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“You look...sad.” Joaquin bit off that last word as if it tasted bad.
Amalia glanced down at her mobile, then shook her head. “Not sad. Not really. I think my circumstances require an appropriate amount of introspection, that’s all. And I’m new to the practice.”
Outside, the rain picked up, beating down hard on the stones. It was so loud she thought it surely could have drowned them both out, had either one of them been speaking.
And still, somehow, the storm in Joaquin’s gaze raged louder.
“Everything in my previous life was outward-facing,” she told him, hardly knowing she meant to speak. It was the way he was looking at her with all of that green in his gaze. It made her feel reckless. “Whatever thoughts or feelings I might have had, about anything, needed to be locked away in service to my public persona. In case you wondered, I didn’t get to pick that persona. The role was chosen for me and I was expected to fill it. The girl you met here five years ago was...not me. She was an anomaly. An escape from reality.”
She saw his lips flatten at that. But he still said nothing, only stood there as if he had braced himself for a fight.
“I’m not complaining,” she found herself continuing, though the idea of afightmade her blood move a little quicker. “Just a fact. My—Queen Esme is of the belief that while the monarchy holds all the power in Ile d’Montagne, there are also obligations incumbent upon those of us who hold—or held—those exalted positions. The public is owed access to us. Or not tous,as such, but these roles we play. She is also of the opinion that mystery is far better than exposure. I don’t suppose this is something you would understand. I suspect you are always and ever you, no matter where you go.”
She had found that exhilarating five years ago. He had been a force and she had been, perhaps, a little in awe of howcertainhe was. About everything.
Surely you must feel some hint of doubt, if only now and again, she had said once. They had been walking down by the water in one of the island’s protected, rocky coves. It had been a hot day, but Joaquin had only seemed to burn brighter in all that sun.
He had held her hand in his, the heat between them always at a simmer. The look he’d sent her way had only set it to a boil.For many years I could not afford doubt, he had said.Now that I can afford anything, I do not see its purpose.
Amalia remembered thinking,I wish I could walk through the world like that.She supposed that when she’d left him that summer, that was what she’d tried to do.
Here, now, she watched his green gaze narrow, slightly. And he nodded. Once.
“And here’s a little secret.” Amalia pulled the blanket more firmly around her. “I liked playing that part. There might have been certain restrictions on my life, and I found those difficult at times, but the role of the Crown Princess? I enjoyed it. I knew that I could do real good and I worked hard to make sure that was at the center of everything I did. And I worked hard at the public persona, too. To always appear graceful. Compassionate. Pleasant, yet serious. To inhabit opposing extremes at all times, usually in heels, while always remaining just unknowable enough, because the people do not really want to know every last detail of the personification of their government, do they? It’s not easy.” She clutched the mobile in her hand. “And it turns out that all this time, it wasn’t even my role to play. It would be strange if I wasn’t thinking about it.”
“They say you lived entirely for the crown.” Joaquin sounded as if he was whispering, but that couldn’t be true. Not when the rain was still coming down like that outside. It was only that his voice moved over her like a whisper, then into her like a caress. “That you bloomed with adulation and will wither away without it.”
“Then I would deserve to wither away.” She tipped her head to one side as she regarded him. “If that’s the only thing I was, then I ought to be happy that it’s turned out it was never my role to play. We’re all just people at the end of the day. Aren’t we?”
“There are different kinds of people.” And again, she couldn’t seem to look away from that green gaze of his, and how intensely he seemed to be watching her. As if he was looking for something in particular. “Most of them are weak.”
Amalia didn’t exactly laugh at that, though a puff of air escaped her lips. She lifted her hand to push her hair back from her face, and only then realized it was trembling. “Everyone knows your story. I don’t think anyone can compete with it. Compared to you, there’s nothing but weakness in this world.”
“You say that, but I doubt very much you know what it means,” he said, dark and yet layered through with too much fire. “You have never known what it is to be entirely alone, Princess. No one coming to save you. No one around to care. I could have died at any point during my childhood and no one would have noticed.”
Amalia had never heard him put it quite like that before.
“I wasn’t sad before.” She wanted to whisper his name. She wanted to touch him, comfort him. But she didn’t dare do any of that. “But that makes me feel something a lot more than simply sad.”
“There’s nothing sad about it.” He moved then, that rangy, almost rolling gait of his that made her think of how controlled he was. How ready, always, to attack. “Life is only ever about survival. My gift is that I have always known that. I did not learn it later, and to my detriment, like some.”
“What you’re talking about isexistence,” she said, with a quiet intensity that seemed to come from a new place inside her. “Living is something else. Living involves light, love. Anyone canexist. Most do. But it’s only when you surrender to life that you get to be truly alive. And that’s what matters.”
Her words seemed to hang there in the grand lobby, buffeted this way and that by the rain outside and the cold wind that whipped through. By contrast, neither wind nor rain seemed to touch Joaquin at all as he moved toward her.
“And how would you know this?” Joaquin’s voice was soft again, but she did not mistake that softness for weakness, not when she could feel the lash of his mockery just beneath it. “You, who have played a role that was not even yours all this time? Is thatalive, do you think?”
But Amalia refused to be cowed by him. Not today. “I can’t do anything about the life that I was told was mine, the one I tried to live as I was told I should.” She lifted her chin, and somehow, holding tight to her mobile and knowing the message that waited for her there made her feel stronger. Brighter. “All I can do is make sure that the life I lead going forward is the life I want.”
“You should know this by now, Amalia,” he growled, and he was standing over her then, his green eyes glittering. “No one ever, truly, gets what they want. Life is compromise—unless you win. And you, I think, were raised to believe you had already won, only to learn otherwise.” He shrugged the way he did sometimes, as if nothing could matter. As if nothing ever had. “I do not think the life you have before you is going to be anything you wish.”
The life before her that would not include him. He didn’t say that, but that was what she heard. Loud and clear.
As if she was just one of his many women, clinging to his trouser leg. She was sure that was precisely how he wanted her to feel.
“I know my life will be exactly what I wish, actually,” she shot back at him. “Because I’m not afraid of it. I don’t have to conquer everything before me. I don’t have to make certain that I win at all costs. The difference between you and me, Joaquin, is that I just want to be happy.”
“No, Princess.” That was twice he’d called her that today, and the sardonic way he said it made goose bumps roll down her neck. She didn’t like it. But then, she supposed that was his point. He was doing this deliberately. So she decided, then and there, that she would die before she gave him the satisfaction of seeing how it got to her. “The difference between you and me is that I know happiness is a lie.”
