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“Is something the matter?” she asked, and it was only after she’d asked it that she realized she would have been better served pretending not to notice.
Because she certainly shouldn’t care.
“Not at all,” Orion said. “Or nothing more than usual. Sometimes it is not possible to rule a country. You must rule yourself and hope the country follows afterward. Eventually.”
Calista had the urge to upend the nearest incidental table, scattering figurines and precious objects to and fro. She refrained. Barely.
She made herself breathe into the fury. “Self-control is admirable, I’m sure. Though I’m not certain it takes the place of, I don’t know, basic human rights.”
“Human rights?” He looked amazed then, and inarguably royal. As if he’d turned into a bust of himself. “Have human rights been violated in some fashion that I am unaware of, here on the quiet streets of Idylla?”
“Perhaps not on a wide scale. Not in Idylla, anyway.” Admitting that felt like a surrender, and she didn’t want to give up so much as a centimeter. “But I’m feeling rather concerned about my own rights at the moment.”
“Yes.” Orion eyed her. “I can see how you suffer.”
“There’s no need for sarcasm,” she shot back at him. “You don’t have the slightest idea what it’s like to have your whole life taken away from you at a whim.”
“Calista. I must beg of you.” He shook his head. “Do you really think that I’m likely to lend a sympathetic ear to my blackmailer?”
“I’m not the one who blackmailed you.”
“No, worse, you are my blackmailer’s instrument.”
There was something in his gaze, then. She didn’t understand it. It was a glittering, dark sort of thing, and it made her skin prickle. Everywhere. It made that melting, caramelized mess she wanted to call fury...very distinctly something else, especially as it sank lower.
“Now you live beneath my roof. I receive daily reports of the ways you challenge my staff. You treat me with rampant disrespect, so I am not particularly shocked that you are not the biddable girl they might wish you were. And none of it matters. I will marry you all the same, come Christmas Eve, because that is the tradition. You may not have been my choice, but you are my betrothed, and I do not break my promises.” Orion’s eyes gleamed, while his voice seemed to get tangled up in all that fire and fury within her. “But by all means, stand before me and tell me what it is like to have the life you’d planned snatched out of your fingers.”
She blinked. Then again. “I suppose you have a point.”
And to her surprise, he smiled. “You are the one who decided we must be enemies, Calista.”
“Perhaps I was hasty.”
Suddenly, it was as if she couldn’t think what to do with her hands. Or her neck. She felt...outsized and awkward, and she knew, now, in no uncertain terms, that it would be inappropriate for her to sit until he did. That royal etiquette decreed that unless and until they sorted something else out for the two of them in private, she must continue to treat him with the courtesy due his station no matter how she felt about it.
The trouble isn’t that you know, a voice in her whispered.It’s that you care.
She rather thought she’d preferred it when she didn’t.
“Did your parents get along?” she asked. He stared at her, and this time, there was no hoping she didn’t flush. She did, and rather brightly, she feared. “I don’t mean at the end. Everyone knows how...sad she became, of course. But surely they could not have begun at the place they ended.” She swallowed, her throat suddenly dry. What had made her think bringing up the queen’s death—officially called an accident but widely regarded as the suicide it was—was a good idea? No matter how the old queen was pitied because whowouldn’twish to escape from King Max? “Could they?”
Orion stalked over to the sideboard, and she watched as he fixed himself a drink with decisive, peremptory movements of his hands that made her feel a bit...fluttery.
He turned back, swirling liquid in a crystal tumbler, and eyed her rather darkly over the top of it.
“What is it exactly you are asking?”
“According to what I’ve learned in the past week, your mother was bred for the job,” Calista said, still standing there feeling foolish with her hands folded in front of her and her back pin straight. Not because she felt in control, the way she did in a boardroom. But because she felt ripped into a million little pieces and she didn’t have the slightest idea how to start putting them back together. So perfect posture it was. “She and your father were promised since the day of her birth. She was trained not only in how to be a queen, or how to be Queen of Idylla, for that matter, but how to be your father’s specific queen. His likes and dislikes, his strengths and weaknesses. Other girls learned about history, but your mother? She studied your father.”
“So I’m told, for her sins,” Orion said darkly.
“Well? Did it work?”
Orion tossed back his drink. “To a point. Yes.”
Calista wanted to fire questions at him, particularly because the look on his face then was troubled. But she bit her tongue. And though it was more difficult than it should have been to a seasoned negotiator, she waited.
Not at all sure he would reply until he did.
