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“This morning,” he said. Though it did nothing. Changed nothing.Shechanged nothing. Certainly not twenty years of pain and rage that had driven him. To survive on the streets. To build his empire. To return here triumphant. With the true princess at that.
He refused to acknowledge the little voice in his head that told him she was no different. She too had survived. Had succeeded in her own way. Had somehow found herself back where she belonged.
She could belong to Kalyva. He didn’t care. If she wanted to stay, so be it. It mattered not to him. Nothing about her could matter to him.
She could not belong to him.
Alexandra let out a long breath, like a sigh of relief. “Ah, so that’s why you stayed away.” And she had the gall tosmile.
“I have been busy.”
“Oh, yes, fomenting your peaceful rebellions and what not.” She even waved her hand as if this were nothing. As if his whole life’s work wasnothing.
“But really you were avoiding me because you knew you would tell me the truth,” she continued. When she didn’t know a damned thing. “You have always told me the truth. Except in one thing. Love.”
“I do not love, Alexandra. Not anyone.” Love was pain. Someone else’s power to destroy you. Love was a lie.
“Perhaps this is true. You certainly do not love yourself. Maybe it means you do not have the capacity to love anyone in this moment. But I don’t believe that you’re incapable or unlovable. I believe all this hate you carry around is just an expression of your love, your grief that was once love.”
“That is ludicrous. And it makes no sense.” He was desperate for it not to make sense. “If you will not attend the ball with me, then I will attend it without you. You are no longer a necessary pawn, Al. You are simply window dressing now.”
There was a flash of hurt in her eyes that landed like a knife to the gut. But he did not go down in pain. He accepted it. Knew it was nothing more than his due.
“How can you hurt him this way?” Alexandra asked, her voice soft. As if she pitied him, and that was the greatest insult in a pile of them.
“He had my parentskilled.”
“You heard him. That wasn’thim.”
“It was him enough. Because I risked my life to save his family, and whether he ordered it or allowed it, he didnothingfor my parents.”
Her shoulders slumped a little, and she did not speak.
“No impassioned rejoinders for that one then?”
“No.” She looked at him with that pity—not love,pity. “I can only beg of you, Lysias. Ibegof you,” she repeated, as if to underscore how important this was. “Do not do this. You don’t have to. It doesn’t need to be revenge. It could be a life. You could repair your relationship with Diamandis. You could marry me. We could live here on Kalyva, where we belong. We cannot erase twenty years of suffering and survival, but we canchangethat. It can be a happy ending. If you let it.”
“There are no happy endings, Alexandra. Because the only endings are bloody coups and death. So I will have my revenge, because anything else would be temporary.”
“My love is not temporary,” she replied fiercely, with all that warrior’s fire. As if it could be true, as if she wouldmake it so. As if...
But it was no matter. He did not believe in her love. He would not. “How would you know? You say you know me, but I knowyou, Al. You don’t remember your family. You’d never been with a man before me. You have been nothing but alone for all the life you remember. Why wouldyouknow anything about love?”
If it hurt her, she did not show it. Except perhaps in the way she stood exceptionally still. And had no words to say back to him. But she also did not move—to go to the ball, to get out of his way.
It didn’t matter. He could go to the ball without her. He could doeverythingwithout her.
“If you do not move out of the doorway, I will move you myself.”
“You’ll regret this course of action, Lysias,” she said, her voice vibrating with emotion as she fisted her hand at her own heart, reminding him of all the times she’d done that to him as they’d slept in the same bed. As she’d slept, as she’d dreamt, as she’d cried. “I know you will regret it.”
But he regretted this horrible, destructive pain more than he could regret anything else. Why not pile on? Then at least he’d know how to move forward. Pain he could survive. Suffering he could weather. He did not know how to handle any of what she wanted from him. “So be it.”
She moved out of the doorway, but as he strode past her, she uttered one last word in a pained whisper.“Please.”
He stilled, but he could not give in to the way that word cracked through him like shrapnel. “I have given you much, Alexandra. A new life. A reunion with your precious brother. I have restored your crown to you. But you ask too much of me now.”
“Perhaps I do,” she agreed, surprising him enough so that he turned to look at her over his shoulder.
