“That’s enough, Zlata,” Brat said as he grabbed her arm.
“No,” she said, pulling forward toward me. “She is not right for you. Forget about her, get a divorce, and marry me. You know I would make a good queen for your people.”
“Brat,” I said with a tone of warning. “Please shut her up before I bring back the old tradition of beheading and placing bodies on stakes around the castle.”
Brat stepped forward, wrapped his arm around Zlata, and pressed his hand against her mouth. She stood there struggling as Brat looked up at me with concern in his eyes. I was livid that Zlata had gone behind my back and done something like this, but the thought that Adriana was pregnant had become the sole focus of my thoughts.
“Go to her. This is her address.” Brat handed me the paperwork from the private investigator. “You love her. I could see that even before you could. Adriana is a good woman, despite her choice in past careers, and I am pretty positive she loves you too, Milos. It’s really not that difficult. You just need to reach inside of you, figure out the man you really are, and pull your head out of your ass. Be the love that she, and that baby, deserve.”
I watched as Brat flashed me a knowing smile and dragged Zlata from the room. I set the coffee down on the table next to the whiskey and stared at them both. There was no denying that I was madly in love with this girl. When she’d first left, it seemed almost hopeless, but now, knowing I had a child growing in her belly, I was even more determined to get her back. I picked up the glass of whiskey and walked over to the sink, tipped the cup, and watched the last of it drain down the gold pipes. I needed to get to Liverpool, and there wasn’t another moment to be wasted.
I grabbed the coffee and took it into the shower with me. I scrubbed my body and refreshed my heart. The hot water no longer felt like an agent to wake me from my drunken state. It felt like the start to a new beginning. I picked out a casual, but nice, set of clothes and pulled them on, spritzing a bit of cologne on for good measure.
I walked out of my wing, feeling refreshed, and caught the eye of the servants who stood to the side. They bowed to me as I approached. I told them to get the jet ready and to call for a car service in Liverpool.
As I boarded my jet, I no longer paid any attention to the stewardess or the large bed at the back. I knew that soon, I would be facing Adriana and trying to convince her that our forever was no longer a sham or a joke.
As the plane soared high over my kingdom, I looked down and imagined flying home with Adriana by my side. Over and over again, I practiced what I would say to her, coming up with tactics to avoid that blinding fear that so often stopped me in my tracks. This time, though, I knew that fear was far beyond me. Instead, I feared a life without Adriana and our child by my side.
The flight to Liverpool wasn’t very long. I peered out the window of the plane and saw the degradation the city had fallen into. It was nothing like Silesia, and it bothered me that my wife was left in such conditions to fight for herself. An overwhelming guilt flooded through me, and I vowed to make it up to her and to her mother, who I knew would need to be part of this entire idea.
When we taxied to the runway, I was already up from my seat and standing at the door, knowing I couldn’t waste another moment. As the doors opened, I saw the car sitting out front, and I jumped in, taking the flowers from the driver that I had ordered ahead of time. I pulled out the paper that Brat gave me and handed it to the driver so he knew the destination. The look on his face as he peered in the rearview mirror told me all I needed to know about where we were headed.
I looked out over the city as we drove through it. I watched as workers headed home to their run down apartments and dilapidated housing. Suddenly, it occurred to me that my father’s fears weren’t that the wealth of his family would get squandered, but that his kingdom would find themselves in the same terrible situation. He was trying to protect the people of the kingdom, even down to his last breath. I couldn’t even imagine walking out of the castle and looking out over Silesia in such a dismal state.
As we turned onto the street where Adriana’s flat was located, I looked up at the battered and graffitied sign that read Toxteth. On the streets, we passed hookers, drug dealers, and thugs, all lined up doing whatever it was they did on a daily basis for survival. A few minutes later, the car came to a stop outside of an old, worn-down flat with the paint peeling from the sides and a pile of papers piled up in front of the door. I looked to the driver for assurance and winced as he nodded his head yes. This was where I had banished my love to, a worn-down, poverty plagued city.
I nodded to the neighbors as I stood from the car and straightened my shirt. They stared at me and my car strangely, as if they wondered whether I was lost or not. I climbed the stairs and breathed deeply, pressed the doorbell, and waited for Adriana to answer.
She opened the door, looking more beautiful than I even remembered. She looked at me with wide eyes, surprised by my appearance in her doorway. I stuck the flowers out toward her and watched as she squinted her eyes and looked at them. She reached her hand out and took them from me, but as she did, I noticed she was no longer wearing her ring. Immediately, anger hit my chest, feeling as if I had made a huge mistake.
“Where is your ring?” I tried to hide the anger in my voice.
“What do you want Milos?” She didn’t have the patience for me at that moment.
She turned from the door, and I followed her into the flat. I wanted to know if she had taken the ring off from heartbreak, or if I had traveled all this way for nothing.
“What did you do with the ring?” I asked, trying to keep my voice even.
“I pawned it, okay,” she snapped, turning back toward me. “The house was going to be taken, and I needed to catch my mother up on her mortgage. There was no food, nothing. So I had to do what I had to do. It’s not like it was that valuable, anyway.”
I looked down at the ground, remembering how I had ordered some cheap, fake ring from an online store, thinking that it wasn’t important in a fake marriage. At the sound of her voice choking back tears, I felt completely guilty. She deserved so much better than what I had given her. At that moment, I vowed to myself that if I could convince her to give this a real try, I would buy her the biggest and most expensive ring I could possibly find. She deserved a thousand rings, and she deserved more than what I had given her to that point.
She dropped the flowers to her side in desperation and turned toward the kitchen. I followed along behind her, trying to remember all the words I had come up with to say. In the plane, they had seemed perfect, but standing in her run down flat, I couldn’t seem to make them work in my head.
I looked around at the blank walls and sparse furniture, realizing everything she had told me, everything I had found so horrible for her, was worse than she had described. She had no reason to be ashamed of what
was here. It was the hand she’d been dealt, and fair or not, it had turned her into the strong woman I had come to know and love.
I could hear her mother shuffling around upstairs as we entered the kitchen. I stood in the doorway, staring at her. She looked beautiful, and I could tell she was trying to hide her belly from me. But it wasn’t like I could tell she was pregnant through her sweatshirt and yoga pants. Her hair had fallen halfway out of its bun, and I watched as she closed her eyes and pulled the blonde ringlets back away from her face. I loved this girl more than I could even imagine, but as I stood in her presence, in her life, I didn’t know if there was any chance that she would ever forgive me.
19
Adriana
When my eyes first landed on Milos standing at my door, my heart skipped a beat, but at the sound of his possessive voice, I immediately became defensive. What did he expect? He had done everything he possibly could to run me off. And when I had, he acted surprised that I wouldn’t still be wearing his ring.
I was terrified he was standing in my kitchen with the intention of dragging me back to the castle to finish out my year contract in the sham of a marriage I had originally agreed to. Just the thought of going back there when I had fallen in love with him, knowing I would be subjected to his cruelty and heartbreaking behavior, was absolutely terrifying. I couldn’t take another ten months of loving him and then hating him, over and over. Not to mention it would be kind of difficult to hide a baby for that long.