I answered, and the revelation on the other line turned the blood in my veins to ice as surely as Marissa turned it molten.
“Your father is dead.” The palace official went on to tell me that my father had been found dead of an apparent suicide.
I could not fathom it. My father, the most self-interested man in the entire world, had ended his own life. He had never been anything but a master of his own self-preservation.
But then it suddenly made sense to me as I sat there in my office, my head reeling in darkness even as the sun rose high over the ocean.
He had chosen how it ended.
He had chosen it in a way that would make things the hardest for me. Because he knew that it would leave me with guilt, and if he left me with guilt, then how could I go on to sabotage his entire reputation? It was his final manipulation.
His final bit of torture. Rage tore me up inside as I tried to put the thoughts in my head in order.
Should I feel grief? Because he was dead, and there was no coming back from it. His revenge was hollow whether or not that was his intent.
Anger?
I did not want to bargain. Unless...
If I could only have had a few more words with him. He would never know now. He thought he had won.
He would never see that he was the one in the wrong.
Because I could not believe that he had taken his own life in a moment of despair. No. My father didn’t have it in him to feel despair.
He would never see. Now he never would.
There was something so desperately hollow in that. Something appalling and vastly terrible in its scope.
Suddenly, I couldn’t breathe. It reminded me of when I had been a boy and he had put me inside of a box. The kind of training that the military went through, he had told me. And the leader of Pelion could not afford to be any less stalwart than the military that protected it, because they would go for the King first. My father had told me that.
Isolation for hours, trapped inside of a box where I couldn’t even stand up.
That was how I felt now. Unable to breathe. Unable to move. And I had to get out, because the walls of my office were closing in around me in spite of the fact that there were windows on all sides.
I did not know this feeling. I did not know helplessness. I did not know weakness.
Those things had been banished from me when I was a boy. Banished at the hand of the man who put me in that state now, and I hated him. Never had I hated him more in life than I did now in death.
I stormed downstairs, the blackness inside of me an entity that was beginning to escape. It had always been there. It was not new. I knew that. I had always known it was there. But I had always kept it locked behind a wall. Only allowing glimpses out. Reminded when I walked through the obsidian halls of the palace and had it reflected back at me.
But I did not let it out.
But now it was as a torrent of living water. Destroying all that might come into its path.
But I was on an island where there were so few other souls.
But there was one.
And I knew... I knew that if she came near me now I would only destroy her.
I stumbled out of the house, down the path that led to the beach. And she was there. I had gone to find her. I had gone to find her because I no longer had it in me to fight. Not myself, not the beast inside of me and not the desire that I felt for her. Why had I resisted? All this time, why had I resisted?
Why had I allowed her these proclamations?
I was the King.
I was her husband.
She looked up at me, the wind whipping her dark hair around, those eyes bright as that little creature I had only just imagined her to be.
“We are through playing games.” I stopped with just a foot between us. “I want you. Do not deny me.”
“What has happened to you?”
But any words she might have intended to say next I cut off. I pulled her up against my body, and a muffled squeak rose from her mouth.
“You’re mine,” I said. “You have been mine for eight years. Since that first moment that I saw you on the beach. Do you not understand that every woman I took into my bed after you was a paltry imitation? Do you not understand that you took me and you turned me into a creature of longing, when I have never had to want for anything in my entire life? If I demanded it, it was mine. But not you. You ran from me. No one runs from me.”
And I remembered her questioning that proclamation I had made when we had first reunited. I remembered her asking me if that was true.
And I pushed away the disquiet in my soul. I pushed away the answer.
And I held on to the lie.
And I held on to her.
“There you are,” she whispered. And she did not look at me like she was terrified. Those bright eyes examined me, and she lifted her hand, brushing her fingertips against my mouth. “I’ve seen you like this before.”
“You have not,” I said. “You don’t know who I am. No one does.”
“I do,” she said. “I saw it. That first day. It might not have been this close to the surface, but I saw it. You hide it from the world. You hide from yourself, but it’s there, Hercules. I know it is.”
“Is it why you ran away from me?”
“No. I ran away from you that first time because of how badly I wanted to run to you. And I was taught. I knew better. To want something the way that I want you... To feel that sickness inside of me... It could only be wickedness on my part, and so I ran from temptation. And I have run from temptation. Every moment since you have been back in my company, but it was not to please my father, and it was not to save my soul. It was just to save... I am in your world. There must be something of mine that remains.”
“I need you,” I said. And it galled me to say it. It was why I did not press the issue before, because I had been unwilling to show her how much I needed her. Unwilling to show her what her denial of her body to me cost me.
But I had no pride left.
My father was dead, and for the first time in my life, I had no idea what to do.
And I had run to her.
I was not a man who ran, and yet I had.
But not away from anything.
Just to her.
And I wondered if she would deny me, or if she would demand conversation first.
But instead, she stretched up on her toes and pressed her mouth to mine.
Marissa
He was falling apart inside, and I could see it. And I knew that there was every chance that touching him would pull me into the darkness right along with him. That I would not be able to protect myself once I’d allowed myself to be stripped bare with him. Especially when he was like this.
But this—as little as it made sense—was the part of him that I had always craved. And it was the part of him I had always been denied.
He had been the smooth playboy around me. He had found something a little bit deeper, and a little bit more authentic, conversations with me that weren’t about trading innuendo, but were about the things that we believed in our hearts.
But he had not shown me this.
I had witnessed it, like a voyeur staring through a window, that first time I had seen him when he had thought that no one was watching.
And that was what had ensnared me. I realized the truth of it now.
The whole truth.
For I had not known who he was.
It was not his wealth, his title, his reputation that had fascinated.
It was not the way he teased me. Not the way he laughed. Not the way he touched me or made me call his name.
It was knowing that there was more to him. That he had shown me something just a little more than he had shown anyone else. And that there was yet another secret I might reach.
And he was giving it to me now.
I didn’t know why. And in the moment, I didn’t want to ask. I didn’t feel that I should.
Because he didn’t want me to know. And if I asked him now it would break the spell. He might be able to gain his composure. And I did not want that. I wanted him like this.
And later, much later, perhaps I would ask myself where my sense of preservation had gone.
But I already knew the answer.
It went where it always had when it came to Hercules.
And here on this island, we were man and wife. King and Queen of each other and nothing more.
Lily wasn’t here.
Here on this island, we were not parents who had been thrown together by our compatible fertility. We were not essential strangers who’d had to marry for a bloodline, for the throne.
We were not those who had taken vows in front of the church only days ago, to each other, to a nation.
We were just Hercules and Marissa.
Even our names seemed at odds, mine so typical.
His, that of a god.
But in this moment my god had fallen, and he needed me to hold him. He needed me to be there for him. To bear witness to this brokenness.
I would ask later why.