The Queen's New Year Secret(26)

She kept walking away, and he said nothing.

Tell her to stay.

His entire body seized up, his throat closing. And still, he said nothing.

He watched her walk out, her shoulders straight and still. Proud in that way Tabitha always was. And so silent, even when she was hurting. Five years he’d been married to her and most of the time she’d been in pain.

Because of him.

At least this way, she’s free of you.

He was free of her too. He should be grateful. He did not need a wife. Everything would be fine with the child, there was no other option. The child would be fine. He would have his heir, and the country would be secured.

That was all that mattered. There was no honor in being a divorced king, but his father had been. This country had been absent a queen for a very long time.

And so it would be again.

He laughed into the empty space, a bitter, hollow sound. He had always aspired to be the king his father was. And now, he had become so.

A king without a queen, who had surrounded his heart in a wall of stone as cold as the castle that he lived in.

Without her, it would be all the colder. But he would welcome it, embrace it. It would make him the leader he had always needed to be. It was a small sacrifice to make for the good of the nation.

A good ruler led with his head and not his heart. A good thing too. Because when Tabitha walked out, she took his heart with her.

And still, he let her leave. In the end, he counted it a blessing.

Finer feelings were for men who had not been born with a kingdom to protect.

He clenched his jaw tightly, and curled his fingers into fists, tightening his hold until his tendons ached. He welcomed the dull pain because it distracted him from the sharp, bitter anguish in his chest. An ache he had a feeling he would have to become accustomed to.

But it was nothing he had not dealt with before. He would make room for this pain next to the one left by his mother. And he would go on as he always had.

There was no other option.





CHAPTER THIRTEEN

FOR THREE NIGHTS, Kairos was plagued with nightmares. Images of a woman walking away from him, of his voice not working, his feet being stuck to the spot. He hated this. This feeling of powerlessness. And in his sleep, it refused to abate. During the day, he did what was required of him. He even issued an official statement regarding the separation of himself and the queen.

Part of him had imagined that if he took official steps to deal with the divorce, it would set things right inside of him. That it would make things feel final. But nothing took away the dreams.

He threw the covers back on his bed and stood, walking out the double doors that led to a balcony that overlooked the mountains and the forest back behind the palace. There was still snow on the ground here in Petras at the higher elevations, and it blanketed everything in glittering frost, making the time spent on the island seem even more surreal. Even more removed from time.

He was continually waiting for a sense of relief to hit. With Tabitha gone, he would not have to contend with the more conflicting elements of their relationship. He would be free to focus again with a kind of single-mindedness he hadn’t fully managed since they married.

The icy air bit into his bare skin and he did nothing to shield himself from the cold as he walked farther out onto the balcony, resting his hands on the balustrade and looking out over all of the land that he bore responsibility for. This was his birthright. This was what he would leave to his child, should he ever truly have one.

Usually, he felt some sense of pride looking down at Petras. Tonight, the bare landscape seemed as empty as he was. It did not seem full of promise, at least, not for any future he cared about. He should be angry. Angry that Tabitha had proven to be as false as every other woman in his life.

But he was not. Because for whatever reason, he could not make comparisons between Tabitha and his mother, not now. Yes, that moment had reminded him of the day his mother had walked away, but she was not his mother.

And he’d never truly been afraid of that. He’d told himself he was. That he needed a cold, loveless union   to prevent himself from falling prey to a fickle, passionate woman. But that had never been his real fear. He was his real fear.

When he had fallen to his knees and wept after his mother had left, when he had refused to leave his room, to get out of bed for days after she had gone, his father had told him that he showed the same signs of weakness that had caused his mother to abandon her duty.

And Kairos had known it to be so. After their mother had left, many people looked at Andres and thought that he was a reflection of the queen. Flighty, free-spirited, and given to reckless, spontaneous action. But Kairos had known the truth.

Andres—while giving the impression of being the feckless spare—did everything with a measure of cold calculation. He did it for the response of the people around him, did it to test their loyalty. And he did it to great effect. But it was Kairos who had that deep well of emotion down in his soul. The one that he could not control. The one that would cause him to act recklessly, to abandon his duty if emotion dictated.

He had wanted to be his father. Desperately. To be the kind of leader that the country needed. But he had known that he wasn’t. He was his mother, through and through. Weak, emotional. And so, he had sought to destroy it. To go out of his way to erect barriers between those deadly emotions and his decisions. So he had trapped both himself and Tabitha in a union   that could have been, and should have been so much more than he was willing to allow it to be.

Because he was afraid. Afraid of what he might do. Afraid of how weak he might truly be.

You just have to choose. You have to choose to trust.

No. He could not make that choice. Couldn’t choose to trust himself or Tabitha.

He gritted his teeth against the anguish that assaulted him. He wanted her. Just thinking about her sent a wave of longing over him. A wave of longing that was destined to go unmet for the rest of his life.

He thought back again to the night his mother had left. To the look in her eyes. Sadness. Fear. She had been afraid. He had never fully realized that before this moment. How could he? When she had left, he had been little more than a boy, concerned entirely with his own emotions and not at all with hers. She was the enemy of that tale, and nothing more. That had been reinforced by his father, and also by his increased understanding of the way she had treated Andres when he was a boy.

But, for some reason, now all he could see was the fear. It twisted the memory, changed it. Made the moment into something different altogether. She wasn’t walking away from him. She was running. Running from the palace. From that life. Likely, from the weight of responsibility.

Oh, how he knew that fear. That very same fear. He was running, even now.

He turned away from the balustrade, walking back into the bedroom, and pulled on his pants. Then he took a sharp breath and walked out the door, stalking down the hall, headed for his office. He badly needed a drink. Something, anything to quiet the demons that were rioting through his mind.

He pushed open the door, making his way to the bar at the far end of the room, shutting out all of the memories currently assaulting him of what it had been like to take Tabitha in here. To put her up on that desk and release five years of desperate sexual tension in one heady moment.

He ignored the images that were assuming control of his consciousness and poured a measure of liquor into a glass. Behind him, he heard the door open. He turned, part of him expecting to see Tabitha there for some strange reason.

But no. Tabitha was gone. And it was only Andres.

“What are you doing up?” Kairos asked.

“I got up to ask you that question. It isn’t every day I see you wandering around the palace without a shirt. Actually, it isn’t any day.” Andres walked into the room, over toward the bar. He took the whiskey bottle out of Kairos’s hand and set about to pouring himself a generous portion. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“I would rather be publicly flogged, then tarred in honey and rolled over an anthill.”

“Excellent. Pretend that I didn’t ask, but that I’m commanding we talk about it instead.”

“Excuse me, Andres. If you have forgotten you are the spare? I am your king.”

Andres waved a hand. “All hail.” He took a sip of his drink. “Does this have something to do with your wife?”

He looked down at his glass. “She left.”

“Right. This is after your last-ditch reconciliation attempt of the past week and a half or so.”

“Yes.”

“I hate to be the one to tell you this, Kairos, but that is not how a reconciliation is supposed to work.”

“I’m not in an exceptionally good mood, Andres. So unless you want to find yourself in the...stocks or something, you might want to watch the way you speak to me.”

“I don’t know what century you’re living in, but there are no stocks in the town square anymore.”

“I might be tempted to build some.”

“Tell me what’s happening,” Andres said, all teasing gone from his tone now. “It can’t end like this between the two of you.”

“Why not?”

“Because you love her. And I know she sure as hell loves you, though I can’t quite figure out why.”

Kairos lifted the glass to his lips, trying not to betray just how frightening he found Andres’s words. “She said she loved me.”