A Royal Without Rules

Her father might hate their family history, Adriana thought as she stood in the musty room, but he still felt called upon to preserve it. And so the portraits hung on the walls of the villa instead of being packed away in the attic or burned in the back gardens. This was his duty to the Righetti legacy, however shameful he found it.

Adriana pulled open the heavy drapes to let the light in, and then stared up at the three great temptresses of old Kitzinia sitting there so prettily in their frames. The Righetti whores, lined up in chronological order. The harlots Carolina, Maria and Francesca.

And, of course, Adriana herself, though she, like her great-aunt Sandrine, could not expect to be rendered in oils and hung in museums. Times had changed.

She couldn’t help the small laugh that escaped her. She didn’t feel much like a notorious whore in the comfortable jeans and soft magenta sweater she’d tugged on when she’d arrived home from the palace. She studied the faces of the women before her, seeing herself in the shape of Carolina’s brow, the color of Maria’s hair and the curve of Francesca’s lips. None of them looked particularly like slinking sexpots, either. They simply looked like young women somewhere around Adriana’s age, all smiling, all bright-eyed, all pretty.

Don’t lock yourself in their prison, Pato had said.

Maybe, Adriana thought, staring at the portraits but remembering the way he’d held her when she cried, they’d simply fallen in love.

She sat down heavily in the nearest chair, her own heart beating hard in her chest as if she’d run up a hill. How had that possibility never occurred to her before? Why had she always believed that she was descended from a line of women who were, for all intents and purposes, callous prostitutes?

Maybe they were in love.

It rang in her like a revolution.

The Righetti family had always kept their own copies of these portraits, and Adriana remembered being herded into this room by her grandmother after church on Sundays, as her aunts had been before her. Her grandmother had droned on about purity and morals, while Adriana had stood there feeling increasingly cross that her brothers were allowed to entertain themselves elsewhere.

The lecture had been repeated with increasing frequency throughout her adolescence, which was when Adriana had discovered the truth about her grandfather’s younger sister, the lovely old woman with sparkling eyes who lived in France and whose name was only ever spoken in distaste. And Adriana had internalized every word of her grandmother’s lecture. She’d accepted the fact that she was dirty, tainted. Ruined before she began. She’d never questioned a word of it.

“Don’t use their weapons on yourself,” Pato had said so fiercely, as if it had angered him to hear her talk about herself like that. As if the casual way she hated herself, her easy acceptance of the idea that she was the dirty thing others called her, was what was upsetting.

Not her. Not her name. Not what had happened between them.

And she realized then, as she sat in the presence of the women who’d supposedly ruined her, that she couldn’t do it anymore. That well of ugliness she’d spent her whole life drawing from simply wasn’t there in her gut the way it always had been. In its place, she thought in some astonishment, was that defiance she’d called on at the palace—that strength she hadn’t known she had.

She looked at the Righetti women, at their mysterious smiles and the sparkle in their eyes, and she knew something else, too. These women hadn’t been ashamed. They hadn’t torn themselves apart in penance for their sins. Adriana knew for a fact that each and every one of them had died of old age, in their beds. These were not meek, placating women. They’d been the favorite lovers of kings and princes in times when that meant they’d wielded great power and political influence. They’d made their own rules.

And so, by God, would Adriana.

At some point she realized that tears were flowing down her cheeks. Was this joy? Heartbreak? Despair? How could she keep track of the wild emotions that clamored inside of her? Adriana knew only that she loved him. She loved Pato, and she wasn’t ashamed of it, either. She didn’t know how she would tell her father what had happened, or what she’d do next, but she couldn’t hate herself for this.

She wouldn’t hate herself for this.

Adriana had thought for a moment that she might have a heart attack when she’d turned to see Lenz standing there in Pato’s doorway, when she’d seen that shocked look on his face. But seeing him there, standing next to his brother, had made everything very clear. “I don’t think you love him,” Pato had told her, and he was right. Lenz had been kind to her, no matter what his ulterior motives, and she’d been so desperate to prove to him that she wasn’t that kind of Righetti. She’d mistaken her gratitude for something more.