The Queen's New Year Secret Read online

  “I know what you said. What we said, but... Five years on things feel different. Or they feel like they should be.”

  “I see. Were you ever going to tell me that? Or were you simply going to freeze me out until I was the one who asked for an end to the marriage?”

  She curled her fingers into fists, and looked away from him. “That isn’t...”

  “Do you not enjoy being held accountable for the breakdown of our union, Tabitha? Because if I recall, you spent the past five years doing much the same thing you accuse me of. If an honest word has ever passed between us, I would be surprised. Did you think I didn’t notice that you have grown increasingly distant? Did you think it didn’t bother me?”

  “Yes, Kairos, I imagined that it didn’t bother you. Why would I ever assume that you cared about there being any closeness between us?”

  “Because there was a time when I at least called you a friend.”

  Her golden brows shot upward. “Did you? Do you consider me a friend?”

  “You know that I did. I assume you remember the day that I proposed to you.”

  “Oh, you mean the day that you watched a video of the woman you had chosen to marry having dirtier sex with your brother than I imagine you ever had with her? The day that you—drunkenly—told me you thought I would be a better choice to be your queen? I find it difficult to put much stock into anything you said that day.”

  “Then that’s your mistake. Because I was sincere. I told you that we could build a stronger foundation than Francesca and I ever could. I told you that I had been having doubts about her even before her betrayal.”

  “Yes, that’s right, you did. And why were you having doubts, exactly?”

  “The way you behaved...it was such a stark contrast to Francesca, even on her best of days. I found myself wishing that it was you. When we traveled together, when I went to you to discuss affairs of the state...I found myself wishing that you were the one I was going to marry. I respected your opinion. And I felt like I could ask you questions, when with everyone else I had to simply know the answers.”

  He felt stripped bare saying these things now, without the buffer of alcohol, five years older and a lot more jaded than he had been then. But she needed to hear them. She needed to hear them again, clearly.

  “And while it is a very nice sentiment, it isn’t exactly the proposal every girl dreams of,” she said, her tone brittle.

  “It seems very much that you are angry with yourself for accepting a proposal you now deem beneath you. How high you have risen. That the proposal of a king is no longer good enough for you.”

  “Maybe I am the one who changed. But people do change.”

  “Only because they forget. You forget that you are going to have to leave my palace, leave Petras, search for a job. Struggle financially. Perhaps even face the life that you were so eager to leave behind. Marriage to me offered you instant elevation. The kind of status that you craved.”

  “Don’t,” she said, “you make me sound like I was nothing more than a gold digger.”

  “Oh, you would have done all right finding gold on your own. But validation? Status? For a piece of white trash from Nowhere, USA, that is a great deal more difficult to come by.”

  She stood, shoving her plate toward the center of the table. “I don’t have to listen to you insulting me.”

  “You want me to call you something honest. Though, I hasten to remind you that I learned these words from you. This is what you think of yourself. You told me.”

  “Because I trusted you. Clearly, my own fault.”

  “No, I think I was the one who was foolish to trust you.”

  “We could go back and forth for days. But it doesn’t solve anything. It doesn’t erase the fact that I think we’re better off apart. We should never have been a couple, Kairos, and you know it. As you said, I’m little more than a piece of white trash from a tiny town. You’re the king of an entire nation. You wanted to marry someone else.”

  “You might be right. But it’s too late for regrets. We are married to each other. And more than that, you’re carrying my child.”

  “Plenty of people work out custody arrangements.”

  He stood, knocking his chair backward and not caring when it hit the ground with a very loud thump. “And do those people still want each other? Do they exist constantly on the verge of tearing each other’s clothes off and having each other on the nearest surface?”

  The pink in her cheeks intensified. “You can only speak for yourself on that score.”

  “Really? I don’t think that’s true.” He was suddenly gripped by lust, lust that mingled with the ever-present anger in his chest. He wasn’t sure whether he wanted to yell at her, or press her against the wall and claim her body again. Both. He wanted both. Even though neither made sense. “You want me.”

  “Go to hell.” They were the harshest words he’d ever heard on her lips. So much sweeter than the sophisticated chill had ever been.

  “There. There at least, some honesty. Perhaps you should try it more often.”

  “I gave you honesty.”

  “Your version of honesty was a list of complaints that you could have, and should have voiced years ago. Ideally, before you accepted my proposal. What changed? What changed that you can no longer stand what you agreed would be enough to make a marriage?”

  * * *

  His words hit her with the force of the slap. And she just stood there, reeling. Tears prickled her eyes, her tongue was frozen. He was making too much sense. Making too good a case for how aggrieved he was by her request for divorce. He was right. She had not spoken an honest word to him. She hadn’t asked him for what she wanted. Hadn’t told him she was unhappy.

  But she didn’t know how to do it without opening herself up, and reviewing bits and pieces of pain that were best left hidden. Didn’t know how to do it without confronting her fears. And anyway, she hadn’t imagined that he would care.

