Page 47 of Wedding Night In The King's Bed

“She asked me a question no one has thought to ask me in a very long while,” Elettra said, and she looked almost wistful. “And for once I felt I could truly answer.”

“I don’t understand the purpose of this,” Gianluca thundered then, as if the storm in him had spilled over. “Is it not enough that I allow you both to live here, insulated from the lies you have told and the damage you’ve done? What more is it that you want?”

It was not clear which woman he was speaking to, Helene saw.

Which was the problem.

“I asked your mother if she really had cheated on your father,” Helene said quietly, well aware that the words made Gianluca jerk as if she’d kicked him in the gut.

And it was hard not to go to him, but she couldn’t. She wouldn’t. This was her chance to carve out a better life for all of them here...if only he would let himself see it.

“Not why. Not how. Not, what could you be thinking? and so on.” Elettra laughed, and the sound coming from her was not bitter at all. “I was stunned. In thirty years, no one has ever doubted that I am guilty as charged, in every possible way.”

“Because you are.” Gianluca’s voice was so low. His eyes were so dark.

Helene still stood between the two of them, and she lifted a hand as if extending it toward Gianluca.

She did not expect him to take it. But it still cut that he didn’t.

“But what if there was a deeper lie?” she asked him, and shook her head at the look of something like bewilderment on her face. “I couldn’t get the things Lady Lorenza told me out of my mind. The things she did not want to say about your father’s character, and how that, juxtaposed with a happy life she leads outside of the spotlight, made me wonder. And I started to think about what it is that lies do. How they can transform everything.”

“Do you need a lesson in this?” Gianluca demanded, but he did not sound like himself. He sounded...torn.

She had to hope it was enough.

“I am a walking object lesson in this, Gianluca,” Helene replied. “But first, imagine this. A young girl marries an overwhelmingly powerful man. He is older than her, the king of everything, and he quickly makes it clear that he will only tolerate the strictest possible control on her at all times. As if she is little more than a trophy. All his, to do with as he wishes.”

Gianluca ran his hands over his face. “Is this one of your fairy tales, Helene?” He dropped his hands and eyed his mother. “Do you think this version of events will work?”

“The thing about tabloids,” Helene said softly, before Elettra could snap back at her son, “is that they don’t have anything interesting to say about people who find happiness and quiet lives on the other side of the glare. So why would they continually drag Lorenza into all those stories about King Alvize and his marriage? Unless, of course, someone far more powerful than an ex-girlfriend who made no attempt at any point to capitalize on her relationship to the crown, was feeding it to them?”

Gianluca’s dark gaze moved to Elettra, then back to Helene, as hard as a fist. “What are you saying?”

She thought he might know, but she kept going anyway. “Imagine Lorenza was less the great love of your father’s life, and more the only person who had ever dared defy him. Would he want revenge? That was the second question I asked your mother.”

Helene glanced at Elettra, who swallowed. Hard. But she did not back down.

“One night,” the older woman said, “your father was in one of his moods. You remember how he was.” And Helene thought that Gianluca’s silence then said more than any protestation could have. “One of the aides told me it was because Lorenza had announced her pregnancy. Alvize did not like this. He was ranting and raving, and I was all of twenty. Heavily pregnant myself, with his heir, and I thought I’d heard quite enough of the Lady Lorenza to last me a lifetime.” A shadow crossed her face, as if she was looking in a very old mirror. “I suggested that he was jealous. I pointed out that she couldn’t make it any plainer that she’d moved on.”

Gianluca let out a sigh that told Helene that all the inferences she’d made about his father, about his family, were true.

Elettra looked down for a moment. “That was unwise. But I didn’t learn my lesson. He made me sorry enough that night, but I got to thinking in the way that angry young girls do. He’d hurt my feelings and I thought I could hurt his, too.” She lifted her head, and Helene saw her son in the way she held herself. “Maybe what I needed was a little leverage. Maybe I needed him to think that I was something he could lose too. Maybe then he would treat me with a little more respect.”

Gianluca muttered something beneath his breath. Helene held hers.

“Your grandmother was still alive, and while she and I never had a bond as some do, she had told me very early in my marriage that she had never known a man who did not benefit from imagining there was some competition.” She smiled when Gianluca made another dark, low noise. “So one time, when he was raging on about Lorenza and how it was obvious to anyone who looked that she was living her life at him, I asked if he would show the same interest in me if I ever decided to break up with him. Or, in the way of so many royals, not break up with him at all, but move on all the same.”

Gianluca looked shaken. “You did not say this.”

Elettra held her son’s gaze. “I did.”

“That was a remarkably foolish thing to do.” And Gianluca sounded as close to stricken as Helene had ever heard him.

“Did you ever wonder why a man with your father’s temper, raging down the palace, somehow sat idly by while his wife betrayed him so publicly and repeatedly?” When Elettra laughed this time, it was a brittle sound. “When I woke up, it was to discover that he had knocked me out cold in two ways. The first with a backhand. And the second with the papers. The stories of my first affair were all over the papers.”

Gianluca flinched as if he’d taken a blow himself. He was breathing too heavily, ghosts in his eyes, and a dawning, horrible new knowledge. “While you were pregnant. With me.”

Elettra nodded slowly. Deliberately. “And then, my darling son, he had a weapon. One he could use as he pleased. When I spoke out, or dared defend myself. When I misbehaved or when you did—every time, he invented a new lover. I lost count. And for good measure, he made certain to suggest that, perhaps, Lorenza’s son was his too. That Lorenza was part of the triangle that existed only in his head. I’m sure he hoped that, at the very least, he could wreck her marriage as well.”