“You did once.”
She shook her head. “I never did.”
“You wore my ring.”
“But we hadn’t taken vows yet. And you left.”
“I let you keep the ring,” he said, looking down at her hands and noticing they were bare.
“An engagement ring isn’t very useful when there is no fiancé attached to it. And anyway, I’ve changed. My life has changed. I suppose you thought you could come back here and pick up where we left off.”
He had. And why not? It would be the story of the decade. The heir’s return and his reunion with the woman the nation had always been so fond of. Except, for some reason, a very large part of him had assumed she’d simply been here in Kyonos, frozen in time, waiting for his return.
A large part of him had assumed that all of Kyonos had done so. But he had been mistaken.
There were casinos now. An electric strip by the beach. His brother Stavros’s doing. The old town had been renewed. No longer simply a quarter where old men sat and played chess, it was now a place for hipsters and artists to hang out and “be inspired” by the beach and the architecture.
His sister was not the same. Not a dark-haired, mischievous girl, but a woman now. Married and expecting a child. His brother had become a man, instead of a rail-thin teenage boy.
His father was old. And dying. His father...
And Layna Xenakos had joined a convent.
“I will be straight with you,” he said. “I am not the favored son of the Drakos family.”
She nodded once but remained silent, so he continued.
“But I have decided that I will rule. For the next generation even more than for this one.”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“Stavros’s children cannot inherit. And that would leave my sister’s child. The changes it would require...it was never her cross to bear. I have done a great many selfish things in my life, Layna, and I intend to keep doing many of them. But what I cannot do, when it comes down to it, is condemn my brother to a life he never wanted. Or give to my sister’s child a responsibility it was never meant to take on.” He had ruined things for his siblings already. Their childhoods had passed by while he was gone. Children who’d had no mother.
Especially Eva. She’d been so young then. It was unfair. He couldn’t continue to hurt her. He wouldn’t.
“You speak of the crown as though it’s a poison cup,” she said, her words muted.
“It is in many ways. But it is mine. And I have spent too many years trying to pass it off to others.” Yes, his. As far as anyone knew, it was his. It was the expectation. What he had trained for until he was twenty-one.
The truth, was another matter. But it didn’t change Stavros’s reality. It didn’t change Eva’s.
It didn’t change what had to be done.
“A conscience, Xander?” she asked, using his first name, the sound sending a shiver through him. A ripple of memory.
“I’m not so certain I’d go that far. Maybe a bit of forgotten honor bred into me. Thanks to all that royal blood,” he said, his tone dripping sarcasm. “Imagine my disappointment when I realized I hadn’t replaced it all with alcohol.”