Page 48 of Forbidden Royal Vows

“So you can call her Mila after all,” Carliz murmured, eyeing Alondra. “But never affectionately. Only to chastise her. No wonder she had to keep a secret or two.”

Mila should have stepped in then. She should have ended this with one of her usual serene asides that were actually commands...but she didn’t.

“You don’t understand, Carliz,” their mother replied icily. “Thrones and crowns and the family legacy do not concern you. You’ve made that clear enough.”

“By not marrying some terrible, boring man the palace selected for me?” Carliz laughed. “Guilty as charged.”

Mila realized too late that this was a wound that needed cauterizing. “Mother, please sit down. It’s Carliz’s last night.”

But there was no stopping her mother tonight. “You promised your father that you would never embarrass him, and what do you think this is? How do you think he would react to your involvement in such a tawdry scandal?”

“Returning to reality, it could be significantly more tawdry,” Carliz pointed out. “All they were doing was looking at each other. Everything else is base speculation.”

“If he was any kind of man, he would have immediately countered the situation. Instead, what is that clip that keeps running again and again?” The Queen Mother made an aggrieved noise. “Speaking of all his bedmates and calling them queens. It’s disrespectful. It’s beneath your station, Mila. I thought you understood that.”

Mila stared down at her plate, biting her tongue. Something she was not sure she had ever literally done before, and it hurt. Maybe that was good. She was tired of her heart hurting, so might as well spread the wealth.

Carliz did not hold back, however. She fixed their mother with a direct, unflinching gaze. “Which sovereign’s station are we concerned about here? Mila’s? Or Father’s? Because they’re not the same person.”

“Your father would never cause a scandal,” Alondra belted out. “I can tell you that.”

“I can’t take this seriously.” Mila didn’t know she meant to speak.

Or maybe she did. Maybe something else inside of her was taking control at last. It wasn’t that mask. It wasn’t the Queen. But that was the trouble with all of this, wasn’t it?

She was tired of the Queen.

She liked the woman she was when she was alone with Caius. She always had. She hadn’t thought that she could ever access that woman again—but it had been easy. All had taken was the way he looked at her.

All it had taken was seeing herself in his eyes.

Maybe she was having trouble remembering why it was she couldn’t have that all the time. Why it was the end of the world to even want it.

She realized that her sister and her mother were gazing at her, waiting for her to explain herself.

That meant she had to try. She sighed. “I question why this is the greatest scandal of all time. It seems a bit unfair, if I’m honest. I have been a literal paragon of virtue my whole life. There are very few members of royal families who can say the same. And there’s nothing untoward about that photo. We could have been discussing the weather.”

“It’s because you’re such a paragon,” Carliz said quietly. “People are so desperate for you to have a secret, dissipated life—one that makes them feel better about not living up to your standard of untouchable virtue—that they’ve created one out of a single photograph.”

“People are horrified at what it means,” Alondra argued. “That a woman whose passion has always been her duty to have her head turned by such a...wastrel of a man.” She made a face as if she was disgusted at the very thought. Or as if it was Caius himself who revolted her, and something in Mila...chilled straight down to the bone. “It’s beyond comprehension.”

“You can comment on my behavior, Mother,” Mila said quietly. And very, very coldly. “But I am not interested in your opinions on his.”

“Hear, hear,” Carliz muttered.

But Alondra waved a hand at her. “And now this. You are the Queen of Las Sosegadas, Mila. It is a little bit late to start acting out one of your sister’s teen rebellions.”

Carliz made a sound at that. But Mila found herself looking at her mother in a way she normally reserved for uppity ministers.

“Excuse me?” she asked, very quietly.

The Queen straight through.

But her mother’s face was flushed with emotion. “I don’t understand how you could let him do this to you,” she cried. And when Mila started to speak, she didn’t stop, which, from Alondra, was akin to flipping over the table. “Duty is everything. Duty is all that matters or ever will. It is the only thing you will be remembered for. Because we, your family members, will pass on and no one will know who you were behind closed doors. They will speculate. They will imagine as they please. But all they will truly know is whether or not their Queen did her duty. Duty is all that’s left.”

As she stood there, her face crumpled, just slightly. Just enough. But she caught herself before she could dissolve entirely.

Then, as her daughters watched, she pulled herself together in a manner Mila knew all too well. Because she did it herself. That deep breath. The straightening of the shoulders. And then, at the end, the determined rise of her chin.

---