She wanted to cry again. “I’m sorry if I insulted you.”
“I have spent the last five hours begging gods I’ve never believed in to save you,” he told her then, tall and still golden. And he had held their babies in his hands when she couldn’t. He had been there. “Our wedding photos are all over every paper in the land, just as I wished, and it is like ash to me. Because there is no point in any of this, Pia, unless you are here. With me.”
“Ares...”
“I have no idea how to love anyone,” he told her, his green eyes blazing. “But for you, I will learn. I have no idea what a father does except crush his own son, but for the ones we made, I will learn how to do it right.”
He moved closer, taking her hands in his, and then going down on one knee beside her hospital bed.
“You don’t have to do this, Ares,” she said.
“When I thought I would lose you, every moment we spent together went through my head in a rush,” he said urgently. “And I could see it so clearly then, how much you loved me. How much you have always loved me. And how much I have failed you, time and again.”
“No,” she said fiercely. She winced as she sat up, but she reached out and took his beautiful, beloved face in her hands. “You are not a failure, Ares. I love you. That’s not conditional on how you behave. That doesn’t come with a list of duties or expectations. I just love you. It’s as simple and as complicated as that, and I don’t know how it works, either.”
“I used you like a pawn. I will never forgive myself.”
“I already have,” she said, and as the words came out of her, she realized they were true. “I’ve spent my whole life hating how I looked because I wasn’t my mother. Hating my body because it never looked like hers. But look what it did today.”
“You were magnificent,” Ares told her, his voice thick. “You are always magnificent, Pia.”
“Let them laugh if they like,” Pia said, her eyes on Ares. “They don’t matter. They never did. The only thing I have to be embarrassed about is that I ever let them get to me in the first place. Even in my own head.”
His mouth formed her name, but he turned his head so he could kiss her palm.
“I spent my whole life watching my parents tear themselves apart and call it love,” Pia told him, a new conviction growing inside her. As if it had always been there. As if her babies’ arrival had jogged it loose. “I used to think that was romantic. Now I suspect it was deeply unhealthy. What I want with you is the chance to explore the difference.”
“I love you,” Ares told her. “And I will spend the rest of this life proving to you that it’s not only because I thought I would lose you today. But because in thinking you were lost to me forever, I understood that forever was meaningless to me without you.”
“We made them,” she whispered. “And Ares. They’re perfect.”
“They’re beautiful,” he whispered back. “And so are you.”
And for a moment they grinned at each other, wide and bright and brimming with hope and possibility. There were two new, shiny little lives, and both of them would do their best to protect each one of them. To honor them and raise them.
Together.
“Pia,” Ares said, a quiet command. “Be my wife.”
“It will be my greatest honor,” she said, tears streaming down her face, but this time, they were not tears of pain. This was joy, this unwieldy, unsteady thing that held her in so tight a grip. Pure joy. “And you must be my husband.”
“It will be my privilege,” he said solemnly. “You will be my queen one day. But know this, Pia. You are already, and always will be, queen of my heart.”
And when he leaned over and pressed his mouth to hers, Pia tasted salt and sweetness. The great tangle that led to forever, and all the knots they’d tied in each other already that would keep them steady and connected as they headed there.
He kissed her, and it was like a fairy tale.
He kissed her, and she kissed him, and they woke each other up from that deep, dark enchantment that was the lives they’d led without each other.
Without love.
There and then, in a hospital room with the paparazzi calling their names outside, they started their new life. Together.
Full of love, light, and laughter to hold it all together, like glue.
* * *
Twenty years later, six weeks after his father’s death and his formal acceptance of his new role, King Ares of Atilia was crowned in the Great Cathedral.
He took the long walk up the cathedral’s august aisle that he had believed, once, he would never take.