AllFreeNovel
Share Us
That threw her more than she wanted to admit.
Later that morning, she actually succumbed to a dress fitting. And when it was finished, she let Paris Apollo’s black-clad manservant regale her with tales of the previous King and Queen and their love for each other and adoration of the son they never thought they’d have.
“He came into this world a miracle,” the man said. “But then, madam, all children should.”
And that seemed to stick inside her ribs like a long, jagged knife.
She made her way outside into a bright summer’s day. The palace seemed to be made of dreams and fairy tales, and the islands looked too good to be true. The moody Atlantic was blue today, the beaches white. The hydrangeas bloomed riotously everywhere she looked, dotting the hillsides, beaming alongside pathways, and flanking almost every doorway down into the parts of the main city that she could see from the palace grounds.
Today Ilonia didn’t feel much like a prison at all. It felt like a dream come true.
Especially when she found her aunt sitting on a swing in the rose garden, watching Paris Apollo and Troy kick a soccer ball back and forth on the royal lawn.
Her heart squeezed so tight she had to stop walking and fight to breathe. Madelyn had to remind herself—sternly—of the six hard years she’d struggled through.
Almost entirely alone.
She found she had to do that a little too much as the days wore on.
“Maybe it’s not all bad,” said Corrine on one of their walks through the extensive palace gardens.
Back home in Tahoe, they had often tried to put in a bit of a summer garden in what summer there was so high up in the mountains. Unkillable geraniums seemed to be the height of their gardening prowess.
It felt a bit like a metaphor that even the gardens here were unutterably lush.
“There are worse things, of course,” Madelyn allowed, trying not to sound disgruntled.
When, in fact, she felt disgruntled. She’d woken from strange, dark dreams to find Paris Apollo in the shower. He had bid her to join him and she had—but not after first noting that there was a pile of those black clothes in the bathroom hamper.Almosthidden. And then, in the shower, bruises on his knuckles. She couldn’t understand why she hadn’t asked him about those marks. Those clothes.
Why, instead, she had let him draw her to him and kiss her as if it had been another six years since they’d seen each other rather than a few hours.
She tried to focus on the present. On her marvelous aunt. On the fact that her son already thought it was settled that she was marrying Paris Apollo, and that, on some level, she must, too. Why else would she keep skipping her library hours for dress fittings and protocol consultations?
“It would be nice not to have any more financial concerns,” she said now, grudgingly. Then smiled at Corrine. “And nicer still not to worry that I’m a burden on you.”
“I remember when you came back from England,” Corrine replied softly. “It was like he’d snapped you in two like a twig. But now he wants to marry you. That’s a happy end to things, surely.”
Madelyn told herself that there was something wrong with her that her aunt’s happy optimism, her saving grace these last years, only made her want to scream today.
“You’ll have your last fittings today,” Corrine was saying. “And I know you’ve set your heart against it, but you really do look like a queen in that dress, Madelyn. It’s just stunning.Youare.”
And Madelyn could only smile and nod at her aunt, even as one hand lifted to her throat of its own accord and stayed there because she felt as if she were drowning.
The fact that Troy and Paris Apollo seemed to be having their own father and son love affair didn’t help.
She should have loved that for Troy. Shedid.
But there was a gnarled and knotted, wholly reprehensible part of her that wished—only a little, and only when she was alone, and not in a way that she would ever admit out loud or act on in any way—that it could have beenslightlyharder for Paris Apollo.
That Troy could have been evenmomentarilywary of his father.
Just for a single, tiny, almost unnoticeable moment.
Every time that terrible thought surfaced, she hated herself for it.
But apparently not enough to keep it from resurfacing.
A few nights later, she was already feeling cranky and out of sorts when she made her way into the cocktail party she had only agreed to attend under duress.
