His Two Royal Secrets

It was yet one more reason to hate the man.

“You say that as if it is a bad thing,” he said instead, no longer playing games of statues in his father’s private rooms.

He was a man grown now, or so everybody told him. He was heir to the kingdom and now would be expected to carry out duties in the name of the crown he would wear one day. He stood by the windows in his father’s compartments and looked out over the sloping hills and crystal blue sea.

This would always be Atilia to him. The murmur of the ocean waves. The soft, sweet scent of flowers on the breeze. The Ionian Sea spread out before him.

Not the king and his penchant for smashing things and causing as much distress as he could at the slightest provocation.

“It is time for you to marry,” his father intoned.

Ares turned, laughing, and then laughed harder when he saw his father was serious. “You cannot imagine I will be amenable to such a thing. Can you?”

“I have no interest in suffering through the sort of twenties you will inflict upon me. And upon this kingdom.”

“And yet suffer you must,” Ares replied with a soft menace that was as close as he’d ever come to taking a swing at his father or his king. “I have no intention of marrying.”

His father broke a decanter that day that had been in the family since the 1700s. It burst to pieces slightly to the left of Ares, though he hadn’t moved a muscle. He’d only stared back at the old man.

But it had broken something in Ares nonetheless.

It wasn’t the shards of priceless crystal raining down on his traditional regalia. It wasn’t his father’s temper, which Ares found little more than tedious at this point.

It was the whole...show. The titles, the land, the bloodline. It all meant more to his father than he ever had. He hadn’t been raised by his parents, he’d been monitored by a succession of servants and paraded in front of his father only every now and again. And only when everyone could be certain his behavior was perfect.

Or tolerable, at any rate.

He couldn’t help thinking that really, he would prefer not to be a prince at all. And if he had no choice in that, well, there was no need to participate in passing the mantle of blood and nonsense on to the next generation. Ares had no intention of marrying. No interest in it.

But he was adamantly opposed to having children.

He couldn’t help but think it was the bloodline itself that had made his father a monster, coupled with the crown. And he was a monster primarily to his son. He was cold to Ares’s mother, but it was Ares who got splintered decanters and rage.

Ares had no intention of passing that rage along to his own children. Ever.

“You should not rile your father so,” his mother said years later, after Ares had indulged in yet another conversation with the king about his marital prospects. He was twenty-six. “We shall have to start importing decanters from the Southern Palace.”

Atilia was an ancient island kingdom in the Ionian Sea. The Northern Island was the most geographically north of the islands that made up the kingdom and was where the business of the country took place. The Northern Palace was accordingly the more stately residence of the royal family. The Southern Palace, on the most southern edge of the most southern island in the kingdom, was about relaxation, not matters of state. Beaches and ease and what breathing room a man could have when the weight of the kingdom sat on his shoulders.

Not that Ares intended to hoist up that weight himself, but still, he preferred the south. It was where he’d been enjoying a few weeks of recuperation after a long goodwill tour before his father had issued his summons. Because clearly too much time had passed between unpleasant conversations about Ares and the bloodline.

“I can’t control what riles the man,” Ares replied, dryly. “If I could, the last twenty-six years would have been markedly different. And there would be a great many more breakable objects left unattended about the palace, I imagine.”

His mother had smiled at him the way she did, soft and sad. Ares always assumed it was because she couldn’t save him from his father. She couldn’t make the king treat the prince the way he treated her—with icy disinterest. “It is not the worst thing in the world to start turning your thoughts toward the next generation.”

“I don’t have it in me,” Ares told her then. The conviction had been growing in him for years, by then. He studied his mother, and her drawn, dear face. “If you are an advertisement for the institution of marriage, or what one must bear to become queen of these islands, I cannot say that I am greatly inspired to foist this dubious pleasure on anyone.”

That was true, but what was more true was that Ares enjoyed his life. He kept a home of sorts in Saracen House, a separate, palatial estate that was part of the palace complex on the Northern Island. But he was never there. He preferred the energy of Berlin. The hustle and rush of London. The mad, thrumming energy of New York City.

Or, really, any place his father was not.

And besides, Ares had yet to meet a woman he wanted for more than a night or two. Much less a lifetime of bloodlines and pomp, tradition and circumstance. He very much doubted the woman who could make him reconsider existed.

Nor was he particularly upset about this lack.

“I see how you are looking at me,” his mother chided him. She sat as she always did, upright and elegant, on the chaise in her favorite room of the palace where the sunlight stood in for happiness. Or so it had always seemed to Ares. “And I’m not so old, thank you, that I cannot remember the excitement of youth and the certainty that I could predict the twists and turns of my own life.”

“I hope you’re not planning to give me any details of the excitement of your youth,” Ares said. “Particularly as I was under the impression you spent most of it in a convent.”

The queen’s smile hinted at secrets, and made Ares glad. He liked to think his mother had more to reflect on in her life than his father and the glacial coldness he knew their marriage contained.

“You must find a wife of similar background,” his mother told him quietly. “You are to be the king, Ares. Whatever your marriage is like, whatever bargains you and your spouse make with each other, she must be a queen without stain. So, too, must your issue be without blemish. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”

He did. But understanding did not equal obedience.

“That I should put off marrying as long as possible,” Ares said, and grinned at her. “I am more than happy to oblige.”

Ares was halfway through his thirties when his mother died suddenly, lost to a quick-moving cancer she’d thought was a bout of the flu. And Ares was still reeling, still mourning when his father called him back to the Northern Palace some months after the funeral.

“You must know that it was your mother’s dearest wish that you married,” the king growled, his hand clenched around a crystal glass like it was a weapon. “The bloodline is your most sacred duty, Ares. The time for games is past.”

But as it happened, Ares was even less a fan of his bloodline than he had been before. Something he would have thought impossible.

His mother had left him all her papers, which included the journals she had kept since she was a girl. Ares, missing her in the bleak months after her passing, had lost himself in those journals. He wanted to hoard every memory he had of her. He wanted to feel close to her again.

Instead, he learned the truth about his parents. Or about his father, rather, and the royal marriage. Once Ares had been born, they had tried for a spare until the doctors had made it clear that the queen could likely not have any more children. The king hadn’t missed a beat. He’d openly flaunted his mistresses.

All those ladies of the court who had cooed at Ares when he was young. All those noblewomen he’d been instructed never to speak with in private. How had he missed their true role?

His father had broken his mother’s heart.

Over and over again, every time he took a new woman to his bed.

And Ares had never been overly fond of the king. But this made it worse. This made him hate his father, deeply and irrevocably.

“You betrayed my mother casually and constantly,” he said now, his own hands in fists because he did not require a weapon. And wanted only an excuse. “Yet you imagine you can speak to her dearest wishes now she has passed? Do you dare?”

The king rolled his eyes. “I grow weary of coddling you and your refusal to do what is required of you.”

“If you’re so interested in your bloodline,” Ares told him now, “I suggest you expand it on your own, as you seem so predisposed to do. You do not need me to do your dirty work for you. And let me be perfectly clear on this. I will not do it.”

His father sneered. “Why am I not surprised? Once a weakling, always a weakling. You would even give away your throne.”

But Ares didn’t think of it as giving away a throne—and one he’d never wanted anyway. He was ensuring not only his freedom, but the freedom of any potential children he might have had. He was making certain no child of his would be raised in that cold palace of lies.

And he refused to treat a woman the way his father had treated his mother.

Ever.