Page 8 of Crowning His Innocent Assistant

Once, she’d had a box. It was entirely hers. Centered in the middle of an alley. It had lasted two full days until moisture had encroached in the material and rendered it soft and useless. She supposed that didn’t count, not as something of her own. Not really. But this apartment...

She stood in the empty space. The wood beneath her feet was scarred, the ceiling high, the windows tall and slim, facing out over the Seine River.

She’d been to Paris many times with Matteo. As his assistant, his background accessory shrouded in black. But now she stood there in her Parisian apartment, quite her own person. It was a small place for she had money but didn’t see the point in wasting it all on a massive dwelling that she had no use for. There was a living area, a kitchen, one bathroom and one bedroom. It was all she needed.

This felt very much like coming to the palace for the first time had. Oh, she could remember that well.

She had been so downtrodden. Angry, frightened.

For whatever Matteo had said, she deeply distrusted him. He was the new ruler of the country and he had done nothing to prove that he was anything unlike his father.

The former King of Monte Blanco had been a monster, and there was no other way to view that. He had made a game out of tormenting her people. A small cluster of indigents who lived in the old ways, who moved around, following the seasons. They had been poor. Hideously so. She wondered sometimes if her mother had spent the last of her coin on that cotton candy. A sugary sop for her guilt.

She also wondered if her mother had been able to return to their people. For abandoning a child in such a manner would be seen as beneath contempt. They had been a poor people, but proud and rooted firmly in family. That made it worse, really. She could remember trying to go back. She had walked for days. But her people had moved on, and there was nothing but fire rings to denote that they’d ever been there.

And she just hadn’t had the strength to walk on.

During the warmer parts of the year, they went higher into the mountains. Children rode ponies and in the backs of carts. She had gone to check one last time, the next winter, and they had not gone back to their usual haunts. She had known it was the fault of the King. There were talks of uprisings within the community. Men had disappeared. And her people had slipped away, not to be easily seen, and certainly beyond the reach of a ten-year-old girl.

In spite of herself, in spite of all that fear, she’d had no choice but to hope when Matteo had first brought her to the palace.

“This will be your room.”

“My room?” She was filled with wonder in that moment. And for that moment she chose to feel nothing but awe.

“Different arrangements may be made in the future, depending.”

Her awe immediately shifted to outrage. “I will not share a room with you.”

He laughed. And it cut her somehow, even as she stood there wrapped in nothing but old clothes, pride and indignity. “I would not dream of asking. For I do not share my bed with girls. Particularly not girls that look like half-drowned mice who have not seen a morsel of cheese for weeks. But I will find you work here at the palace. There is always work to be done. You will have a position here for as long as you may need it.”

“I will?”

“Yes.”

“I...” She looked around at the glittering, gilded walls, the plush bedding. She had never in all her life seen anything like this. It was beyond her experience. Beyond her wildest dreams.

And this man, who had the face of an angel, all sharp cheekbones and dark eyes, black hair pushed back off his forehead and a smile that could not be described as kind, but not wicked either, looked as if he had been pulled from other dreams entirely.

“What is your name?” he asked, an intensity to the question that burned right through her. How long had it been since anyone had wanted to know? Whatever his reasons, he was asking after her and that felt something of a gift.

“Livia.”

“And have you a family name?”

Bitterness clamped down in her chest and she lifted her chin high. “I have no family.”

“Livia,” he said. “A nice name.”

She kept that compliment and turned it over in her heart. Livia. He liked her name. Bit by bit, she grew in strength. She found that she enjoyed work at the palace. There was cleaning involved, of course, but she found that she quite enjoyed making things shine. She found she had a talent for catching small details. She knew that she sometimes annoyed the more senior members of staff, but she was just so very...happy.

That was what had marked the first weeks there. Happiness.

She had spent years, the tenderest parts of her childhood, into burgeoning womanhood, existing in a space where she could barely make any progress. Where the best she could hope for was survival. And here she had found an existence that allowed her to embrace beauty. There was a simple sort of joy in polishing silver until it gleamed. In the excess that she found around her. The luxury of making things beautiful just for the sake of it.

And somewhere in the back of her mind she knew that her people would scoff. That all of this excess and indulgence was somehow contrary to the life that they had forged for themselves, but she didn’t care. She had been betrayed by them.

She had been betrayed by her mother. She had lived a life of austerity, so why couldn’t she enjoy the clean, fine clothes she was able to put on every day. Nothing fancy, a simple uniform of black pants and a white shirt, but the fabric was not scratchy, and everything fit perfectly. She was never too cold, she was never too hot. She was no longer at the mercy of the elements.

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