he hadn’t thought in that moment. He simply acted. This revelation challenged perceptions that he had never examined. Not deeply.
“What happened?” he asked, trying to keep his voice level.
“She shot him,” Tabitha said, the words distant and matter-of-fact. Her expression stayed placid, as though she were discussing the contents of the menu for a dinner at the palace. “She was very sorry that she did it. Because he didn’t get back up. He died. And she was sent to jail. I don’t visit her.”
She spoke the last item on the list as though it were the gravest sin of all. As though the worst thing of all was that she had distanced herself from her mother, not that her mother was a murderer.
“You saw all this,” he said, that same shell he had accused her of having wrapping itself around his own veins now, hardening them completely.
“Yes. It was a long time ago,” she said, her voice sounding as if it was coming straight out of that distant past. “Eleven...twelve years ago now? I’m not sure.”
“It doesn’t matter how long ago it was, you still saw it.”
“I don’t like to think about it,” she said, her blue eyes locking with his, looking at him for the first time since she had started telling her gruesome story. “I don’t think you can blame me for that.”
“No, not at all,” he said.
“It wasn’t relevant to our union. Not relevant to whether or not I would be good for the position.”
“Except it clearly was, as I think it is probably related to the action you have taken now.”
She looked down. “I can’t argue with that. I was growing frustrated in our relationship, and I don’t like to give those feelings any foothold on my life. I don’t like to allow them free rein.”
“Surely you don’t think you’re going to find a gun and shoot me?”
“I’m sure my mother didn’t think she would do that either,” Tabitha said, starting to pace, her hands clasped in front of her. She was picking at the polish on her fingernails, something he had never seen her do before. It was then he noticed that she wasn’t wearing her ring. How had he missed it before?
Perhaps you were too wrapped up in imagining those fingers wrapped around your member to notice.
He gritted his teeth. Yes, that was the problem. Whatever had exploded between them was stealing his ability to think clearly.
“Where is your ring?”
She stopped thinking and looked at her fingernails. “I took it off.”
“It was very expensive,” he said, though that was not his concern at all, and he wasn’t sure why he was pretending that it was.
“I know. But it is also mine. That was part of our prenuptial agreement if you recall.”
“I don’t need the money, I was just concerned something might have happened to it.”
“It’s in a safe. In a bank. It’s fine. But there is no point in me wearing it when I’m not your wife. I would hate to start gossip in the press.”
“We already have.”
“Imagine the gossip if they knew my past as well.”
“Enough. No one is going to find out. Because I will not tell. Anyway, it is not a reflection on you.”
“Isn’t it? My genetics. Our child’s genetics.”
“If blood determined everything I would be a tyrant or absent.” He didn’t like to speak of his parents. Talking about his father, and his rages, was much simpler than talking about his mother, who was not there at all. But either way, it was a topic he preferred not to broach.
“Well, you’re neither of those things,” she said, “but Andres isn’t exactly well-adjusted.”
Kairos laughed, thinking of his brother and the large swath of destruction Andres had spent the first thirty years of his life cutting through the kingdom, through Kairos’s own life. “He has settled, don’t you think?”
Tabitha laughed. “I suppose he has. I’m not quite sure how they managed. A real marriage. Especially out of their circumstances. If any marriage came about in a stranger way than ours, it’s theirs.”
“Zara is not exactly conventional. Or suitable,” Kairos said.
Tabitha looked up at him, deep, fathomless emotion radiating from her blue eyes. “Perhaps I should have been more unsuitable?”
Her words made his heart twist, made his stomach tighten. “Tabitha, I cannot imagine the things you have seen,” he said. He wasn’t sure why he said it. But then, he didn’t know what else to say.
“I’m the same person.”
The same person from before she had told him about her experience, he knew that was what she meant. But for him it only highlighted the fact that he didn’t truly know her at all. She was right. The Tabitha who had witnessed the murder of her stepfather was the same woman he had been married to for the past five years. The same woman he had known for nearly a decade.
But he didn’t know her. Not really. How could he? She was all things soft, beautiful and contained, and he had imagined she had grown that way, like a plant that had only ever experienced life in a hothouse.
It turned out she had been forged in the elements. An orchid put to the test in a blizzard. And she had come out of it alive. Beautiful. Seemingly untouched.
It humbled him in a strange way.
“We do not know each other,” he said.
“I’ve been saying that,” she said.
“Yes, you have been. But I didn’t realize how true it was until now. You know my life, so I did not imagine there were such secrets between us.”
“We don’t talk about your life,” she said, “not beyond what you had for dinner last night.”
He couldn’t argue with the truth of that statement. “There is nothing to tell. The evidence of my life is before you. You have seen who I am by my actions. I don’t see the point in rehashing how I felt when my mother left.”
“You felt something,” she said, her voice muted.
“Of course I did,” he said. The very thought opened up a pit of despair inside of him. Helplessness. And a dark, black rage he would rather not acknowledge lived within him. “We are strangers.”
“Strangers who have sex,” Tabitha added.
“Yes,” he said, “certainly. And yet, I’m not even entirely certain I know your body.”
Her cheeks turned pink. “You did all right with it last month.”
“And the times before that?” This line of questioning was not pleasant for him. What man liked calling his own prowess into question? But it wasn’t so simple as prowess. He had the ability, but he’d always held back with her. Always.
That was the very beginning of where he had gone wrong. He had imagined that he needed to go slowly, that he needed to mitigate the passion between them.
The truth of it was he had been attracted to her from the moment she walked into his office. Even during his engagement to Francesca. And while he had never acted on it, it had been there, shimmering beneath the surface like waves of heat over the sand. He wanted her. He had always wanted her.
He had kept a part of himself closed off because it was so strong. Because, like her, he rejected strong emotion, strong desire.
But perhaps it would be possible to open up the physical, to have that, while keeping the rest of it safe. Perhaps it might give her what she craved. Or at the very least thaw some of the chill that was between them.
“Yes,