Page 50 of Wedding Night In The King's Bed

Anything to be something besides a victim.

Because if he was a victim, then it was far more possible that his mother was, too.

His mother, who had stuck around. Who had never hidden away, nor run. Elettra had instead remained seemingly unapologetic. She had never corrected the record. She had never explained.

Gianluca had thought it was defiance—he had wanted to believe it was—but out here in the cold tonight, it seemed a lot more like dignity.

And after tonight, he was going to have to face the fact that while he knew his father all too well, he knew his own mother not at all.

It all seemed to jumble around inside of him. Mothers and fathers. Children. Helene, who was simply waiting in that way of hers. Not quite so maddeningly serene tonight, but watching him closely—as if she already knew exactly what would happen inside him in the face of her announcement.

He suspected she might.

She was his queen. His wife.

She was going to be the mother of his child.

The child that he had declared he would treat precisely as he had been treated. When he’d said that, he’d been focused on his work. How he’d turned out. What had become of him, not how it had felt.

But tonight he could remember that scared little boy who had wanted only his mother.

And whatever it was that had come asunder inside of him before broke apart even further now.

Gianluca took a step back, then another. He was aware that he was staggering like a drunk man, but he could not seem to stop himself.

“Helene,” he managed to grit out. “Helene, mia regina, I do not think you understand...”

But when he stepped back again, she came forward. She came straight to him as if she was sure that he would welcome her easily.

As if he had not been keeping her at arm’s distance from the start.

He thought of what she’d said to him here, that she’d had the courage to say it when he had not. That they had looked at each other in a garden in Provence, the smell of lavender in the air and bees buzzing lazily as they would, and everything had changed.

They had changed, and theirs were not the sort of lives that allowed for such things.

There had been no place to put something so overwhelming. So mad and wild and intense.

“I had to keep you in your proper place.” He would never know how he forced those words free from the constriction in his chest, his throat. And he could hear how it sounded, there in the cool night air in the shadow of the palace. “I don’t mean that in the way you think I do.”

“Then tell me what you mean,” she said quietly.

Gianluca blew out a breath, as if that would help. Or loosen his chest enough to speak, anyway. “My father, who I wanted very badly to think of as a good man, called me into the throne room and told me how the world works. I was ten. Looking back, I do not think this was because he was seized with the urge to parent his only child. I believe it was because he thought he could leverage me against my mother.”

And it wasn’t lost on him that the word mother sounded thick and little used on his tongue.

Because it was.

Helene moved closer, keeping that gaze of hers so steady on his. As if all he really needed to do was follow the gold there, brighter than the moon. “He explained to me that the King especially must keep everything partitioned. And I’m not sure I thought much of him as a man, though I wished I could, but I thought he was a decent king. And after his death, when my mother seemed to get more and more erratic by the day—”

He stopped himself. Because everything inside him was spinning around and around, and he could not be certain he knew anything. Not even what he would have said, only a few hours ago, was the inevitability of Elettra’s lust for the spotlight.

Because it was possible—it was more than just possible—that it had never been that at all.

“I think you can grieve people in a variety of ways,” Helene said quietly. “And not all of them are palatable to others. I don’t know why we think they should be.”

Gianluca tried his best to focus. Not on his mother’s grief, but on the things he needed to say to this woman. His wife and queen.

This woman who would make him a father.