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“I don’t care about your narrative.”
“Ournarrative, Valentina, and you should. You will. It is a weapon against us or a tool we employ. The choice is ours.”
She was frowning now, and it was aimed at him, yet Rodolfo had the distinct impression she was talking to herself. “You should never, ever have come up here tonight.”
He considered her for a moment. “This was not a mistake,princesita.This was a beginning.”
She lifted her hands to her face and Rodolfo saw that they were shaking. Again, he wanted to go to her and again, he didn’t. It was something about the stiff way she was standing there, or what had looked like genuine torment on her face before she’d covered it from his view. It gripped him, somehow, and kept him right where he was.
As if, he realized in the next moment, he was waiting for the other shoe to drop. The way he had been ever since he’d discovered at too young an age that anything and anyone could be taken from him with no notice whatsoever.
But that was ridiculous. There was no “other shoe” here. This was an arranged marriage set up by their fathers when Valentina was a baby. One crown prince of Tissely and one princess of Murin, and the kingdoms would remain forever united. Two small countries who, together, could become a force to be reckoned with in these confusing modern times. The contracts had been signed for months. They were locked into this wedding no matter what, with no possibility of escape.
Rodolfo knew. He’d read every line of every document that had required his signature. And still, he didn’t much like that thing that moved him, dark and grim, as he watched her. It felt far too much like foreboding.
His perfect princess, who had just given herself to him with such sweet, encompassing heat that he could still feel the burn of it all over him and through him as if he might feel it always, dropped her hands from her face. Her gaze caught his and held. Her eyes were still too dark, and filled with what looked like misery.
Sheer, unmistakable misery. It made his chest feel tight.
“I should never have let any of this happen,” she said, and her voice was different. Matter-of-fact, if hollow. She swallowed, still keeping her eyes trained on his. “This is my fault. I accept that.”
“Wonderful,” Rodolfo murmured, aware his voice sounded much too edgy. “I do so enjoy being blameless. It is such a novelty.”
She clenched her hands together in front of her, twisting her fingers together into a tangle. There was something about the gesture that bothered him, though he couldn’t have said what. Perhaps it was merely that it seemed the very antithesis of the sort of thing a woman trained since birth to be effortlessly graceful would do. No matter the provocation.
“I am not Princess Valentina.”
He watched her say that. Or rather, he saw her lips move and he heard the words that came out of her mouth, but they made no sense.
Her mouth, soft and scared, pressed into a line. “My name is Natalie.”
“Natalie,” he repeated, tonelessly.
“I ran into the princess in, ah—” She cleared her throat. “In London. We were surprised, as you might imagine, to see...” She waved her hand in that way of hers, as if what she was saying was reasonable. Or even possible. Instead of out-and-out gibberish. “And it seemed like a bit of a lark, I suppose. I got to pretend to be a princess for a bit. What could be more fun? No one was ever meant to know, of course.”
“I beg your pardon.” He still couldn’t move. He thought perhaps he’d gone entirely numb, but he knew, somehow, that the paralytic lack of feeling was better than what lurked on the other side. Much better. “But where, precisely, is the real princess in this ludicrous scenario?”
“Geographically, do you mean? She’s back in London. Or possibly Spain, depending.”
“All tucked up in whatever your life is, presumably.” He nodded as if that idiocy made sense. “What did you say your name was, again?”
She looked ill at ease. As well she should. “Natalie.”
“And if your profession is not that of the well-known daughter of a widely renowned and ancient royal family, despite your rather remarkable likeness to Princess Valentina, dare I ask what is it that you do? Does it involve a stage, perhaps, the better to hone these acting skills?”
“I’m a personal assistant. To a very important businessman.”
“A jumped-up secretary for a man in trade. Of course.” He was getting less numb by the second, and that was no good for anyone—though Rodolfo found he didn’t particularly care. He hadn’t lost his temper in a long while, but these were extenuating circumstances, surely. She should have been grateful he wasn’t breaking things. He shook his head, and even let out a laugh, though nothing was funny. “I must hand it to you. Stage or no stage, this has been quite an act.”
She blinked. “Somehow, that doesn’t sound like a compliment.”
“It was really quite ingenious. All you had to do was walk in the room that day and actually treat me like another living, breathing human instead of a cardboard cutout. After all those months. You must have been thrilled that I fell into your trap so easily.”
The words felt sour in his own mouth. But Valentina only gazed back at him with confusion written all over her, as if she didn’t understand what he was talking about. He was amazed that he’d fallen for her performance. Why hadn’t it occurred to him that her public persona, so saintly and retiring, was as much a constriction as his daredevil reputation? As easily turned off as on. And yet it had never crossed his mind that she was anything but the woman she’d always seemed to be, hailed in all the papers as a paragon of royal virtue. A breath of fresh air, they called her. The perfect princess in every respect.
He should have known that all of it was a lie. A carefully crafted, meticulously built lie.
“The trap?” She was shaking her head, looking lost and something like forlorn, and Rodolfo hated that even when he knew she was trying to play him, he still wanted to comfort her. Get his hands on her and hold her close. It made his temper lick at him, dark and dangerous. “What trap?”
