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He wanted to go back and change everything. Save his mother. Save himself.
And somehow find a way to keep his father from walking the path that had led them here.
Maybe what he couldn’t accept—what he’d never been able to accept—was that, given the chance, he’d save his father, too.
He didn’t want to feel these things. He didn’t want tofeel. He had always chosen to see himself as a finely honed weapon of a particular vengeance. Nothing less, nothing more. As he had vowed over his mother’s grave he would become, so he had done.
Yes, yes, such a weapon, his friend Vin, more commonly known these days as His Royal Majesty, the King of Arista, had said with an eye roll when they’d all gotten together for a drink in Paris.
Perhaps the weapon has grown a bit blunt now that you’re impregnating women and parading them about Paris with statement jewelry, Prince Jahangir Hassan Umar Al Hayat had murmured, lounging in the chair opposite in the private club. Jag had grinned.I recall a time when all you could do was extol the virtues of prophylactics.
Rafael Navarro, bastard child of the former King of Santa Castelia and long its regent, had laughed. Vin had joined him. Zeus, who knew exactly why they were laughing, forced himself to smile when he would really rather...not.
There are a great many virtues in impregnating the wrong woman and making her a wife, Rafael had said. As he would, having recently scandalized the whole world by kidnapping his own woman from her wedding to another man. Another man who had happened to be Rafael’s half brother.I recommend it.
I second this recommendation, Vin had said, sounding revoltingly happy.
I have no intention of settling like the two of you, Jag had said, shaking his head at them.I prefer the time-honored practice of not making my lovers accidentally pregnant.
His friends and he often cleared their schedules and made drinks happen in various cities, all these years after Oxford. Zeus had been surprised at how little he had wished to leave Nina in their hotel for even so short a time. He, who had never turned down the opportunity for a social event in all his days. Particularly not when it was with these men. His closest friends.
His only friends.
But he had only shrugged languidly, as if he was still the samehimhe had ever been.I believe you are all mistaking the matter. I salute your fecundity, truly. Yet I assure you—my situation is not emotional, however accidental. It fits in nicely with my plan or I would not have moved forward with a wedding. Have you met me? Do I seem the marrying kind?
And he had pretended not to notice how Vin and Rafael had looked at each other then.
He couldn’t seem to get that look out of his head now.
Because the way his friends had gazed at each other had seemed ripe with a kind of emotion Zeus would have sworn neither of them could feel.
Yet maybe what he’d been worried about after all was whathefelt.
What he had always felt.
Zeus kept circling back to the fact that whatever the shape of the weapon he’d made himself into, that hadn’t been what he’d wanted. It had never been what he’d wanted.
He’d gone to great lengths to deny it, but at heart, he’d wanted what any child did. His mother. His father. His family.
And it only occurred to him now—here in this room with a woman who had knocked him off balance from the start—that maybe it wasn’t the vow that he’d made at his mother’s grave that had motivated him all this time. Not entirely.
Maybe it was the longing of a child, after all.
Zeus told himself he was horrified at his own mawkish sentimentality.
He made sure Nina was covered as he left the bed. He moved over to the fire, pulling the quilt that they’d long since kicked off around his waist. And then he sat, stared into the flames as they danced before him, and, for the life of him, could not understand how things had come to this point without him realizing what he was doing.
Not his own feelings, which he assured himself he could dismiss as he should have long ago. But toher. To his Nina. For a man was no man at all who hurt the woman he should protect. Hadn’t he learned that when he was young? In the worst possible way? He knew he had. It had changed the course of his life. It had made him who he was.
How could he possibly justify using the woman who loved him, despite what he’d done to her, as a pawn in this bitter game?
The fire gave no answers.
Zeus kept imagining holding his baby for the first time. Staring down into the eyes of his own child. And it was so powerful that it threatened the favorite image he’d been carrying around for more than half his life now. Of staring down at his father on his deathbed, diminished and humbled, and making sure the old man knew that despite everything, Zeus had won.
It was like the two things were at war, ceding no territory.
Tearing him apart.
