A Royal Without Rules

It took him a long time to look at her again, but when he did, Adriana had recovered herself. Maybe it was the women on the wall, reminding her that she could do this, whatever this was. It took a lot of strength to survive being as hated as they’d been—as she was. She remembered that Sandrine’s eyes had sparkled merrily when she’d met her, that the older woman had looked anything but cowed.

Adriana could survive these final, painful scenes with Pato. She could.

“I would have preferred to sacrifice myself, I think,” she said coolly, pulling the familiar defense around her gratefully. She crossed her arms and ignored that flash in his gaze. “Rather than wake up yesterday to find myself burned to a crisp on your little pyre with no warning whatsoever. Call me controlling if you must.”

He eyed her from across the room in a way that unnerved her, but she refused to back down.

“You believe I did this?” he asked mildly. But she knew him too well to be fooled by that tone.

“I don’t know why you didn’t ask for assistance,” she continued, as if this was any other conversation she’d ever had with him. As if it was easy to pretend there was no emotion beneath this, no dark whirling thing that threatened to suck her under. “I’ve been handling your paparazzi encounters for a long time, Pato. At the very least, I might have suggested a better nickname for myself than ‘Witchy Righetti.’”

Again, he gave her a long look, and it occurred to her belatedly that he was fighting for calm and control as much as she was. It made her heart kick in a kind of panic.

“I promised you I wouldn’t use you that way,” he reminded her, almost politely. As if he thought she might have forgotten.

And it was too much. He was here, and the way he was dressed made the difference in their situations painfully clear to her. He would walk away from this a prince. She would crawl away from this the disgraced daughter of a despised family, personally responsible for this new helping of shame and recrimination heaped on her family’s name.

She used the only weapon she had.

“You also promised your brother that you wouldn’t reveal his secret, I assume,” she said, very distinctly, and told herself she was pleased when she saw something dark and raw in his gaze. “And yet you did. Why would I think you’d keep a relatively small promise to someone like me?”

A muscle worked in his jaw. His hands curled into fists. And he looked at her as if she’d torn him wide-open.

Adriana told herself she was glad. He wasn’t here to save her. He couldn’t undo what she’d done to her family. But if she could make him feel a little bit of what she did, all the better—even if that look on his face clawed into her, shredding her from within.

He laughed, but it was short. Bitter.

“This, then, is what you mean when you say you love me,” he said quietly, his dark eyes pinning her to the wall behind her. “Is it better this way, Adriana? If you succeed in running me off—if you take that knife and bury it deep enough, twist it hard enough—will that get you what you want?”

He was moving toward her—one step, then another—dark and furious and something more than that. Something that made him look as destroyed as she felt, and there was nothing good about that at all.

“I don’t want—” she began, but he laughed again, and this time, it made her shudder.

“I think you do,” he said, low and intense. Damning her where she stood. “I think you want to hole up in this mausoleum and paint your own portrait to hang on that wall.” He pointed at the trinity of pictures, but he didn’t take his eyes off her. “That’s what Righettis have been doing in this place for the last hundred years, wafting through the kingdom like ghosts, subjecting themselves to whatever punishment is thrown their way—”

“You don’t have any idea what you’re talking about!” she cried, aware that she was shouting. But there was something hard and itchy and hot inside her, and she had to get it out or it would kill her, she knew. “It’s not as if you have any idea what it’s like to be the most reviled family in the kingdom. And why would you? It wasn’t your ancestor who murdered the king!” She swept her hand toward the portraits. “Or slept with several branches of the royal family tree!”

His eyes blazed at her, and she realized only belatedly that he’d come much too close to her, as if he’d stalked her without her noticing.

“Do you imagine that my family took control of the throne of Kitzinia because we asked nicely?” he demanded, sounding as incredulous as he did angry. “Is that how you remember the history of Europe? Because to my recollection, every kingdom that ever was came about in blood and treachery.” He shook his head, and then somehow his hands were on her upper arms and he was even closer, and she knew she should push him away. She knew she should extricate herself—but she couldn’t seem to move. “Your family isn’t the only one in the kingdom with blood on its hands, Adriana. But it is certainly the only one I can think of that’s created a cult out of its guilt!”