CHAPTER TWELVE

ONTHENIGHTbefore his wedding, Orion stood in his office, there at the window with his back to the palace where he had always been most comfortable.

Not that anything could comfort him these days.

The royal city stretched out before him, the lights sparkling brighter than usual with holiday splendor, and more this year. Because tomorrow was the royal wedding, and the celebrating kingdom had no idea that their new king was anything but transported with joy at the prospect.

The way he might have been a week ago, it pained him to admit. And no matter the faintly sniffy headlines in some of the tabloids, which questioned the timeline the palace had given them about the king’s romance.

He knew those headlines were warning shots.

But it was the wordromancethat sat in his chest like a spot of pneumonia, gnarled and heavy, and worse by the day.

He found no peace in this view tonight.

Because instead of the kingdom he planned to save, all he could see was Calista.

He had barely seen her since that fateful last ball, when he had discovered what he should already have known—that she was as devious and untrustworthy as her father. That she could have turned her back on Aristotle and his schemes, but had chosen not to.

That she had made those choices despite what had happened between them.

That whatever it was that haunted her, she refused to share it with him.

It was that last that bothered him the most, loathe as he was to admit it.

They had run into each other once in the hallway of the family wing. She had been surrounded by a pack of seamstresses all dressed in black, a wild sort of look on her face—until she saw him.

She had gone silent. Still.

Haunted straight through, something in him had intoned, but he couldn’thelpher betray him.

A man—a king—had to draw the line somewhere, surely.

He had stared at her, not certain what he was meant to do with all the unwieldyfeelingsinside him, now. He had wanted nothing more than to be the opposite of his father. And instead, it turned out that while his temptations might not level the kingdom—they might just level him. They might just lay him out flat all the same.

Neither one of them had spoken.

He had inclined his head. She had performed the expected bob of head and knee upon one’s first daily sighting of the monarch.

And he had wasted an entire day when he should have been sorting out cabinet ministers and putting out fires all over the kingdom, brooding about that interaction.

Another time, he’d heard her.

Calista and her sister, laughing together in one of the rooms where the staff was laying out her trousseau. He had stopped himself midstride, the sound of her laughter seeming to pierce straight through him.

He was an embarrassment to himself. A disappointment, certainly.

But none of that mattered as the days dragged by and he began to realize exactly what he was signing himself up for.

It had been better before. He had been fascinated, and that was far better than disappointed. He had to think that it was worse, now, to know how good it could be between them when it could never, ever be like that again.

He couldn’t unknow it.

But he wasn’t sure how he could live with it, either. Sometimes he would find himself in one of his meetings or ceremonies, suddenly seized with a kind of deep panic at the endless stretch of days before him. Days that would become months, then years. If he was lucky, he would keep this marriage of convenience civil, if chilly.

Year after year after year, as they both turned to stone.

Sooner or later, the vivid longing of these weeks would fade. He was sure of it. It would be like a dream he’d had once—never quite forgotten, but never repeated.