Page 87 of Crowned

“Like what?”

I open my eyes and gaze up at her. How the hell did she get me talking about this? Even now, the shame and disgust burns like it is my doing.

“I have never told anyone,” I say stonily.

She waits, her expression expectant.

Suddenly, I laugh. “The irony is, I should not want to tell you because what you think of me actually matters. Yet, I can feel myself wanting to tell you anyway.”

“That is why you want to tell me,” she murmurs softly. “It’s fighting to get out because you want to know that your secret won’t change the way I see you.”

What a clever thing she is.

“Can I show you something?” I ask her.

Her mouth quirks in a smile. “How perverted is it?”

“Oh, fiendish,” I say, sitting up slowly. There’s a dull ache in the back of my skull, but I can bear it.

I lead Lilia down the corridor by the hand to the room we’ve dedicated to the nursery. A crib is waiting in the corner with a folded yellow blanket, and there’s a mobile hanging over the crib. Elephants and tigers in yellow bowties.

Lilia gives a cry of pleasure and reaches out to touch it, and all the animals go dancing around in a circle. “That’s my mobile from Prague. I thought I had left it behind. You brought it with you. You remembered, despite all the fear and blood that day.”

I put my hands on her shoulders and turn her to face me. “Lilia, I…”

But the words stick in my throat.

Say you’re sorry, you fucking idiot.

But I don’t feel it, and Lilia will know it’s a lie. She’ll hate me even more for lying than for staying silent.

I can’t change what I’ve done.

The past is indelible, and I have to make her understand that.

Lilia understands Elyah. She knows what made Kirill into the man he is today, but she doesn’t know what made me Konstantin, and she won’t accept me until she does.

I brush her hair away from her neck and plant a kiss there. “Shall I bare my throat to you? Shall I give you every weapon you require to best me and lay all my vulnerabilities at your feet?”

I move my lips up her throat until I whisper against her mouth.

“Will you accept me then?”

* * *

Nineteen yearsearlier

“I don’t want the money. Keep your money.” My voice is high with terror. I back away slowly through the water, the shallow waves lapping at my ankles and then my knees.

“Where are you going, Konstantin? Mother and I just want to talk.”

My older brother advances on me slowly, a malicious smile on his face. It’s a moonless night, and the surface of the water is black. A cold wind cuts through my clothes and chills my sweat-soaked skin. Pyotr is smiling but there’s murder in his eyes. He’s seventeen years old but as brawny as a full-grown man. When our father died three years ago, he stepped into his shoes as head of the family.

In every way that he could.

He and Mother have been whispering behind my back. Plotting. Scheming. I can taste their trickery in the air I breathe. The food I eat. Sometimes I wonder if Mother sprinkles the dinner she sets before me with poison. I check for shadows behind me on staircases. When I ride my horse, I check the saddle blankets twice over for prickles that could cause the stallion to throw me and break my neck.

In two years when I turn seventeen, I’ll inherit my share of our father’s fortune, a fortune that Pyotr and Mother are desperate to control themselves. Their greed is going to kill me.

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