I not know you?”
“No. I know you did some cursory searching, as far as I was concerned. My name. But you don’t know everything. In part because I don’t have the same last name as my mother, nor is her name the same as the one listed on my birth certificate, not anymore. I don’t share a name with my stepfather either. Not having those names excludes quite a lot from a cursory search. Of course, you found nothing objectionable about me. Nothing but good marks in school, no criminal record, no scandal.”
“Because that’s all that mattered,” he said, something odd glittering in his black eyes.
“Yes. It is all that mattered. You were only looking for what might cause problems with my reputation, for you, as far as the public eye was concerned. You weren’t actually looking for anything real or meaningful about me.”
“Come off your high horse, Tabitha. Obviously you didn’t care whether or not I found anything meaningful out about you, because you deliberately concealed it from me.”
She lifted her shoulder, her stomach sinking. “I can’t argue with that. I can’t argue with a great many of the accusations leveled at me today. I wasn’t honest with you. I didn’t tell you. I preferred to run away, rather than telling you what I wanted. But a lot of it is because... I don’t actually know what I want. I started feeling dissatisfied with our relationship, and wanting more. And that confused me.”
“Well, hell, if you’re confused, what chance do I have?”
“I can’t answer that question,” she said, sounding defeated. Feeling defeated. “I don’t know the answer. All I know is that I never thought I would marry. Then I met you, and I can’t deny that I felt...attraction. It confused me. I had spent years getting through college, school of every kind, really, with a single-minded focus. I wanted to be better than my birth. I knew that education was the only way to accomplish that. I set about to get good grades, high test scores, so that I could earn scholarships. And I did that. I knew that if I split my focus, I wouldn’t be able to. Then the internship at the palace came up, and I knew I had to seize it. I didn’t have connections, I didn’t have a pedigree. I knew that I needed a leg up in order to get the kind of job that I wanted.”
“I imagine, ultimately, the chance to become queen of the nation was too great a temptation to pass up?”
She laughed, hardly able to process the surreal quality of it all even now. “I guess so. It was a lot of things. A chance to have you, physically, which I wanted. A chance to achieve a status that I’d never even imagined in my wildest dreams. I’m from nothing. Nothing and nowhere, and I wanted something more. And that... How could I refuse? Especially because your criteria suited mine so well. You see, Kairos, I didn’t want love either. I didn’t want passion.”
“You said you were attracted to me.”
“I was. I am. I suppose that’s something I can’t deny now. But I thought perhaps I could just touch the flames without being consumed by them. Then I realized that holding your fingertips over a blaze for five years is nothing more than a maddening exercise in torture. You’re better off plunging yourself in or disengaging.”
“And you chose to disengage?”
“Yes. I know that I can’t afford to throw myself in.”
“Why is that?”
“Reasons I haven’t told you. Things you don’t know.”
“I’m not playing twenty questions with you, Tabitha, either tell me your secrets, or put them away. Pretend they don’t matter as you did all those years. Jump into the fire, or back away.”
Her throat tightened, her palms sweating. She hadn’t thought about that day in years. She had turned it into a lesson, an object, a cautionary tale. But the images of the day, the way that it had smelled, the weather. The sounds her stepfather had made as he bled out on the floor, the screams of her mother when she realized what had been done... Those things she had blocked out. The entire incident had been carefully formed into a morality tale. Something that served to teach, but something she couldn’t feel.
Not anymore.
Use what you need, discard the rest.
“I never wanted passion. Or love. Because...I shouldn’t. I’m afraid of what I might be. What I might become. I think I’ve proven I have the capacity to act recklessly when I’m overtaken by strong emotion,” she said, realizing that to him, the admission must seem ridiculous. For years all he had ever seen was the carefully cultivated cool reserve she had spent the better part of her teenage years crafting from blood and other people’s consequences.
“Tell me,” he said.
She was going to. Her heart was thundering in her ears, a sickening beat that echoed through her body, made her feel weak.
But maybe if she said it, he would understand. Maybe if she said it he would get why what he’d offered had seemed amazing. Why it had felt insufficient. Why she’d chosen to end it instead of asking for more.
“I was walking home from school. I was seventeen at the time. It was a beautiful day. And when I approached the trailer I could already hear them fighting. Not unusual. They fought all the time. My mother was screaming, which she always did. My stepfather was ignoring her. He was drunk, which he very often was.”
She didn’t let herself go back to that house. Not even in her mind. It was gritty and dirty and full of mold. But more than that. The air was heavy. The ghost of faded love lingering and oppressive, a malevolent spirit that choked the life out of everything it touched.
“I didn’t know,” Kairos said.
“I know,” she said. “I didn’t want you to.” It stung her pride, to admit how low she’d started. To admit that she had no idea who her biological father was to a man for whom genetics was everything.
She was a bastard, having a royal baby. It seemed wrong somehow.
You always knew it would be this way. Why are you panicking now that it’s too late?
Because the idea of it was one thing, the reality of it—all of it—her marriage, her past, her life, was different.
She’d spent the past year growing increasingly unhappy. And then Andres had married Zara. Watching the two of them physically hurt. It twisted her stomach to see the way they smiled at each other. Put a bitter, horrible taste in her mouth.
Made her feel a kind of heaviness she hadn’t felt since she’d stood in that grimy little trailer.
“Tell me,” he said, an order, because Kairos didn’t know how to ask for things any other way.
“She kept screaming at him to listen. But he never did. She was so angry. She left the room. I thought she was going to pack, she did that a lot, even though she never left. Or that maybe she’d given up. Gone to take a nap. She did that sometimes too depending on how much she’d had to drink. But she came back. And she had a gun.”
A COCKTAIL OF cold dread slithered down into Kairos’s stomach. He could hardly credit the words that were coming out of his wife’s mouth. Could hardly picture the gentle, sophisticated creature in front of him witnessing anything like this, much less being so tightly connected to it. Tabitha was strong. She possessed a backbone of steel, one he had witnessed on more than one occasion. When it came to handling foreign dignitaries, or members of the government and Petras, she was cool, calm and poised. When it came to organizing his schedule, and defending her position on hot-button issues, she never backed down.
But for all that she possessed that strength, there was something so smooth and fragile about her too. As though she were a porcelain doll, one that he was afraid to play with too roughly. For fear he might break her.
If she were that breakable,