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She loosened her grip on the strap of her bag, and shifted it off her shoulder, then set it down on the desk that stood between them.
There were so many things Orion wanted to say to her, but something about the too-still way she stood, and that look on her face, kept him from it.
“I have worked for years to get to this meeting,” she told him, her voice quiet, but racked with some emotion he couldn’t name. “And finally, after years and years of near misses, setbacks, and disappointments, it was all finally going to happen. I managed to convince just enough members of the board to throw their lot in with mine. That would put me at fifty-one percent. Meaning, a controlling interest in Skyros Media. My first act would be a vote of no confidence in my father, which he would not survive. I intended to reject him from his own company by the end of the year.”
“Why?” Orion asked, his throat so tight he wasn’t sure the word would come out right.
“Because I want my sister safe,” Calista said fiercely. “That has always been my first and foremost priority. He has threatened me with her all my life. If I misbehaved, he would have her minders lock her in her room, without food. If he was truly angry at me, he might slap me—but he’d leave her black-and-blue. And if I didn’t tell him what he wanted to know about you, Orion...” Her voice wavered then, but she lifted her chin. “He told me he would send her to an institution. For life. Kicking him out would mean substantially reducing the amount of time, money, and energy he can dedicate to bullying me and her.”
“You are discussing the sister-in-law of the King of Idylla,” Orion reminded her, raising his brows, even as a rush of sympathy moved in him for her predicament—when he would have said he could never forgive her for betraying him in the way she did. “I will make it a law, if you wish, that your sister must remain free.” He shook his head. “Why did it not occur to you that all you needed to do was ask?”
“Because I was so close,” she threw at him, and she sounded much less composed, then. “My whole life was leading to tonight, and I thought it was nothing more than a strange tangent that I was suddenly thrown in your path. What did I care if my father wanted to marry me off? Soon enough what he wanted wouldn’t matter. I could break off our engagement. I could divorce you. I didn’t really care what I did, when you were just a figurehead to me. Just a king. Not a person, Orion. And not when Melody was the one who would suffer if I lost focus.”
He stayed where he was, every muscle in his body tense, focused on her so intently he should have been worried it would rip him asunder.
But all he could manage to think about was her.
“I never expected...you,” Calista whispered. She looked away then, blinking rapidly. And he wondered if that sheen in her gaze was what he thought it was when she looked back at him again. When he was sure she would have sworn she never cried. “But then, last week, it seemed that everything was...”
“In ruins all around us?” he asked starkly.
“Clarified,” she said instead. “However harshly. So tonight, I went to the board meeting. It was exactly as I imagined it. I arrived late, to make an entrance. There were the expected whispers and mutterings when I walked into the meeting and took my place. My father looked apoplectic, because he expected me to be sequestered off in the palace, allowing him to cast my vote by proxy, as he preferred.”
She sniffed. “Only once every few years has he allowed me to attend the meetings, so I could have the pleasure of voting the way he told me to, but in person. In some ways that is a gift, as this is the sort of meeting that goes on for hours and takes a long while to get to the voting. At the first break, I knew that if I stayed, my father would become abusive. As usual.”
Orion heard himself growl. “The next time he puts his hands on you, Calista, there will be consequences.”
Her lips twitched and something in him warmed at the site. That optimism that he claimed came and went—but, in truth, only hunkered down within him, waiting for its moment—burst to life all over again.
Like fireworks.
But he tried to tamp it all down and assume his usual stern expression.
“I didn’t intend to give him the opportunity to put his hands on me,” she assured him. “I ducked out the door and slipped away because I knew that he would get caught up in conversation, and I needed to ready myself for the final act of this thing. At last.”
“Have you come here to tell me that you are breaking off our engagement?” Orion asked then, the fireworks starting to feel a bit more like gunfire. “I suppose I should thank you for doing it in person.”
His mind spun out, then. He thought of the scandal it would cause. The crowing in the papers that as they’d suspected, the king had been played for a fool by a member of the toxic Skyros family. And, really, how could anyone esteem a king who was a fool? Better, really, to be a villain. At least there was power in it instead of pity.
But Calista was talking again. “I went and hid in my office. It’s right next my father’s, so I knew there’d be no particular rush for someone else to take it over. I left all the lights out and stood there, staring out at that very same moon.”
“It is not quite full,” he heard himself say. “It will be full tomorrow.”
Again, that sheen in her gaze made his chest feel tight.
“There was something about the moon, full or not.” She looked down at the ring on her hand. That ring he’d put there, and now could not imagine gracing any other hand, ever. Everything in him rejected the very idea. “It was as if the moon and the sea caught the stones. And they all twisted around and around inside me. And all I could think about was last week. When we stood in the dark, with only the sea and the rocks as witness, and you asked me to make a choice I was certain was already made.”
“Was it not?” he hardly dared ask.
“I could hear it when they started calling the meeting back to order,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. A rough, harsh whisper, her eyes fixed on his. “And everything I had always wanted was in that boardroom. Mine for the taking. I could hear my father’s voice, booming down the hall as he told one of his vile, off-color jokes. All I had to do was move. Turn on my heel, walk down the hall, and crush him beneath my foot the way I’ve always dreamed.”
“Calista.”
And then again, just her name, like a prayer.
“Instead, I went into his office.” She sounded as if she was running, but she stood still, there on the other side of the old desk that had once been his grandfather’s. “I went to his safe. It only took me three or four tries to guess his combination, because it never occurs to my father that anyone might be observing him. He thinks he’s too busy studying everyone else, looking for weaknesses, for anyone to return the favor.”
She looked down, then, and it felt like a slap. Orion blinked. But she was reaching into the bag she’d tossed on his desk. And she pulled out a very familiar portfolio.
