Page 49 of Forbidden Royal Vows

“Love dies,” her mother told her, in that rain-soaked voice she would never acknowledge. She had never cried in public. Mila and Carliz had assumed she’d cried in her bedchamber, but they had never seen it. If she asked about it now, Mila knew Alondra would say that was the tribute she was paying the late king. “All that remains is your legacy, and that only comes from your dedication to your duty.”

Mila felt winded. She and her mother stared at each other across the table, and Alondra’s chest might have been heaving as if she’d just run uphill, but her gaze was clear.

“And that is why, my favorite queen, only sister, and very best friend on this earth,” Carliz said quietly, from where she was still lounging in her chair, “you must love while you can. As hard as you can. For as long as you can.”

She shook her head when Alondra started to speak, and harder when Mila opened her mouth to do the same. “Yes, even you. Especially you.”

Carliz looked at her mother, then at her sister, with compassion and something else in her gaze. Something like pity, Mila thought, though that stung more than she wanted to admit.

But then, Carliz was the only member of the family who had picked her own path. She had gone to university outside the kingdom, the first in the line to ever do such a thing. She had not toed the family line, married a palace-vetted candidate, and quietly produced children to bulk out the blood claim to the throne. She had declined the offer to take royal engagements, because she wanted the chance at a different life.

And Mila couldn’t help noticing that she was the happiest person in this room.

Possibly in the whole of the palace.

“You have to make the duty worth doing by living a life worth claiming,” Carliz told them both, with a kind of wisdom in her voice that made everything inside of Mila seem to ache. In rejection, she tried to tell herself. But she thought it was likely recognition. Her sister seemed to pin her with that gaze of hers. “Or what is the point of living at all?”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CAIUS WALKED OFF the trail some two weeks later.

It turned out that he wasn’t quite the callow younger man he’d been the first time, unable to imagine a life or a world that wasn’t the same endless merry-go-round of notoriety and exposure. He hadn’t needed months to come to his senses.

“Besides,” he muttered to himself as he took the last long walk back into the nearest town. “The company this time was severely lacking.”

With a couple of phone calls, he arranged everything he’d decided he needed, out there where his clarity had descended when he was finally alone in the wilderness. No comments section. No paparazzi. No one clamoring for his money or his notice or what he could do to raise their profile.

He could breathe again, and getting that back made it clear he’d lost it sometime over the past five years.

Maybe the moment Mila had walked away from him.

But out on the trail with only the sky and the earth, the weather and his heartbeat, he could think through the implications of everything. Every single thing that had happened to the pair of them since they’d met. He could see it all clearly. He could cut through not only the excuses he’d made to himself, but his own deeply ingrained, knee-jerk reaction to be only what was expected when people looked at him and nothing more.

How, the stars above had seemed to say, can you ask for a change you are not willing to give?

He had turned that over and over inside of him.

One day it had rained. On and on, relentlessly, and yet he hadn’t quit. He hadn’t even considered it. Caius had marched grimly on, determined to keep going until he found what he was looking for. That unidentifiable thing inside him that would indicate it was time to leave the wilderness and face the world.

Why, the mountains had seemed to whisper, can you commit yourself so wholeheartedly to a hike no matter the adversity you face, when you accepted the end of your marriage without so much as a whimper?

Caius had walked until he’d found the answers.

He’d walked into that last town, met his assistant, and drove the rest of the way to that same hotel that he and Mila had stayed in so long ago. Once there, he cleaned himself up. He restored himself to form, though part of him would miss the ease of the wilderness. The beard that grew without his notice.

The lack of any reflective surfaces.

He thought a lot about that, too.

And he decided that he could not let himself go so long again. That the moment he suspected the real him was retreating from his own gaze in the mirror, that was his call to take himself off until he found himself again. Until he remembered that he wasn’t who they said he was. That was a role he played, and anytime he liked, he could step off that stage.

He’d had ample time to think through all those parts of his childhood that had led directly to where he was now. Caius knew full well each and every incident that had created the empty vessel he’d made himself into.

And he’d worked so hard on the particular quality of that emptiness, was the thing. He’d learned how to bend any room to his will from a master. His mother was a pro at it—it was only those who knew her who truly saw her for what she was. But her charm, used only on strangers, was a useful tool. It had helped him immensely in his business dealings, which was likely one of the reasons all the rest of his half siblings were in awe of him. Because they relied on his mother’s fickle regard to fund their lives.

It had been good to walk until he remembered that he’d chosen the tools that he would take from her. That he had vowed when he was sixteen that he would never rely on her for anything material again. And he hadn’t.

Caius had developed his pretty-as-a-picture, delightful, and profoundly empty persona instead.

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