“What about whatIhave had?” she demanded, temper flashing.
“Whatyouhave had?” he repeated, frustration reaching its boiling point. Everything he did was forher, for his citizens. And she complained when she was the one who had dismantled all they’d built?
“You havedestroyedme,” he shot at her. “Does this make you happy?” he demanded. “Satisfied? This love you speak of has only ever been used against me like a weapon. You are not the first. I hope to God you are the last.”
It was too much. He knew it was too much. A break. She was always causing a damnbreak.
She looked at him like he’d lost leave of his senses. Ifonly.
“A weapon? Love isn’t a weapon,” she said, shaking her head. “What would make you think… Your father didn’t love you, Alexandre. The way he harmed you and Evelyne was never love.”
She said this with such certainty, as if she worried he saw the warped version of his father’s attention or, even worse, his father’s abuse as love. “No. Never. He never lovedus.” But Enzohadloved.
And Alexandre had enjoyed an unwanted front row seat to what that meant. What kind of adversity it caused. The stress, the blows, the end. Violence and grief and destruction.
All for love.
“Your mother also loved you.” She said it like a statement, but it felt like a question, and it stirred up too many things that needed to stay in the past. His motherhadloved him. She had tried to save him. She had been good, wonderful. Everything he did was for her memory and for Evelyne.
He was the protector in the face of all the ways he’d failed as a boy.
He turned away from Ines. “I will not speak of her. I have made that clear. You must go. It is for yourowngood, but you are making me glad of it.”
“She did love you, didn’t she?”
Ines wouldn’t give up. She wouldn’tsee. “More than anything, Ines,” he said, exhausted clean through. “Why must you belabor this point?”
“If she loved you more than anything, and your father did not, I do not understand why you feel so…threatened by me loving you. By me wanting you to love our daughter. If you would explain anything to me, maybe I could understand.”
He remained mute for a wide variety of reasons while she sat there looking at him, seeking answers he didn’t have. Even if she deserved them.
“I am trying to understand, and I cannot,” Ines said, quietly but with deep, haunting emotion in her voice. “I know you want to be nothing like Enzo. I don’t think youcouldbe anything like him, but this is not that. So what happened to you, Alex?”
Alex, Alex, Alex.AlwaysAlexwith her. Always poking under all the walls he’d needed to erect to be the perfect king. Theoppositeking to his father.
“Happened to me? Nothing. Don’t you see? Nothing happened tome. My mother died because oflove. My father used her dead body as a punching bag. Because oflove. My father violated the trust of his citizens and his duty to them. Evelyne suffered abuses her entire childhood that I could not stop, but I stand before you, all in one piece.”
Ines’s eyes were wide and bright and full of tears. She looked pale. “Perhaps in one piece, Alex, but no less marked. No less…warped.”
“You dare call mewarped?” he demanded. The shock of the blows just kept coming. “Just because my father didn’t lovemedoesn’t mean he didn’tlove. Oh, he loved. My mother most of all. Until I was born and ruined everything. Because she did not have room for both of them, only me. And he blamed me for that.Sheblamed me for that.”
If I loved you less, I could be what he wants, but I love you too much for that.How often had his mother whispered that to him, as if it were some mantra to save herself?
But it had only felt like blame.
It wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t. It washis.
If she loved you less, everything would be the way it was. There is no good in you or for you, I will make sure of it, so she never knows your love.How often had his father taken his rage on not getting exactly what he wanted on Alex—a punishment for love.
Love was Enzo’s weapon. His bludgeon.
And his mother’s excuse.
And Alexandre had built himself to be everything his father was not, but he loved in spite of himself…and he would never, ever use it against another.
The silence was heavy, throbbing, but it was Ines who broke it first.
“And you’d never wield a weapon your father did,” she said, with such quiet surety he felt as though she’d used her own weapon to cut him open. But in all that pain, he found some semblance of nothingness. Detachment. A bit like watching his parents fight when he’d been but a boy.
