Page 23 of Forbidden Royal Vows

“I do very little,” she told him, hoping her wishes did not show on her face. “There’s a daily call with certain ministers, of course, and a government to run. Other than that, I am left to my own devices.”

When Caius only gazed back at her as if he truly wanted to know, as if he was still the man she had considered her only truly safe space on earth, if only briefly, she sighed a little. “At first I took my mother and my sister with me when I went. But I stopped that after the first time. I didn’t want to be anything while I was there. Not a queen. Not a daughter. Not even a sister, which I would say is the easiest role of the three.” She lifted a shoulder and let it drop. “I just wander about as if I’m anyone. As if I’m no one. I cook my own meals. I clean up after myself. Doesn’t that sound silly, that a grown woman could find these things transcendent? Transformative?”

“Not at all,” he said, and there was too much memory in his voice then. Too much of the Caius she’d loved so recklessly, so heedlessly, so fast. “I was there the first time you let yourself be anyone and no one. I’m glad to know you still do it.”

In the distance, she heard a swell of laughter on the breeze. It was the waning days of August now. And the summer was always stuffed full of events, so that she usually couldn’t wait to set off to the September House.

But she knew that this year would be different. Because she knew no matter when she went, she would take this aching thing inside of her along with her.

“I did hear that you planned to start looking for a husband,” he confessed, maybe to that ache. Maybe to the memories they shared. “I was incensed.”

“Let me guess. You assumed I was throwing down the gauntlet. Directly at you.”

“Something like that.” It was the way he looked at her, the way no one else ever did or ever would. As if he saw the things she worked so diligently to hide. It was the way he saw Mila first, always, and had to look for the Queen, when for everyone else she knew—including herself—it was the opposite. It was the way he seemed to have no notion of the reverence he was meant to show in her presence. All the deference he was meant to display. Not Caius. He only reached out and brushed something from her cheek as if she could just...be touched like that. Then his mouth curved, likely because he could feel the same heat that she did. “I set about plotting how best to disrupt this process immediately.”

She laughed, despite herself. And the glory was, she didn’t have to try to hide it. “How marvelous. I can’t decide if I think you would go for a big, splashy sort of disruption, for maximum scandal and rippling aftereffects. Or if you were looking for something more stealthy, for more of a seismic, earthquake effect.”

There was a flash of his teeth and that smile of his he used far more rarely than people thought. They always remembered him smiling, laughing, but in reality, it was usually that smirk. He was witty, not funny. There was a difference.

And when it came to Caius, all of it was sharpened to a point and wielded with precision.

“I haven’t decided yet,” he told her, still smiling. “It was all going to depend on what lies you told me.”

“And now?” Her hands ached with the effort of keeping them to herself. “Have you decided my fate?”

“Before I heard about your dating plans, I had intended to divorce you.” But he was still standing so close to her. He found a tendril of her hair and was wrapping it, ever so slowly, around and around one finger. “I was going to tell you that I would sign whatever papers you needed signed, so that we could dissolve the legalities as if they had never occurred in the first place.”

“I think,” she whispered, “that you don’t actually know what you want, Caius.”

He tugged the bit of hair he had wrapped around his finger and they both made the faintest noise, as if they were singing in a kind of harmony.

Mila knew that harmony. It was that ache inside of her. It was that grief.

But it was less and less like grief the longer they gazed at each other like this. It shifted. It became that long, lingering, golden heat.

She recognized it. The way it wound around and around inside of her. The way it lit her on fire and the flames seemed to reach every part of her, only to settle between her legs. The way it made her soft and needy in an instant.

Oh, yes. She remembered the song too well.

“I have always known exactly what I want, Mila,” Caius told her.

“You only want me because you know that you can never truly have me,” she replied, and she hardly knew where those words were coming from. But they felt true as she said them. And she wasn’t hurling them out. She wasn’t even upset. If anything, it was another part of that same golden heat. The part of her that grieved for having to give him up. Again. And always. No matter what she wanted. “It’s much easier to blame it all on me, isn’t it? Then we don’t have to ask ourselves what you might have done to change the landscape.” He stared back at her, something like affront in his gaze, or perhaps all that magic was laced with a kind of acknowledgment she doubted either one of them wished to face, or speak out loud. “You could have made yourself into a paragon, Caius. A saint among men.”

“What would be the point?” he returned, and he didn’t sound intense or furious, either. “Each and every strand of my bloodline is shiny in its way, but altogether? It’s a whole lot of mud. And we know you can’t have that.”

“Just remember that you get to make choices. I am bound to fulfill my duty. No one ever said it would be pleasant, I assure you.”

He let out a breath, or maybe it was a curse too soft to hear. “What’s the point of having all this power, Mila, if you only wield it to make yourself miserable?”

“What are my options?” She leaned in close, because that felt like power. Then she reached up so she could set a palm on each side of his jaw, holding that beautiful face fast between them. And that felt even better, even if it hurt. “This was always better as a dream, Caius. The more we do this, the more we tarnish it. Is that really what you want?”

She felt his hands cover hers, but all she could see was the way he looked at her. The way he had always looked at her.

As if their hearts beat in the same rhythm, even now.

“So which is it?” she asked him, keeping her gaze trained on his. “Will you expose me to all of my people, making them all question my judgment forever? Will you attempt to seduce me so you can cause a new scandal in real time? Or will you simply say goodbye, and let us both remember what this was fondly?”

Mila didn’t know how she managed to say that so calmly, when inside, she felt ravaged. She felt torn into ragged little pieces, but that didn’t matter. That had never mattered. She could rip her heart out of her chest and hurl it out of the highest window in the palace, and it still wouldn’t matter. She would still be the Queen. She would still have the same duties, the same responsibilities, the same expectations.

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