Page 46 of Wedding Night In The King's Bed

Do you make my son happy? she’d asked. And then she’d looked up, with a smile. It is not that I think he is particularly capable of happiness. It is more that I’m wondering if you’ve managed to convince him that he could be. That it is even remotely possible.

Helene had shrugged helplessly. I don’t know, she had said honestly.

They had met twice more after that, and while each visit was pleasant, they started doing a bit of digging, Elettra and Helene. Some comparing of notes. And Helene had intended to raise the subject of his mother with Gianluca.

Eventually.

She couldn’t say she was sorry that he had appeared here tonight. No matter how thunderous he looked.

And that was putting it mildly.

“You will not speak of my father, Madam,” Gianluca bit out, that black glare of his on Elettra.

Helene did not think it through. She stood, as if prepared to put her body between Gianluca and Elettra if necessary. And she knew the instant she did it that he would not take to it kindly.

He did not. His eyes widened in affront.

“This is your mother, Gianluca,” she reminded her husband. “How is it you have managed to forget that?”

As he took a step toward her, Helene felt her heart catch in her chest. Because the lie she believed least was that he was as cold and as remote as he sometimes behaved.

She knew different. She’d felt different.

This was the man who’d become her lover.

This was the man who was still obsessed with the absurd notion that she had lied about her innocence—but who she sometimes caught looking at her with a very nearly soft expression on his face when he thought she was asleep.

Maybe she was putting too much stock in those moments. Maybe she wanted them to mean something they didn’t, a necklace of connected baubles, little threads for a tapestry only she would ever see.

Helene had to believe otherwise.

She had to, for her own heart—and for her child.

“I never forget my mother,” Gianluca told her darkly. “I never forget her betrayals. The mockery she made of her position, of the crown, and of everything else I hold dear. I do not need you to wade into matters that do not concern you and make them more complicated.”

But Helene did not back down, because she could see beneath that darkness. She could see the hurt in him. She could feel it like an ache in her own bones. She thought of a little boy who believed what he was told, because he had no reason not to, and she hurt, too. “I can think of very little that concerns me more.”

“I will deal with you later,” Gianluca told Helene, though his gaze shifted to Elettra. “My mother and I need to refresh our memories.”

Elettra stood, then, and somehow Helene knew that she was the only one here who saw the way the other woman trembled. And also how she hid it.

She met and held her son’s gaze. “My memory is perfectly clear,” she told him.

And every single thing Helene had ever learned urged her to sit down. To do as she was told. To retreat in the moment, so she might live to fight another day. To bend, choose silence, and utilize softness as a weapon.

Helene had always been so good at these things.

But she was carrying a baby. She was going to be a mother.

She could not live with herself if she did not fight for the life she wanted. The life her child deserved.

Because what good was the magic she and Gianluca made between them if everything else was poisoned? And though she had intended to simply prove, over time, that she could not be the liar he believed her to be—through her character, through her works, through the way she loved him—she felt as if she was running out of that time now. For there was no way she could bring a child into the world when her own husband truly believed that, at heart, she was a liar.

She knew it started here, in this quiet little cottage, where another woman branded a liar and a cheat had waited all this time. Not always out of sight. Not always quietly. Not always according to the principles Helene felt certain Elettra knew as well as she did, when it came to handling powerful men and highly weighted marriages.

“Do you know what I asked your mother?” Helene began.

Gianluca let out that bitter laugh of his. “I shudder to think.”