of the excitement of your youth,” Ares said. “Particularly as I was under the impression you spent most of it in a convent.”
The queen’s smile hinted at secrets, and made Ares glad. He liked to think his mother had more to reflect on in her life than his father and the glacial coldness he knew their marriage contained.
“You must find a wife of similar background,” his mother told him quietly. “You are to be the king, Ares. Whatever your marriage is like, whatever bargains you and your spouse make with each other, she must be a queen without stain. So, too, must your issue be without blemish. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”
He did. But understanding did not equal obedience.
“That I should put off marrying as long as possible,” Ares said, and grinned at her. “I am more than happy to oblige.”
Ares was halfway through his thirties when his mother died suddenly, lost to a quick-moving cancer she’d thought was a bout of the flu. And Ares was still reeling, still mourning when his father called him back to the Northern Palace some months after the funeral.
“You must know that it was your mother’s dearest wish that you married,” the king growled, his hand clenched around a crystal glass like it was a weapon. “The bloodline is your most sacred duty, Ares. The time for games is past.”
But as it happened, Ares was even less a fan of his bloodline than he had been before. Something he would have thought impossible.
His mother had left him all her papers, which included the journals she had kept since she was a girl. Ares, missing her in the bleak months after her passing, had lost himself in those journals. He wanted to hoard every memory he had of her. He wanted to feel close to her again.
Instead, he learned the truth about his parents. Or about his father, rather, and the royal marriage. Once Ares had been born, they had tried for a spare until the doctors had made it clear that the queen could likely not have any more children. The king hadn’t missed a beat. He’d openly flaunted his mistresses.
All those ladies of the court who had cooed at Ares when he was young. All those noblewomen he’d been instructed never to speak with in private. How had he missed their true role?
His father had broken his mother’s heart.
Over and over again, every time he took a new woman to his bed.
And Ares had never been overly fond of the king. But this made it worse. This made him hate his father, deeply and irrevocably.
“You betrayed my mother casually and constantly,” he said now, his own hands in fists because he did not require a weapon. And wanted only an excuse. “Yet you imagine you can speak to her dearest wishes now she has passed? Do you dare?”
The king rolled his eyes. “I grow weary of coddling you and your refusal to do what is required of you.”
“If you’re so interested in your bloodline,” Ares told him now, “I suggest you expand it on your own, as you seem so predisposed to do. You do not need me to do your dirty work for you. And let me be perfectly clear on this. I will not do it.”
His father sneered. “Why am I not surprised? Once a weakling, always a weakling. You would even give away your throne.”
But Ares didn’t think of it as giving away a throne—and one he’d never wanted anyway. He was ensuring not only his freedom, but the freedom of any potential children he might have had. He was making certain no child of his would be raised in that cold palace of lies.
And he refused to treat a woman the way his father had treated his mother.
Ever.
His father married again, quickly, to a woman younger than Ares. Ares caused a scandal by refusing to attend the wedding.
The kingdom was in turmoil. The royal advisors were beside themselves.
“The throne has a stain upon it,” cried the most senior advisor, Sir Bartholomew. He’d come all the way to New York City to plead his case before Ares, who had refused to grace a room that also contained the king since that last, dark conversation with his father. “The kingdom is reeling. Your father has installed his mistress and dares to call her his queen. And he has claimed that any issue he gets upon her will supersede you to the throne. You cannot allow this, Highness!”
“How can I prevent it?” Ares asked.
He lived halfway across the planet. He spent his time carrying out his royal duties and running the charity he’d started in his mother’s name and still enjoying his life as best he could. The tabloids loved him. The more they hated his father, the more they adored what they’d called his flaws as a younger man.
Ares had no intention of submitting himself to his father’s court. He had no interest whatsoever in playing the royal game.
“You must return to Atilia,” Sir Bartholomew cried, there in the penthouse suite of the hotel Ares called home in Manhattan. “You must marry and begin your own family at once. It is only because your father continues to refer to you as the Playboy Prince that the people feel stuck with his terrible choices. If only you would return and show the people a better way forward—”
“I’m not the king you seek,” Ares told him quietly. Distinctly. And the older man paled. “I will never be that king. I have no intention of carrying on this twisted, polluted bloodline beyond my own lifetime. If my father would like to inflict it on more unwary children, I can do nothing but offer them my condolences as they come of age.”
Ares thought of his mother after his advisors left, as he often did. What he would not give for another moment or two of her counsel. That sad smile of hers, her gentle touch.
Her quiet humor that he knew, now, only he had ever witnessed.
You must marry, he could hear her voice say, as if she still sat before him, elegant and kind.
And he missed his mother. Ares understood he always would.
But he had no intention of following the same path his parents had.
He would die first.
His phone was buzzing in his pocket, and he knew it was more invitations to more of the parties he liked to attend and act as if he was a normal man, not the heir to all this pain and hurt and poison. He eyed the face in his mirror that he hated to admit resembled the King’s, not hers.
Ares straightened his shoulders until his posture was as perfect as she would have liked it, on the off chance she could still see him, somehow. He liked to imagine she could still see him.
And then he strode off to lose himself in the Manhattan night.
Five months later
“PREGNANT?”
Pia Alexandrina San Giacomo Combe gazed back at her older brother, Matteo, with as much equanimity as she could muster.
She’d
