He dug into the side of his chair cushion and produced an unsealed fold of parchment. “Your mother wrote to me before she sailed away. I had refused it upon arrival, but Rena held onto it.” A sound that was half-grunt, half-laugh escaped his chest. “She knows me well.”
“What did my mother say?”
“I’m certain you can guess. She loves us still and wishes me to know what a good man you are.” He twisted to face Dimitrios more fully. “Are you? A good man?”
“I try to be.”
Antonis stood and paced toward the fireplace. He tossed the letter into the flames.
Dimitrios’s stomach sank like a stone through water. That wasn’tmerely his mother’s familiar scrawl blackening, but the care she put into words, the hope, cheapened by one toss. “You don’t believe her.”
“I make my own determinations.” Antonis faced Dimitrios, his expression hard, but his eyes betrayed the storm. “Perean sits on a precipice, and here you are again, digging in your heels inside my home. These aren’t the actions of a man who would be king, not one who cares for his country.”
Dimitrios didn’t flinch. The past months of cold interactions and doubts couldn’t have prepared him better for this conversation. “I’m well aware of the dangers to Perean, and I can say with full authority that not even you can imagine the depth of our situation, my lord. But that’s where my authority ends—I uncover horrible truths and prepare for the day I can actuallydosomething about it.”
He shifted to the edge of his seat and leaned into his grandfather’s space. “The people might recognize me as a Vidalatos, but even I can see how anxious they are for the inquisitor’s fate. Right now, he’s the one man they’ll listen to, the only man who can declare me the rightful king, and yet he remains in a coma.”
Antonis’s gaze carved into him like a sculptor with a fresh block of stone. “Yes. I heard what befell Stavros. Unfortunate circumstance, though for all you know, he could wake up and declare your cousin, Alexandra, queen.”
“He’d already decided in my favor,” Dimitrios said, heat edging his words. “He would have told the council had we not been attacked.”
“You can’t know that.” Antonis didn’t move, but the set of his shoulders shifted, retracting, not retreating. Like a soldier bracing for an impact he’d already accepted. “You hoped he would. You need him to. Otherwise, all of this”— he gestured vaguely—“will have been nothing but wasted time and flailing ambition.”
“I was with Stavros during the attack. Hesaidthe words aloud. He was trying to warn me that the council couldn’t be trusted.”
Antonis faced the fire. Silence stretched for an eternity, then, quietly, he said, “You must think I can help, or you wouldn’t be here.”
“I think youwantto help,” Dimitrios said. “That’s not the same, but it’s not nothing either.”
“You’re mistaken.”
Dimitrios exhaled sharply through his nose. He fought the urge to stand and pace, to raise his voice, to bare his throat to a man who clearly wasn’tready to see him. Only control would help here. Only truth. “Sometimes, help isn’t about titles or armies. Sometimes, it’s just…having one person you trust at your side. Just one.”
The old man stilled. A beat. Two. Then, he half-turned, and he met Dimitrios’s eyes across that unspoken, fragile chasm.
Dimitrios stepped into it without hesitation. “I’m alone in a land I barely know, whose ways I don’t understand, and surrounded by people I can’t trust. Everyone who’s guided me through these pitfalls—my mother, Selene, Oskar—they’re all gone. I don’t know who’s next. All I know is that Mother said I would find the allies I need here. With our family.”
Antonis’s eyes narrowed, not in accusation, but in thought. Like a man trying to solve a riddle he didn’t like the answer to. “She said that?”
“That surprises you?”
“Everything I’m learning about Pandora these days surprises me.”
There was no venom in his voice now—only something quieter. Sadder. As Antonis lowered himself into the chair again, sinking deep into its leather embrace, Dimitrios felt the flicker of progress. A crack in the stone. Maybe they could talk now. Maybe this would be a conversation between family—if not in affection, then at least in honesty.
He should have known better.
Antonis rested one hand on the armrest, fingers curling into the worn leather. “Pandorabetrayedour family to marry a Vidalatos. It’s as if we’re talking about two different people.”
“You truly hate the Vidalatos name that much? She’s your daughter.”
Storm-filled eyes snapped up to his. “You couldn’t possibly understand.” The words were intended to cut through to the bone. “Butshedid. And she chose them anyway.”
This wasn’t petty family bitterness. This was a man who’d wrapped his pain in armor and worn it so long he couldn’t remember what it was like to be without it.
Antonis appeared to relax—a little. “You want to understand? Fine. I’ll give you the truths your mother never did.”
Dimitrios sank into his seat, bracing himself.
