“It is.” Too bad I won’t be needing another one in white. The one I’m wearing was presented to me as an example of the maker’s skill, in hopes that I would grant her the honor of crafting my wedding gown, but the giver couldn’t have known our engagement is a sham.
Lorcan saved my country from conquest, but he cost us the money we needed to rebuild. Money I would have obtained for marrying Prince Sohrab. Maybe it wasn’t much to the rest of the world, but Auralia is bankrupt. All I had to offer was myself and the title that casts a shadow over my entire life.
Then I leaped at the chance to have Lorcan back, and ruined my best chance of setting Auralia right in the process.
Catastrophic princess fail.
I placed my sweat-stained clothes into the steam washer while Lorcan took his turn in the shower. It all felt quite domestic—reminiscent of life in our shared dormitory at university in Scotland. Before I knew Bashir was a power-hungry murderer and aspiring rapist, back when my biggest problem was concealing the nature of my feelings for Lorcan lest I hurt those of our mutual best friend, Raina. I dragged my fingertip along the contents of Saskaya’s messy desk, remembering.
A folder of Cata’s press clippings lay open. I flipped through it for a moment, remembering the way she kept these articles on hand to show me what they wanted me to be. But that wasn’t me, then, and they’re not me, now. They’re sad reminders of how badly I’ve already failed at the most basic tasks of being a princess.
At the sound of Lorcan’s return, I closed the folder. There’s no reason to hide that I was looking at it. In the photographs I look impossibly young, and more beautiful than I have ever actually felt. I’m inexplicably embarrassed by them.
I didn’t appreciate my good fortune then. I’m not sure I deserve it now. What a foolish girl I was. Yearning for things I was never going to have. An education. Freedom. Respect and love, most of all.
All proved elusive. Now there’s nothing left but the dreary weight of ruling.
“Sas used those to try and jog my memory.” Lorcan’s voice, so close by, jolted me. I sensed him rather than looking up—the clean scent of his freshly-washed skin, the warmth of his body at my back.
“It didn’t work,” I said, flatly.
“Not really.” Lorcan reached past me to flip it open again. He paged to one of the later entries in the stack. Us at the Louvre. Me in a backless emerald dress that hid nothing. I looked like a Hollywood movie star, and Lorcan was mind-numbingly handsome in his suit. He, too, looks impossibly young. That life seems so long ago, now. “This one. I remembered that night, a little.”
“A little?”
Does he remember how boldly he undressed me from neck to navel? It didn’t take much. The bodice was held up with two pieces of silk tied at the back of my neck. Lorcan took advantage of a dark corner of the museum to touch me, when there was no other way for us to be together privately.
He glanced at me then, and my insides erupted with flutters. “Pieces. Fragments. Things I didn’t trust or believe. It was very confusing.”
Stupidly, I remained rooted to the spot. “How so?”
“I would have these...episodes. Not dreams; I wasn’t asleep when they happened. Right on the edge, though.” His hand came to my back. I flinched at the contact but didn’t move away. “I would be kissing you, or touching you. There was this crushing sense of longing. I’d wake up then—or become fully conscious, I guess—and remember you yelling at me in the snow after that party. Running away in Princes Street Gardens. Now I know you were running away from the men I killed, not me. But at the time...” He trailed off. “I couldn’t put the pieces together to figure out the truth. I was sure you despised me, but Raina insisted I was wrong. Saskaya didn’t know either way. Suspected there were feelings, but didn’t know how much they’d changed.”
Because we hid everything we were, back then. Too afraid of being separated, only to have it happen anyway. We should’ve claimed the time we had together. Like Scarlett and Kenton did.
My heart pinches at the memory of Kenton’s playful roughhousing and sometimes brutal honesty.
The warm press of Lorcan’s palm left an imprint on my back when he removed it. I exhaled through parted lips, staring without focus. As long as he doesn’t know how he still affects me, I can get through the next few months of this façade.
“You weren’t entirely wrong,” I said when I could breathe normally again. “I did despise you, at first.”
I can’t quite despise him now, though. He’s lost so much. Part of me believes that when he confessed to remembering me after pretending not to for weeks, he was reaching for that shared past, hoping we could reclaim what had been taken from us.
That’s the part of me that needs to hold him at a distance. The danger is that he’ll betray me all over again. I can’t afford any more false starts to my shaky rule, and he’s already made a fool of me once.
Lorcan set out two bowls. I tucked my skirts beneath my bottom and sat. I glanced up to find his flinty eyes crinkled with mirth.
“I thought you never hated me.”
“Never too late to start.” I smiled sweetly. His answering smirk was simultaneously familiar and rage-inducing.
I’m starting to suspect that Lorcan knows exactly what effect he has on me, and that Raina was right: he will try to worm his way back into my good graces. I cannot allow that to happen. The only thing more humiliating than being cheated on by the man I spent a year waiting for, would be giving him a chance to do it twice.
Or marrying him, and setting myself up for a lifetime of infidelity.
There are many things I need to bury tonight. My father. Cata. The love I once shared with Lorcan.
All my hope.
