was an ample playground, and he made friends in all the desperately pedigreed boarding schools he was eventually kicked out of. Together he and his bored, wealthy friends would traipse about the Continent, from the Alps to the beaches, and back again. From underground clubs in Berlin to parties on superyachts somewhere out there in all that Mediterranean splendor.
“You are a man now,” his father told him bitterly when he turned twenty-one. “Chronologically.”
By the law of their island kingdom, twenty-one was the age at which the heir to the throne was formally acknowledged as the Crown Prince and Heir Apparent to the Kingdom. Ares’s investiture cemented his place in the line of succession, and further, that of his own heirs.
It was more of the same bloodline nonsense. Ares cared even less about it now than he had when he was five. These days, Ares was far more interested in his social life. And what antics he could engage in now he had access to his own vast fortune.
“Never fear, Father,” he replied after the ceremony. “I have no plans to appall you any less now I am officially and for all time your heir apparent.”
“You’ve sown enough wild oats to blanket the planet twice over,” the king growled at him.
Ares did not bother to contradict him. First, because it would be a lie. He had indeed. And second, because the hypocrisy might choke him. King Damascus was well-known for his own years of sowing, such as it were. And unlike Ares, his father had been betrothed to his mother since the day of her birth.
It was yet one more reason to hate the man.
“You say that as if it is a bad thing,” he said instead, no longer playing games of statues in his father’s private rooms.
He was a man grown now, or so everybody told him. He was heir to the kingdom and now would be expected to carry out duties in the name of the crown he would wear one day. He stood by the windows in his father’s compartments and looked out over the sloping hills and crystal blue sea.
This would always be Atilia to him. The murmur of the ocean waves. The soft, sweet scent of flowers on the breeze. The Ionian Sea spread out before him.
Not the king and his penchant for smashing things and causing as much distress as he could at the slightest provocation.
“It is time for you to marry,” his father intoned.
Ares turned, laughing, and then laughed harder when he saw his father was serious. “You cannot imagine I will be amenable to such a thing. Can you?”
“I have no interest in suffering through the sort of twenties you will inflict upon me. And upon this kingdom.”
“And yet suffer you must,” Ares replied with a soft menace that was as close as he’d ever come to taking a swing at his father or his king. “I have no intention of marrying.”
His father broke a decanter that day that had been in the family since the 1700s. It burst to pieces slightly to the left of Ares, though he hadn’t moved a muscle. He’d only stared back at the old man.
But it had broken something in Ares nonetheless.
It wasn’t the shards of priceless crystal raining down on his traditional regalia. It wasn’t his father’s temper, which Ares found little more than tedious at this point.
It was the whole...show. The titles, the land, the bloodline. It all meant more to his father than he ever had. He hadn’t been raised by his parents, he’d been monitored by a succession of servants and paraded in front of his father only every now and again. And only when everyone could be certain his behavior was perfect.
Or tolerable, at any rate.
He couldn’t help thinking that really, he would prefer not to be a prince at all. And if he had no choice in that, well, there was no need to participate in passing the mantle of blood and nonsense on to the next generation. Ares had no intention of marrying. No interest in it.
But he was adamantly opposed to having children.
He couldn’t help but think it was the bloodline itself that had made his father a monster, coupled with the crown. And he was a monster primarily to his son. He was cold to Ares’s mother, but it was Ares who got splintered decanters and rage.
Ares had no intention of passing that rage along to his own children. Ever.
“You should not rile your father so,” his mother said years later, after Ares had indulged in yet another conversation with the king about his marital prospects. He was twenty-six. “We shall have to start importing decanters from the Southern Palace.”
Atilia was an ancient island kingdom in the Ionian Sea. The Northern Island was the most geographically north of the islands that made up the kingdom and was where the business of the country took place. The Northern Palace was accordingly the more stately residence of the royal family. The Southern Palace, on the most southern edge of the most southern island in the kingdom, was about relaxation, not matters of state. Beaches and ease and what breathing room a man could have when the weight of the kingdom sat on his shoulders.
Not that Ares intended to hoist up that weight himself, but still, he preferred the south. It was where he’d been enjoying a few weeks of recuperation after a long goodwill tour before his father had issued his summons. Because clearly too much time had passed between unpleasant conversations about Ares and the bloodline.
“I can’t control what riles the man,” Ares replied, dryly. “If I could, the last twenty-six years would have been markedly different. And there would be a great many more breakable objects left unattended about the palace, I imagine.”
His mother had smiled at him the way she did, soft and sad. Ares always assumed it was because she couldn’t save him from his father. She couldn’t make the king treat the prince the way he treated her—with icy disinterest. “It is not the worst thing in the world to start turning your thoughts toward the next generation.”
“I don’t have it in me,” Ares told her then. The conviction had been growing in him for years, by then. He studied his mother, and her drawn, dear face. “If you are an advertisement for the institution of marriage, or what one must bear to become queen of these islands, I cannot say that I am greatly inspired to foist this dubious pleasure on anyone.”
That was true, but what was more true was that Ares enjoyed his life. He kept a home of sorts in Saracen House, a separate, palatial estate that was part of the palace complex on the Northern Island. But he was never there. He preferred the energy of Berlin. The hustle and rush of London. The mad, thrumming energy of New York City.
Or, really, any place his father was not.
And besides, Ares had yet to meet a woman he wanted for more than a night or two. Much less a lifetime of bloodlines and pomp, tradition and circumstance. He very much doubted the woman who could make him reconsider existed.
Nor was he particularly upset about this lack.
“I see how you are looking at me,” his mother chided him. She sat as she always did, upright and elegant, on the chaise in her favorite room of the palace where the sunlight stood in for happiness. Or so it had always seemed to Ares. “And I’m not so old, thank you, that I cannot remember the excitement of youth and the certainty that I could predict the twists and turns of
