“And I don’t care what she is to the world. To me, she is and will remain my little girl and I’ll take care of her as long as there’s breath in my body.”
“You won’t have many of those left if you keep hollering like that,” her mother grumbled.
Kassandra raised her hand. “I knew I’d regret telling you anything, so thanks, everyone, for proving me right.” She turned her gaze to her father. “If taking care of me means bringing the Stavros and Papagianni testosterone mob to Zorya to ambush Leonid, I’ll have immigration revoke your visas at the airport and send you back on the first flight home.”
Eyes widening at her threat, knowing she didn’t make them lightly, her father pretended to laugh. “You’re worried we’re going to rough him up or something, nariy kyria? Nah, we’ll just take him aside and...convince him of the error of his ways. I’m sure he’ll be a better husband and father after our talk. This is men’s stuff, so leave it to the men.”
“Fine.” As her father’s face started relaxing, macho triumph coating his ruggedly handsome face, Kassandra added, “I’ll have them send you home with heavily armed escorts from the CIA and its Zoryan equivalent.”
Before her father went off again, she raised her voice, looking at her mother and sister. “About the estrogen posse... I’ll leave instructions that the authorities are to sift you from your male components and let you through. But only if you promise you won’t ambush Leonid yourselves, if for other purposes.”
Salome burst out laughing. “After seeing the latest footage of him on the news today? No promises.”
Her mother chuckled in agreement. “Don’t be stingy. Let the women have some crumbs of your fairy-tale king. You’re going to have, and eat, his whole cake, forever.”
After that overt innuendo, her parents left the conference call to continue their argument in private. Her siblings had dozens of questions for her, each according to his or her interests.
She detailed the hectic preparations for the coronation, and the sweeping changes Leonid was implementing as he transitioned Zorya back to a sovereign state and kingdom. But whenever Salome asked about their relationship, she steered the conversation to Leonid’s blossoming relationship with the girls. She wasn’t about to tell her sister she’d resigned herself to a lifetime of co-parenting the girls with Leonid as polite strangers.
Not that that was accurate. He wasn’t one. She had no idea what he was, had been going insane, constantly exposed to the suppressed emotions and hunger that blasted out of him.
Either she was imagining it, or what she sensed was real. But even if it was, by now she knew he had made up his mind never to act on those feelings, had zero hope he ever would.
For now, she managed to end the call without letting her siblings suspect this whole thing was the furthest thing from a fairy tale, or even an actual reconciliation. Or that she’d never been more miserable, hopeless and confused in her life.
She’d resigned herself to being so for the rest of her life. For the girls, and for the larger-than-life destiny she by now believed was their birthright.
Later that night, after disappearing all day, Leonid materialized like clockwork to have dinner with her and the girls, and to share in all their nightly rituals.
After they put their daughters to bed, he headed out of the wing, saying little, seeming anxious to leave her, alone and unappeased on every level, for another endlessly bleak night.
As he reached the door, she cried out, “Leonid!”
He stiffened, as if her voice was an arrow that had hit him between the shoulder blades. Then he turned, his movement reluctant, his gaze apprehensive.
“I thought I could go on like this,” she choked. “But I can’t. You never gave me a straight answer and I have to have one. However terrible it is, it will be far better than never knowing for sure where we stand and why, and going nuts forever wondering.”
In response, there it was again, that corrosive, devouring longing in his eyes.
“You can’t keep looking at me like that! Not when you never let me know what it means!”
He only squeezed his eyes shut. But it was too late. She’d seen that look, could no longer doubt what it was.
Her voice rose to a shriek. “If you want your daughters to have a mother and not a wreck, you must put me out of my misery. Tell me what the hell is going on.”
His gaze lowered, and she thought he’d escape her again, leaving her to go insane with speculation.
Then he raised his gaze and she saw it. The severe aversion to coming clean. And his intention to do it. At last.
Still saying nothing, he walked toward her. But instead of stopping, he bypassed her. Feeling like a marionette, she followed him until he reached the master bedroom.