  She hadn’t trusted herself enough to voice them. To deal with them.

  She wasn’t sure she trusted herself now.

  “It isn’t what I wanted,” she said, her voice hollow.

  “You just said what you wanted changed.”

  “Yes. No. It isn’t that simple,” she said, panic gripping her neck, making it impossible for her to breathe.

  “It seems fairly straightforward to me, agape, but then, I do not know much about the inner workings of the female mind. Throughout my life I have seen women act in ways that are inexplicable to me. My mother walking away from her position at the palace, Francesca compromising our union for a bit of stolen pleasure. You divorcing me. So, it comes as no surprise to me that I do not understand what you’re trying to tell me now.”

  “You don’t know everything about my past,” she said.

  It was for the best that he didn’t. Best that he never did. She looked back on the Tabitha she’d been, before university, before she’d put distance between herself and her family, and saw a stranger.

  But he didn’t seem to know the Tabitha she was now. And she didn’t know how to make him. Didn’t know how to make him understand who she was. Why she was.

  She didn’t even know if it would change anything.

  If nothing else, it would show him. Why he should let her go. Why she wasn’t suitable. And it would remind her too.

  “Do I not know you?”

  “No. I know you did some cursory searching, as far as I was concerned. My name. But you don’t know everything. In part because I don’t have the same last name as my mother, nor is her name the same as the one listed on my birth certificate, not anymore. I don’t share a name with my stepfather either. Not having those names excludes quite a lot from a cursory search. Of course, you found nothing objectionable about me. Nothing but good marks in school, no
criminal record, no scandal.”

  “Because that’s all that mattered,” he said, something odd glittering in his black eyes.

  “Yes. It is all that mattered. You were only looking for what might cause problems with my reputation, for you, as far as the public eye was concerned. You weren’t actually looking for anything real or meaningful about me.”

  “Come off your high horse, Tabitha. Obviously you didn’t care whether or not I found anything meaningful out about you, because you deliberately concealed it from me.”

  She lifted her shoulder, her stomach sinking. “I can’t argue with that. I can’t argue with a great many of the accusations leveled at me today. I wasn’t honest with you. I didn’t tell you. I preferred to run away, rather than telling you what I wanted. But a lot of it is because... I don’t actually know what I want. I started feeling dissatisfied with our relationship, and wanting more. And that confused me.”

  “Well, hell, if you’re confused, what chance do I have?”

  “I can’t answer that question,” she said, sounding defeated. Feeling defeated. “I don’t know the answer. All I know is that I never thought I would marry. Then I met you, and I can’t deny that I felt...attraction. It confused me. I had spent years getting through college, school of every kind, really, with a single-minded focus. I wanted to be better than my birth. I knew that education was the only way to accomplish that. I set about to get good grades, high test scores, so that I could earn scholarships. And I did that. I knew that if I split my focus, I wouldn’t be able to. Then the internship at the palace came up, and I knew I had to seize it. I didn’t have connections, I didn’t have a pedigree. I knew that I needed a leg up in order to get the kind of job that I wanted.”

  “I imagine, ultimately, the chance to become queen of the nation was too great a temptation to pass up?”

  She laughed, hardly able to process the surreal quality of it all even now. “I guess so. It was a lot of things. A chance to have you, physically, which I wanted. A chance to achieve a status that I’d never even imagined in my wildest dreams. I’m from nothing. Nothing and nowhere, and I wanted something more. And that... How could I refuse? Especially because your criteria suited mine so well. You see, Kairos, I didn’t want love either. I didn’t want passion.”

  “You said you were attracted to me.”

  “I was. I am. I suppose that’s something I can’t deny now. But I thought perhaps I could just touch the flames without being consumed by them. Then I realized that holding your fingertips over a blaze for five years is nothing more than a maddening exercise in torture. You’re better off plunging yourself in or disengaging.”

  “And you chose to disengage?”

  “Yes. I know that I can’t afford to throw myself in.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Reasons I haven’t told you. Things you don’t know.”

  “I’m not playing twenty questions with you, Tabitha, either tell me your secrets, or put them away. Pretend they don’t matter as you did all those years. Jump into the fire, or back away.”

  Her throat tightened, her palms sweating. She hadn’t thought about that day in years. She had turned it into a lesson, an object, a cautionary tale. But the images of the day, the way that it had smelled, the weather. The sounds her stepfather had made as he bled out on the floor, the screams of her mother when she realized what had been done... Those things she had blocked out. The entire incident had been carefully formed into a morality tale. Something that served to teach, but something she couldn’t feel.

  Not anymore.

  Use what you need, discard the rest.

  “I never wanted passion. Or love. Because...I shouldn’t. I’m afraid of what I might be. What I might become. I think I’ve proven I have the capacity to act recklessly when I’m overtaken by strong emotion,” she said, realizing that to him, the admission must seem ridiculous. For years all he had ever seen was the carefully cultivated cool reserve she had spent the better part of her teenage years crafting from blood and other people’s consequences.

