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He studied the woman critically. She had the right coloring, more or less, when she wasn’t pale from an attack. What didn’t quite fit with her hair, with her nose and mouth, could easily be fixed in a salon or with the right clothes and makeup.
“I’m fine,” Al said stupidly, in his opinion. “I just need a bandage or something. Take me back tomyhome. I’ll find out about the princess. This won’t stop me.”
Lysias made no move to entertain her little attempt at orders.Hedid not get ordered around. “Do youhavea home?” he asked instead.
“Perhaps not as fine as yours, but certainly a place to lay my head.”
Yes, she was going to fit into his plan very, very nicely. The obstinate lift of her chin, the challenge in her eyes. With the right training, that could be seen as royal. “I’m afraid our plans have changed.”
She got that wild look, panic, through and through. Like when she’d bolted from him in the crowd. “I don’t want them to.”
“Alas, I find that you now have two uses for me.” He smiled at her, quite pleased with this turn of events. He understood that part of his success came from his tenacity, his spite that drove him in everything he’d done since the age of twelve, but there was also the element of luck to how far he’d been able to climb.
And luck was once again on his side.
“Asteri mou,”he said, smiling at her. “It is your lucky day after all. You are to become my bride.”
CHAPTER THREE
ALWASCERTAINshe must have heard wrong. He must speak a different language—one wherebridemeant something else entirely.
“We will likely be able to avoid anactualunion, of course,” Lysias continued as if this were normal. As if...
Maybe she had a head injury. Surely she did since she was riding in this luxurious car, a stab wound on her chest, going to who knew where without having put up much of a fight. It was his eyes. His authoritative way of speaking that didn’t feel like commands so much as the only reasonable course of action. It was the blood loss, the trauma. It was everything exceptreasonable,rationalandsane.
“But, should push come to shove, you will be compensated for this as well. A large payout is your goal, is it not?”
“Money, not a husband.” Bride. Husband. She pressed her free hand to her forehead. Was she in some sort of fevered delusion?
“Even a billionaire for a husband?” Lysias replied, though she didn’t believe his feigned surprise for a second. Though he had stepped in to save her, though he was being hands off and allegedly going to get her medical attention, she saw that he was not really different from the man who’d sent her attacker.
Lysias had decided something—regardless of how strange—and thought he could sit there and smile charmingly and she would just go along. That she wouldn’t poke or argue oruncoverall that he was.
“Especiallythat,” she said, giving an injured little sniff. “I have no interest in men of wealth and power who think of little else.”
“It is not my wealth and power that consumes me,Alexandra. Though they are impressive.”
He practicallypurredthe name, which wasn’t hers, but it seemed almost as if him speaking it into existence made it so. And every syllable felt like a caress down her spine. Not just a jitter in her chest but something dangerous and yearning blooming deep within her. Stuck again in the direct beam of his golden gaze.
Al tried to breathe normally, to let out all that had gotten clogged without giving away how affected she was by...him. But it was no use. His smile deepened.
She scowled at him. “Then what doesconsumeyou?” she asked, being sure to imbue the word “consume” with as much disdain as possible even though pain and fear coursed through her.
“Revenge,” he said. Simply. Bland, almost, but she saw the fierceness in his gaze, in the way he held himself. “I was wronged many years ago. And I will not rest until that wrong has been righted.”
Every word got more intense. Deeper and darker. She realized in the brief flash of it, there then gone, that he kept this fury banked or hidden away under some kind of mask. But it was there. Perhapsalways.
And she did believe that it did in fact drive him. That he was a dangerous man, but she had never been afraid of dangerous men. Fear never accomplished anything good, so she had done all she could to eradicate it.
“Maybe I don’t wish to help you enact revenge,” she said.
He did not respond with surprise or fury as she had expected. Maybe even hoped. Both reactions she would understand.
The cold, cutting smile was not one she could make sense of.
“Let me tell you a little story about the kingdom of Kalyva.” He leaned forward, those gold eyes seeming to gleam here in the dim back seat, where even the daylight couldn’t make it through the tinted windows. And those eyes acted like some sort of hypnotist’s tool to keep a woman still and rapt with whatever he said.
“It is small and independent, as I said. Some would call it backward, old-fashioned. They would not be wrong. The king and queen of my youth were good people, or so it seemed, but they were notstrong. And so, as dissatisfaction with the old ways mounted, they buried their heads in the sand and ignored all the whispers, all the signs. And though the bloody coup ended their lives and the lives of all but their oldest child, the kingdom remained, because the eldest child survived.”
