You need this...
He pushed it aside. He didn’t need anything. And he didn’t need to have her again.
Control was his.
He would not give in to the beast inside of him.
To do otherwise made him no different than the men he took out of this world. The men he hated above all else.
If he could not protect her, then his life was forfeit.
And so, today he would go to her coronation, and tonight, he would reinstitute the distance between them.
There really was nothing else to be done.
She was to be Queen today.
Annick looked in the mirror at her sleek reflection. Her hair was piled up atop her head, ready for a crown. For coronation. She wondered what it would have been like if life had gone the way it was supposed to.
Her parents would still be dead. That was the nature of coronations. It was why they were, in her opinion, sort of a terribly barbarous thing. A ceremony. Passing the torch. But only when the flame of your loved one was extinguished.
And Annick... Well, she never should’ve been Queen.
She squeezed her eyes shut and tried her best not to think of Marcus, her older brother. The one who should have been standing here today. The one who should have always been here.
And then she tried not to think of Maximus. Of the way her body burned when she remembered what had transpired between them last night.
This day was to be a ceremony, celebrating her becoming Queen. A coronation. Essentially, she was being recognized as a woman. At the moment, it all felt a bit too literal. For last night, she had been introduced to another dimension of what it meant to be a woman. For last night, she had...
And he had turned away from her.
She had never felt half so alone as she did going back into that ballroom without him. As she did for the whole rest of the evening, in a space filled with hundreds of people.
She had given a good speech, had found a strength in herself that she had not known was there, but it had done nothing to ease the loneliness in her.
She was good at standing alone.
But she was tired of it.
And she had not yet seen him today.
Today she was wearing emerald green. A brocade fabric made up the gown, which was shaped like a large bell, the fabric making dramatic folds, billowing out around her feet.
The door to her chamber opened, and there he was. He looked stern and striking in a black suit with a black shirt and tie. He looked... Well, he looked like the King. Of her country. And of death.
He looked every inch the assassin that he was.
How did other people not see this? How did they see him and think that he was nothing more than a feckless playboy? It was so patently untrue. So clearly not all he was. Not even remotely.
“The guard has been vetted, checked over and completely cleared. The perimeter is secure. You have nothing to worry about tonight, Annick. I have seen it is safe.”
“Well. You had better,” she said, keeping her eyes on her own reflection, only glancing at him in the mirror. “It is, after all, why you are here.”
“Yes. It is.”
“To do anything else would be an abject failure. Are you a failure, Maximus?”
“I think you know that I’m not.” He straightened the cuffs on his sleeves, the movement inescapably catching her eye. She looked away as quickly as possible.