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CHAPTER TEN
RODOLFOWASCONFLICTED.
He hadn’t seen Valentina since that night in Rome. He’d had his staff contact her to announce that he thought they’d carried out their objectives beautifully and there would be no more need for their excursions into the world of the paparazzi. And that was before he’d seen their pictures in all the papers.
The one most prominently featured showed the two of them on the dance floor, in the middle of what looked like a very romantic waltz. Rodolfo was gazing down at her as if he had never seen a woman before in all his life. That was infuriating enough, given what had come afterward. It made his chest feel too tight. But it was the look on the princess’s face that had rocked Rodolfo.
Because the picture showed her staring up at the man who held her in his arms in open adoration. As if she was falling in love right then and there as they danced. As if it had already happened.
And it had all been a lie. A game.
The first you’ve ever lost,a vicious voice inside of him whispered.
Today he stood in the grand foyer outside his father’s offices in the palace in Tissely, but his attention was across Europe in Murin, where the maddening, still-more-fascinating-than-she-should-have-been woman who was meant to become his wife was going about her business as if she had not revealed herself to be decidedly unhinged.
She’d kept a low profile these last few weeks. As had Rodolfo.
But his fury hadn’t abated one bit.
Secret twins. The very idea was absurd—even if she hadn’t been the daughter of one of the most famous and closely watched men in the world. There was press crawling all over Murin Castle day and night and likely always had been, especially when the former queen had been pregnant with the heir to the country’s throne.
“Ridiculous,” he muttered under his breath.
But his trouble was, he didn’t want to be bitter. He wanted to believe her, no matter how unreasonable she was. That was what had been driving him crazy these past weeks. He’d told himself he was going to throw himself right back into his old habits, but he hadn’t. Instead he’d spent entirely too much time mired in his old, familiar self-pity and all it had done was make him miss her.
He had no earthly idea what to do about that.
The doors opened behind him and he was led in with the usual unnecessary ceremony to find his father standing behind his desk. Already frowning, which Rodolfo knew from experience didn’t bode well for the bracing father/son chat they were about to have.
Ferdinand nodded at the chair before his desk and Rodolfo took it, for once not flinging himself down like a lanky adolescent. Not because doing so always irritated his father. But because he felt like a different man these days, scraped raw and hollow and made new in a variety of uncomfortable and largely unpleasant ways he could blame directly on his princess, and he didn’t have it in him to needle his lord and king whenever possible.
His father’s frown deepened as he beheld his son before him, because, of course, he always had it in him to poke at his son. It was an expression Rodolfo knew well. He had no idea why it was harder to keep his expression impassive today.
“I hope you have it in you to acquit yourself with something more like grace at your wedding,” Ferdinand said darkly, as if Rodolfo had been rousted out of a den of iniquity only moments before and still reeked of excess. He’d tried. In the sense that he’d planned to go out and drown himself in all the things that had always entertained him before. But he’d never made it out. He couldn’t call it fidelity to his lying, manipulative princess when the truth was, he’d lost interest in sin—could he? “The entire world will be watching.”
“The entire world has been watching for some time,” Rodolfo replied, keeping his tone easy. Even polite. Because there was no need to inform his father that he had no intention of marrying a woman who had tried to play him so thoroughly. How could he? But he told himself Ferdinand could find out when he didn’t appear at the ceremony, like everyone else. “Has that not been the major point of contention all these years?”
His father ignored him. “It is one thing to wave at a press call. Your wedding to the Murin princess will be one of the most-watched ceremonies in modern Europe. Your behavior must, at last, be that of a prince of Tissely. Do you think you can manage this, Rodolfo?”
He glared at him as if he expected an answer. And something inside of Rodolfo simply...cracked.
It was so loud that first he thought it was the chair beneath him, but his father didn’t react. And it took Rodolfo a moment to understand that it wasn’t his chair. It was him.
He died, Rodolfo,his princess had said in Rome, before she’d revealed herself.You lived.
And he’d tried so hard to reverse that, hadn’t he? He’d told himself all these years that the risks he took were what made him feel alive, but that had been a lie. What he’d been doing was punishing himself. Pushing himself because he hadn’t cared what happened to him. Risking himself because he’d been without hope.
Until now.
“I am not merelyaprince of Tissely,” he said with a great calm that seemed to flood him then, the way it always did before he dropped from great heights with only a parachute or threw himself off the sides of bridges and ravines attached to only a bouncy rope. Except this time he knew the calm was not a precursor to adrenaline, but to the truth. At last. “I am the only prince of Tissely.”
“I know very well who you are,” his father huffed at him.
“Do you, sir? Because you have seemed to be laboring under some misconceptions as to my identity this last decade or two.”
“I am your father and your king,” his father thundered.
But Rodolfo was done being put into his place. He was done accepting that his place was somehow lower and shameful, for that matter.
