Page 45 of Forbidden Royal Vows

For good.

CHAPTER TEN

THE PALACE WENT into crisis mode and stayed there. Teams of outward-facing staff huddled in the corridors, whispering to each other about the situation. The crisis management battalion took over all palace communications. There was a sudden influx of very serious people having very intense meetings, throwing around buzzwords and PR phrases.

Mila sailed about pretending she didn’t notice. Or perhaps that it was all beneath her notice, which was not quite the same thing.

But when Carliz arrived, a few days after that picture hit the papers when it was clear that the scandal was not going away on its own, she was grateful.

More than grateful, even though her sister had left her baby, not quite a year old, at home.

“We don’t get to see him enough,” Mila chided her as she greeted her with a hug.

“This visit is not about him,” Carliz replied in a fierce whisper, hugging her back.

Hard.

“How can you travel without your child?” Alondra asked that first night as they gathered for a private family dinner. “I know I never did. Not when you were both so small.”

“You and Father did a round of extended state visits all over Europe the year I was born,” Mila said mildly. “And again when Carliz was eighteen months.” She smiled when her mother glared at her. “I’ve had to study the history of state visits, of course. What worked, what didn’t, goals versus outcomes, the usual.”

Carliz, on the other hand, smiled in that way she had that was precisely calculated to drive the Queen Mother mad. She had cultivated that smile, Mila knew. She had spent years working on it.

She had once told Mila, If you can’t be the heir, be annoying instead.

“It is actually not necessary to live forever tethered to a child,” she told Alondra languidly now. Deliberately giving the impression that she let her infant fend for himself on his Mediterranean island home when Mila knew she did no such thing. “As you apparently decided yourself in your day, Mother. I always knew we were secretly alike.”

Alondra did not care for that comparison, as the way she gripped her utensils made clear. “I suppose that husband of yours can afford a fleet of excellent nannies,” she murmured, quite as if her two daughters had not spent large swathes of their young lives in the care of staff.

“We do have some help,” Carliz agreed. Serenely. “Though Valentino prefers to care for Centuri himself, whenever possible.”

The Queen Mother blinked. “How singular that he is willing to babysit.”

“He is not singular, he is a parent,” Carliz replied, and she no longer sounded languid. Though she was still sparkling at her mother. “A parent cannot babysit their own child. By definition.”

“You will argue about anything, Carliz,” Alondra said, as if this conversation had already exhausted her. “My goodness.”

“If you’re asking if the man I married, the love of my life, is a good father? Yes, he is. And lo, just as he is perfectly capable of making empires out of all he surveys, he can also take care of our baby. Sometimes he does so when I am right there.”

Alondra did not respond to that. Mila glanced at her sister. “I’m not sure she can take that on board.”

“I’m sure you’re both very droll,” their mother replied. “I am certain there must be someone who would find your humor entertaining.”

That person, she made clear with her tone, was not Alondra. She started talking of incidental things, deftly leading them all away from powder keg topics like anything involving Carliz’s husband and Mila’s scandalous photo.

So mostly she discussed the plans for the holiday decorations in the palace.

Later that night, when Carliz slipped into her bedchamber the way she had that summer she’d lived here—and every single night when they’d been girls—Mila felt herself relax for the first time since she’d walked down that trail behind the September House and found Caius gone.

Just...gone.

The crisis team had suggested he’d planted that photo, but she’d shut them down.

I am more likely to have planted that photo than Caius Candriano could ever be, she had said dismissively. For one thing, he does not plant photos. He doesn’t have to.

But she had almost wished she could believe that he had. It would have felt like a message. It would have felt like something.

“So,” Carliz said breezily, taking her place on the chaise. “It sounds like we have some catching up to do, no?”

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