it happened, hard enough to bring tears to her eyes. That was his farewell gift to the daughter he’d sold.
She had the whole ride over from her father’s house to wait for the stinging to subside. And she had that little gift with her—bruising up nicely—when the palace staff ushered her, with no little pomp and circumstance, to the rooms she was told had been set aside for her use in the family wing.
“Quite an honor, madam, I don’t mind saying,” the stuffy butler had intoned down the length of his impressive nose.
Inside, alone, Calista had sat there in one of the sitting rooms. It was easily the most elegantly appointed room she’d ever beheld. And it made her feel lonelier than she ever had in her life.
She had no reason to imagine that would ever change.
Not when none of this was real, or hers. And when her brief was to gather incriminating information on the king while she was here so her father could continue to wield his repulsive influence. Orthoughthe could continue—until she took his company out from under him, which might be more difficult to pull off than she’d anticipated if she was locked up in the palace...
But her own self-pity was too much for her to bear. She wiped at her face, annoyed to find she’d actually let a few tears fall. She wandered through her suite until she found the bathroom and splashed water on her face until she felt a bit more like herself.
Feeling sufficiently pulled together, she went back out into the main hallway, and stopped. Because she came face-to-face with three officious-looking men.
