“You don’t understand. There is no room in my life for these kinds of emotions.”
“Why not? What about Lily?”
“This has nothing to do with Lily.”
“Do you love her?”
“But that is a foolish question. I have known her for a matter of weeks.”
“She’s your daughter. That’s... That’s not how that works. I’ve loved Lily from the moment she first came into the world, and I can tell you I didn’t know her then. With children, it’s not a matter of knowing them, is it? It’s a matter of knowing that their lives are in your hands. That you must protect them, that you must care for them. That without you they won’t know anything of the world. You’re meant to be her conscience, her guidance. Her place of protection. And that... Let me tell you, Hercules, that produces feelings of love faster than knowing someone ever could. So do you intend to never love your daughter? Because you will be the only father that she ever has.”
“I didn’t need love. I didn’t need love—it was weak, and it did nothing.”
“Your father didn’t love you. At least, not in the way that a normal person should. He didn’t demonstrate love.”
And then Hercules exploded. “Not my father. My mother. My father never said that he loved me. My father never lowered himself to tell such a lie. He never would. It was her. I love you. She would whisper that. Over my bruised body, but she would never do anything to stop it.”
“Hercules...”
“She couldn’t, and I understand that, but what did her love get for me? It meant nothing. She would go off, because she claimed she couldn’t stand to see the way that he treated me, but she left me here with him. She had another child for the sole purpose of having one that she could...that she could love in the way that she wanted. Because she had to surrender me to him. So, you tell me what love ever did for me. You tell me how love makes a family. Because it never did in mine.”
“Hercules,” I said softly. “Your mother was wrong. Your father was wrong.”
“That’s a lot of people who were supposed to love me being wrong, Marissa. At a certain point a man must acknowledge that the problem might be with him.”
“I love you. You think I would allow you to be submitted to torture? Do you think I wouldn’t die for you?”
“No,” he said, the admission ferocious. “Never offer such a thing to me. I don’t deserve it. I am not worth that. Don’t you ever say something like that to me again.”
“Why must you reject it so?”
“Because I am last—do you understand me? That is how I must see myself. My father saw himself as first. Above all else, above anything, sovereign to the entire world. And look at the things he did. To me. To my mother.”
“Hercules, your parents were broken. Undeniably. I am sorry if your mother had a difficult time of it, but that doesn’t give her an excuse to allow her child to be abused. She had money. She could’ve fled with you. The UN would have taken care of you, something. There must have been a way that you could have escaped.”
“It would have created a national incident. And I was not worth that. The chaos would’ve thrown the country into...”
“No. It would have healed your country years earlier. Your mother could have exposed him for the madman that he was, and what purpose did it serve for her to protect him? All it did was protect her position as Queen. That’s what it did. Your parents loved themselves more than they loved you, and on that score you’re correct. But love isn’t what created the brokenness in that scenario. It was the lack of it. Surely you must see that.”
“In any case,” he said, “I don’t know how to love.”
“That isn’t true. You do know how to love... You do...”
“No. I am not the right man for that. I’m a broken vessel, and if you pour into me, it’s all going to leak out, and I won’t hold a drop of it in the end. I’m not worth it, Marissa.”
“You’re worth everything.”
“No. No.”
And then he stood and walked away from me, walked naked out of the bedroom, as if he weren’t a king and we weren’t in a palace full of other people. I knew the hallways would be empty, but still.
I ran out into the hall, without bothering with clothes myself, but I didn’t see which way he’d gone.
Then I returned to the bed and sank to it in misery.
He didn’t love me. He didn’t want to love me.
And I had the feeling that something permanent had happened just now. That he had closed the door on something with a finality that would break us both.
I had given up on Hercules once, and I had cast him as the villain before. But I could see him now. See him for what he was. The wounded boy who was afraid.
Because his mother had offered him love but not protection.
Because she had given him words and not actions.
It scared me. Because my mother had been faithful to my father, she had demonstrated love every day, and she had given him as he asked, and he had taken advantage of it, and nothing had changed.
But I would have to trust that Hercules was a different manner of man, and that our love was different. That it could be bigger, that it could be better.
And that I could change him.
I knew that it was ludicrous. I knew that there were multiple self-help books on the topic.
But if he didn’t want me, I was better off leaving. Demanding everything or taking nothing.
I would have to have faith. Faith in that first moment we had ever met.
In that certainty I had felt then.
I had lost that faith over the years, but when the truth had come out, it had become clear that Hercules hadn’t been the villain.
And I had to trust it would bear out again.
But, oh, that trust would take a leap. The bravery to remain open when all I wanted to do was close in on myself...
I got beneath the covers, not caring that I was in his room. And I curled into a ball and dissolved.
Because in the morning I would have to emerge whole. I would have to do it for Lily, for Pelion and for the future of my marriage—such as it was.
But for the first time in my memory, the hope wasn’t there. That little bubble had burst, abandoning me when I needed it most.
I had an answer to the question of what remained when you were plunged into darkness, what remained when the last vestige of hope was extinguished inside you.
It was love.
When everything else failed, love remained.
And that was simply where I would have to place my trust.
Because love never failed.
It was a truth that I believed, and it was one that I would hold to. I had no other choice.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Hercules
I HAD NOT spoken to Marissa in days. And I told myself that it was for the best. I told myself that I was doing the right thing.
Love.
She loved me. What did love mean?
Do people abandon you often?
The words that she had spoken to me stuck now, stung. I couldn’t get them out of my head. They were like a barb in my heart.
I love you. My mother had said that, every time she had left the palace. Every time she had left me there.
But she had never taken me with her.
She loved me, but I was the heir.
She loved me, but I was Xerxes’s son, not really hers.
I had been her obligation to the Crown, and I had given her freedom with my very existence.
That was why she loved me.
But she loved her freedom more, and she had gone her own way, flitting about the world as I was tortured. Going about her life as I was broken and reshaped into a weapon for the throne of Pelion.
For my father’s own satisfaction.
/> What good were words of love if there was nothing behind them?
What was wrong with a child that his mother could speak those words so carelessly and then leave him to be devoured by the wolves?
I didn’t know.
I didn’t understand.
All I knew was that those words felt like they had fractured something between us. Because they reminded me of the ache that I had felt in my soul when she had spoken them.
No.
I would not allow emotion, words, to create that kind of pain inside of me.
What could I reason? What could I see and touch? Certainly never my mother’s love.
Those words were useless.
And yet I craved them.
For Marissa.
And I thought of Lily...
Lily, my own daughter, who I was avoiding like a true coward, because...
What if I gave her the words and failed miserably in the execution of them?
I didn’t even know what love was supposed to look like.
The bloodline of my family was poison. And that was all it was. A bloodline, and not a family.
It was all I knew. All I understood.
I had taken to prowling the halls at night, because I couldn’t sleep. My need for Marissa was like a sickness, and I didn’t trust that I wouldn’t go to her in a moment of weakness. This was what she had reduced me to. A man who did not trust himself. A man who wandered the halls of his own palace, questioning his sanity and trying to breathe around fractured pieces in his heart.
It was then I heard a sound. A whimpering sound, and I stopped for a moment, trying to figure out the source of it. It was the sound of a child, and for a moment that struck me as strange. Because for a moment, I could only think of myself.
I had whimpered like that in this palace, reduced to such a thing at the hands of my father. I couldn’t move. Not then.