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He slumped back down after that, pretending to lapse off instantly into sleep like the lazy ass he was so good at playing would.
But he felt the weight of her dark gaze on him for a long time after.
* * *
“The general is rumored to be in ill health,” Ricardo told him some days later. “It has been widely suggested that this ill-conceived fling of yours at a time the kingdom might actually need you may finally have put you beyond the pale, even in the eyes of your most die-hard supporters.”
Cairo did not look up from his laptop, where he was managing his investment portfolio with a shrewdness he knew most would not believe he possessed, but then, he had worked hard to live down to any and all expectations. He sat at the gleaming, polished table in his Parisian residence that had welcomed all manner of European royalty in its time. It, like everything else in this house he’d inherited from his late family and got to rule over like the high king of ghosts, was a monument to nostalgia.
He included himself in that tally.
“I would have thought that I was so many shades lighter than pale that I’d gone entirely translucent before my eighteenth birthday,” he said, more to the screen than to Ricardo. “That was certainly the goal.” He sat back then and eyed the closest thing he had in the world to a friend, this man who had been at his side since before his family had died and who would support him to the bitter end. “What will it take? A murder conviction?”
“The loyalists would only claim you’d been framed, Sire. And then you’d simply be in prison, a situation that I doubt would suit you.”
Cairo did not state the obvious: that he was already in prison. That he had been born into one sort of prison and then, after the revolution that had sent his family into exile, thrust into an entirely different one. And that the way he’d lived since he’d survived his adolescence was yet another jail cell, all things considered, no matter how elegantly appointed.
No one had any sympathy for a man like Cairo Santa Domini. Cairo, least of all. He knew he deserved it.
“You are correct,” he said instead. “A life sentence would not suit me at all.”
Ricardo smiled slightly, as if he knew exactly what Cairo hadn’t said. “The scandal sheets are having a field day and there appear to be more than the usual number of appalled citizens registering their dismay at your antics, but I’m afraid the rumblings from the most deluded of your followers grow ever louder. It’s as if they think they must act before you commit an unthinkable crime.”
“Not an actual murder, I assume. A marriage.” Ricardo nodded and Cairo rubbed a hand over his face. “But the general is unwell?”
His murderous heart, one of the many reasons he would never be a good man, wanted that evil man dead, as painfully as possible. It would be a good start.
“The palace is trying to keep it quiet, but my sources tell me it is serious,” Ricardo said quietly. He aimed a swift, dark look from Cairo. “The loyalists think this relationship of yours is a distraction. Merely a game you play as you bide your time and wait for the usurper to die.”
Cairo thought of the loyalists, true believers who had opposed the general’s coup thirty years ago and had only grown stronger and louder in the years since. The more the general hunted them down and attempted to silence them, the louder they got and the more furiously they agitated for Cairo to return and take his throne.
They didn’t seem to realize that his attempting to do so would lead to nothing but slaughter. Had they learned nothing from his family’s “accident”? General Estes was as much a butcher today as he had ever been. Perhaps even more so, if his power was slipping away.
“The loyalists believe what they want to believe,” he said now.
“The key points they wished me to pass on all concern your current companion,” Ricardo told him. “She is inappropriate, they claim. Unacceptable, though stronger language was used. She is a slap, and I quote, ‘in the face of centuries of the Santa Domini bloodline.’”
“Heaven forfend the bloodline that ends in me suffer a slap. The monarchy might be lost in shame forever—ah, but then, there is no monarchy and hasn’t been for thirty years.”
Ricardo had heard all of this before. He inclined his head. “They want to meet.”
They did not want to do anything so innocuous asmeet. They wanted to plan, to scheme. They wanted to talk strategies and possibilities. The practical loyalists wanted their seized lands and confiscated fortunes back. The idealists wanted the country of their forefathers, the fairy-tale perfection of “the kingdom in the clouds,”as Santa Domini had been known in previous centuries. Cairo was as much a figurehead to them as he was to their enemies.
And figureheads too often ended up sacrificed to the cause, one way or another. What the loyalists failed to realize was that they’d be served up along with him. Cairo had been trying to avoid that very outcome since the general had assassinated his family.
As long as the general lived, nothing and no one Cairo cared about was safe.
“Impossible,” he murmured now. “My social calendar is filled to bursting and I am, quite publically, falling head over heels in love with an American temptress reviled on at least three continents, rendering me stupendously unfit to be anyone’s king.”
“That is what I told them, more or less. It was not received well.”
This was the problem with royal blood. History was littered with the executed and deposed relatives of this or that monarch, all of whom had been pressed into service by exactly the sort of people Cairo knew better than to actually speak to directly. The fact of his existence was enough of an irritant to General Estes. The general had claimed the throne of Santa Domini, but everyone knew he’d taken that throne by force and, because of that, there would always be whispers that he could only hold the throne by the same force. Meanwhile, Cairo hadn’t set foot on Santa Dominian soil since he’d been a child and had made himself one part a laughingstock and two parts too scandalous to bear, but there was no doubt that he was his country’s legitimate heir.
If he’d hid himself away somewhere and stayed out of the public eye as his parents had advised him to do when he was a child, Cairo wouldn’t have survived to adulthood. That he lived, that he drew breath daily, was a constant reminder to the general that he was not legitimate and could never be legitimate no matter whom he bullied. That he had not won his position by popular vote or historic right, but by violence and betrayal.
Cairo had spent a very long time making sure no one could possibly imagine a known fool like him, vapid and excessive and usually scandalously naked besides, as any kind of king. Secret meetings and murky discussions with those who would use him to take back the country would undo all of that work. It would put not just Cairo at risk, but all of those who had ever supported his family. From the sweet nannies who had raised him and his lost sister, to Ricardo, to say nothing of the ancient families that had stood with the kings of Santa Domini for centuries.
He might have risked himself, now that he was no longer a grieving and terrified boy. But he had already lost everyone he’d ever cared about. He could not risk anyone else.