After closing the door behind them, he half turned to her. “There’s something I need to...show you.”
Then he started to strip.
Her stupefaction wavered into deeper bewilderment when she realized he wasn’t exactly stripping. Turning sideways, brow knotted, face darkened with pain-laced consternation, he left his shirt on, took off his shoes, his belt, undid his zipper, let his pants drop before kicking them away.
Straightening, he finally turned to face her.
But long before he had, with each inch he exposed, her confusion had turned to shock, then to horror.
One of his legs was a map of livid, hideous scars, where massive tissue had been lost, where fractured bones had torn through muscles and shredded skin, and surgeries had put it all back in a horribly disfigured whole.
His other leg was...gone.
Nine
His leg.
Leonid had lost his leg.
In its place, there was a midthigh prosthesis with a facade that resembled his previously normal leg, looking even more macabre than his remaining, mutilated one for it.
All the instances she’d noticed his difficulties in moving, his discomfort, his pain, came crashing back, burying her in an avalanche of details. Then the wheel of memory was yanked to a stop before spooling back at a dizzying speed to that time in his hospital room. New explanations to his every word and glance, making such perfect sense now with hindsight, thudded into place, decimating everything she’d thought she’d known, until she felt everything in her brain falling in a domino effect.
The wheel shot forward through time again, to the moment he’d reappeared in her life. The way he’d avoided coming near. Stepped away every time she had. Their time on the jet, undoing his clothes only enough to release himself. Not lying down with her, so she wouldn’t find out.
But she should have.
Nausea welled, the bile of recriminations filling her up to her eyes. That she hadn’t even suspected the significance of what she’d noticed, what she’d felt from him, that she’d been so disconnected from him, so wrapped up in her own suffering and loss, she hadn’t felt his.
Every thought and feeling she’d had, toward him, about him, built on that obliviousness, came back to lodge in her brain like an ax, shame hacking at her.
But it wasn’t only because he’d lost a limb. Leonid’s loss cut so much deeper than that. His legs, both of them, had been more than a vital part of his body. He’d used them like so few on the planet ever had, turning them through discipline and persistence into supreme instruments, catapulting himself to an almost superhuman level of physical prowess and achievement.
But—oh, God—he hadn’t only lost his supremacy, he’d lost the ability to walk and run like any other average human being.
And she hadn’t been there for him. He’d been alone through the loss and the struggle back to his feet. Such as they were.
Now he was reversing the painfully stilted process of exposing his loss to her, putting his pants and shoes back on, the difficulty with which he found something so simple shredding her heart to smaller pieces. And that was when she was still shell-shocked. When it all sank in, it would tear her apart.
Not that what she felt mattered. Only he did.
Numb with agony, mind and soul in an uproar, she watched him as he walked to the room’s sitting area, his every step now taking on a whole new meaning and dimension. Reaching the couch by the balcony with her favorite view of the grounds and the sea, he sank down as if he could no longer stand.
When he finally raised his eyes to her, they were totally empty, like they’d been when he’d first come back.
“That’s your answer, Kassandra. From the look on your face, it’s even more terrible than anything you’ve imagined.”
Fighting the muteness to contradict his catastrophically inaccurate analysis, she choked, “It’s...not...not...”
“Not terrible?” His subdued voice cut across her failed efforts to put what raged inside her into words. “There’s no need to placate me, Kassandra. I know exactly how my legs...my leg...and the prosthesis look. They’re both right out of a horror movie, one from a Frankenstein-like one, the other a Terminator-like one. It’s perfectly normal you’re appalled.”
Objections burst out of her, her anguish at the way he perceived his injuries, her indignation that he thought the way they looked was what horrified her. But they only sounded in her mind. Out loud, she couldn’t say one word.
Keeping his dejected gaze fixed on her no doubt stricken one, he exhaled as he heaved up again. “Now you’ve had your answer, I hope everything is settled.”