been more than able to fit two people with room to spare. And yet Valentina felt crowded, as if he was pressing up against her when he wasn’t. Achilles wasn’t touching her, but still, she was entirely too aware of him.
He took up all the air. He’d done it on his plane, too.
She had the hectic notion, connected to that knot beneath her breastbone that was preventing her from taking anything like a deep breath, that it wasn’t the enclosed space that was the issue. That he would have this same effect anywhere. All that brooding ruthlessness he didn’t bother to contain—or maybe he couldn’t contain even if he’d wanted to—seemed to hum around him like a kind of force field that both repelled and compelled at once.
If she was honest, the little glimpse she’d had of him in the airport had been the same—she’d just ignored it.
Valentina had been too busy racing into the lounge so she could have a few precious seconds alone. No staff. No guards. No cameras. Just her perched on the top of a closed toilet seat, shut away from the world, breathing. Letting her face do what it liked. Thinking of absolutely nothing. Not her duty. Not her father’s expectations.
Certainly not her bloodless engagement to Prince Rodolfo of Tissely, a man she’d tuned out within moments of their first meeting. Or their impending wedding in two months’ time, which she could feel bearing down on her like a thick hand around her throat every time she let herself think about it. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to do her duty and marry the Crown Prince of Tissely. She’d been promised in marriage to her father’s allies since the day she was born. It was that she’d never given a great deal of thought to what it was she wanted, because want had never been an option available to her.
And it had suddenly occurred to her at her latest wedding dress fitting there in London that she was running out of time.
Soon she would be married to a man in what was really more of a corporate merger of two great European brands, the houses of Tissely and Murin. She’d be expected to produce the necessary heirs to continue the line. She would take her place in the great sweep of her family’s storied history, unite two ancient kingdoms, and in so doing fulfill her purpose in life. The end.
The end, she’d thought in that bathroom stall, high-end and luxurious but still, a bathroom stall. My life fulfilled at twenty-seven.
Valentina was a woman who’d been given everything, including a healthy understanding of how lucky she was. She didn’t often indulge herself with thoughts of what was and wasn’t fair when there was no doubt she was among the most fortunate people alive.
But the thing was, it still didn’t seem fair. No matter how hard she tried not to think about it that way.
She would do what she had to do, of course. She always had and always would, but for that single moment, locked away in a bathroom stall where no one could see her and no one would ever know, she basked in the sheer, dizzying unfairness of it all.
Then she’d pulled herself together, stepped out and had been prepared to march onto her plane and head back to the life that had been plotted out for her since the day she arrived on the planet.
Only to find her twin standing at the sinks.
Her identical twin—though that was, of course, impossible.
“What is this?” the other woman had asked when they’d faced each other, looking something close to scared. Or unnerved, anyway. “How...?”
Valentina had been fascinated. She’d been unable to keep herself from studying this woman who appeared to be wearing her body as well as her face. She was dressed in a sleek pencil skirt and low heels, which showed legs that Valentina recognized all too well, having last seen them in her own mirror. “I’m Valentina.”
“Natalie.”
She’d repeated that name in her head like it was a magic spell. She didn’t know why she felt as if it was.
But then, running into her double in a London bathroom seemed something close enough to magic to count. Right then when she’d been indulging her self-pity about the unchangeable course of her own life, the universe had presented her with a glimpse of what else could be. If she was someone else.
An identical someone else.
They had the same face. The same legs, as she’d already noted. The same coppery hair that her double wore up in a serviceable ponytail and the same nose Valentina could trace directly to her maternal grandmother. What were the chances, she’d wondered then, that they weren’t related?
And didn’t that raise all kinds of interesting questions?
“You’re that princess,” Natalie had said, a bit haltingly.
But if Valentina was a princess, and if they were related as they surely had to be...
“I suspect you might be, too,” she’d said gently.
“We can’t possibly be related. I’m a glorified secretary who never really had a home. You’re a royal princess. Presumably your lineage dates back to the Roman Conquest.”
“Give or take a few centuries.” Valentina tried to imagine having a job like that. Or any job. A secretary, glorified or otherwise, who reported to work for someone else and actually did things with her time that weren’t directly related to being a symbol. She couldn’t really wrap her head around it, or being effectively without a home, either, having been a part of Murin since her birth. As much Murin as its beaches and hills, its monuments and its palace. She might as well have been a park. “Depending which branch of the family you mean, of course.”
“I was under the impression that people with lineages that could lead to thrones and crown jewels tended to keep better track of their members,” Natalie had said, her tone just dry enough to make Valentina decide that given the right circumstances—meaning anywhere that wasn’t a toilet—she’d rather like her doppelganger.
And she knew what the other woman had been asking.
“Conspiracy theorists claim my mother was killed and her death hushed up. Senior palace officials have assured me my whole life that no, she merely left to preserve her mental health, and is rumored to be in residence in a hospital devoted to such things somewhere. All I know is that I haven’t seen her since shortly after I was born. According to my father, she preferred anonymity to the joys of motherhood.”
And she waited for Natalie to give her an explanation in turn. To laugh, perhaps, and then tell her that she’d been raised by two perfectly normal parents in a happily normal somewhere else, filled with golden retrievers and school buses and pumpkin-spiced coffee drinks and whatever else normal people took for granted that Valentina only read about.
But instead, this woman wearing Valentina’s face had looked stricken. “I’ve never met my father,” she’d whispered. “My mother’s always told me she has no idea who he was. And she bounces from one affair to the next pretty quickly, so I came to terms with the fact it was possible she really, truly didn’t know.”
And Valentina had laughed, because what else could she do? She’d spent her whole life wishing she’d had more of a family than her chilly father. Oh, she loved him, she did, but he was so excruciatingly proper. So worried about appearances. His version of a hug was a well-meaning critique on her latest public appearance. Love to her father was maintaining and bolstering the family’s reputation
