Page 62 of Pregnant at the Palace Altar

He shook his head. She couldn’t understand. “Our father...” But he could not say the words. The words Marias had programmed into him long ago. Emotion. Connection. The enemy. The beginning of an end.

And why might he have wanted to isolate you from any kind of love?

He swallowed against his tight throat. Could he really believe that when the loss of everything he’d wanted to love was so evident?

Zandra uncurled his fist, and then she put a picture in his hands. It was an old snapshot of their parents. Not a royal portrait, but one of the more casual family snapshots. Not in their royal finery, but two regular people smiling at the camera.

His mother was pregnant. With him.

“I have been carrying this with me, trying to remember them. Sometimes I think maybe I do. A word. A flash. But I guess I’ll never know for sure it is them.”

He tried to pull his hand away, but Zandra pressed the picture more firmly into his palm.

“Not so long ago, I looked at their portrait in your office and asked them to show you love. Maybe it’s a silly thing to believe, but they brought you Katerina. Your babies. And nothing you do or don’t do will change the outcome of what happens in this hospital. But you are the only one who can choose faith, love and future, Diamandis. Not fate. Not tragedy.You.”

He said nothing. What was there to say? His parents were dead, even as they looked back at him from this picture.

Zandra brushed a kiss across his cheek. “Lysias and I are going to go in search of food. We will be back soon.”

She was lying. They could have any staff member bring them whatever food they wished. She was giving him a moment alone.

With this picture of his parents.

He stared at it, no matter how his mind screamed at him to put it away. To put this all away. To freeze himself out once again.

But his heart ached for them. For the love and support they’d given him in their too-short lives. Zandra had said she’d looked at a portrait and asked for something. She’d asked for love for him, which was foolish. Silly indeed.

But he had certainly been given it. Katerina had been steadfast in her love. Never pulling it back. Never questioning it. Katerina believed in love, in him.

Just as his parents had.

He stared at their long-gone faces.

“Not a day has gone by where I have not missed you,” he heard himself say, as if he were outside his body, watching some other person talk to a picture of dead people.

“I do not know who to beg, or to which deity I should supplicate myself. I only know you and your love. Please, please... I need her. I needthem. If I am to be punished for loving, punishme.” He pressed his forehead to the picture.

He heard the door open, but did not look up, assuming it was Zandra and Lysias. But someone cleared their throat.

When he looked up, it was the doctor. He leaped to his feet.

“You have two sons, Your Majesty. They are both healthy, needing only moderate interventions.” She smiled at him.

He could not take this information in. Not yet. “The queen?”

“She is still fighting. You may come and meet the babies.”

“I wish to see Katerina.”

The doctor nodded. “Once she is stable.” And she led him out of the room, down a maze of hallways, to a room with little plastic cribs. There were two nurses who curtsied upon his entrance.

The doctor guided him over to two little enclosures. “Baby A is five pounds, five ounces,” the doctor said, pointing to the infant on the left. “Baby B is four pounds, eight ounces, and we’re monitoring him to make sure everything is going well. But they’re both healthy, Your Majesty. Very well developed for being early.”

Diamandis could only nod. They were so small, wriggling and moving about, one with his eyes open—a dark, inky blue. The other with his eyes closed as the wrap of blankets he was swathed in wriggled.

“In regard to names, are the royal customs to be followed?” a nurse asked.

He looked down at the two babies. Sons.His sons.So tiny. So helpless. With little shocks of dark hair. And Katerina was not here to see them. To love them.

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