  “Tell me,” he said.

  She was going to. Her heart was thundering in her ears, a sickening beat that echoed through her body, made her feel weak.

  But maybe if she said it, he would understand. Maybe if she said it he would get why what he’d offered had seemed amazing. Why it had felt insufficient. Why she’d chosen to end it instead of asking for more.

  “I was walking home from school. I was seventeen at the time. It was a beautiful day. And when I approached the trailer I could already hear them fighting. Not unusual. They fought all the time. My mother was screaming, which she always did. My stepfather was ignoring her. He was drunk, which he very often was.”

  She didn’t let herself go back to that house. Not even in her mind. It was gritty and dirty and full of mold. But more than that. The air was heavy. The ghost of faded love lingering and oppressive, a malevolent spirit that choked the life out of everything it touched.

  “I didn’t know,” Kairos said.

  “I know,” she said. “I didn’t want you to.” It stung her pride, to admit how low she’d started. To admit that she had no idea who her biological father was to a man for whom genetics was everything.

  She was a bastard, having a royal baby. It seemed wrong somehow.

  You always knew it would be this way. Why are you panicking now that it’s too late?

  Because the idea of it was one thing, the reality of it—all of it—her marriage, her past, her life, was different.

  She’d spent the past year growing increasingly unhappy. And then Andres had married Zara. Watching the two of them physically hurt. It twisted her stomach to see the way they smiled at each other. Put a bitter, horrible taste in her mouth.

  Made her feel a kind of heaviness she hadn’t felt since she’d stood in that grimy little trailer.

  “Tell me,” he said, an order, because Kairos didn’t know how to ask for things any other way.

  “She kept screaming at him to listen. But he never did. She was so angry. She left the room. I thought she was going to pack, she did that a lot, even though she never left. Or that maybe she’d given up. Gone to take a nap. She did that sometimes too depending on how much she’d had to drink. But she came back. And she had a gun.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  A COCKTAIL OF cold dread slithered down into Kairos’s stomach. He could hardly credit the words that were coming out of his wife’s mouth. Could hardly picture the gentle, sophisticated creature in front of him witnessing anything like this, much less being so tightly connected to it. Tabitha was strong. She possessed a backbone of steel, one he had witnessed on more than one occasion. When it came to handling foreign dignitaries, or members of the government and Petras, she was cool, calm and poised. When it came to organizing his schedule, and defending her position on hot-button issues, she never backed down.

  But for all that she possessed that strength, there was something so smooth and fragile about her too. As though she were a porcelain doll, one that he was afraid to play with too roughly. For fear he might break her.

  If she were that breakable, you would have shattered her on your desk.

  Yes, that was true. He had not thought about her fertility then. Had not taken care with her, as he had always done in the past.

  But still, he hadn’t thought in that moment. He simply acted. This revelation challenged perceptions that he had never examined. Not deeply.

  “What happened?” he asked, trying to keep his voice level.

  “She shot him,” Tabitha said, the words distant and matter-of-fact. Her expression stayed placid, as though she were discussing the contents of the menu for a dinner at the palace. “She was very sorry that she did it. Because he didn’t get back up. He died. And she was sent to jail. I don’t visit her.”

  S
he spoke the last item on the list as though it were the gravest sin of all. As though the worst thing of all was that she had distanced herself from her mother, not that her mother was a murderer.

  “You saw all this,” he said, that same shell he had accused her of having wrapping itself around his own veins now, hardening them completely.

  “Yes. It was a long time ago,” she said, her voice sounding as if it was coming straight out of that distant past. “Eleven...twelve years ago now? I’m not sure.”

  “It doesn’t matter how long ago it was, you still saw it.”

  “I don’t like to think about it,” she said, her blue eyes locking with his, looking at him for the first time since she had started telling her gruesome story. “I don’t think you can blame me for that.”

  “No, not at all,” he said.

  “It wasn’t relevant to our union. Not relevant to whether or not I would be good for the position.”

  “Except it clearly was, as I think it is probably related to the action you have taken now.”

  She looked down. “I can’t argue with that. I was growing frustrated in our relationship, and I don’t like to give those feelings any foothold on my life. I don’t like to allow them free rein.”

  “Surely you don’t think you’re going to find a gun and shoot me?”

  “I’m sure my mother didn’t think she would do that either,” Tabitha said, starting to pace, her hands clasped in front of her. She was picking at the polish on her fingernails, something he had never seen her do before. It was then he noticed that she wasn’t wearing her ring. How had he missed it before?

  Perhaps you were too wrapped up in imagining those fingers wrapped around your member to notice.

  He gritted his teeth. Yes, that was the problem. Whatever had exploded between them was stealing his ability to think clearly.

  “Where is your ring?”

  She stopped thinking and looked at her fingernails. “I took it off.”

  “It was very expensive,” he said, though that was not his concern at all, and he wasn’t sure why he was pretending that it was.