Princess, Pregnant, Prisoner
Millie Adams
Chapter One
“SO,IT’S TObe a loveless marriage, to a stranger in a strange land.”
Princess Emerald of Basilia stared up at her older brother, King Onyx, his gaze dark and uncompromising as it ever was. And then to his left, at her brother’s right-hand man, and her bodyguard, Andrei Ardelean.
He might as well have been carved from stone. He was a man who exhibited little emotion, unless you knew him. And Emerald and Onyx were two of the very few people who knew him. Sometimes, Emerald could even get a smile out of him. But not today.
“If you wish to look at it that way, Onyx,” she said, staring her brother down, her rebuttal to his attempt at making her decision sound unhinged obviously irritating him.
“It is not how Iwishto look at it,” he said. “It is how it is.”
“And what othersolutiondo you see? King Lucian asked for me.”
King Lucian, ruler of Alabria, The Sea Serpent of the Mediterranean. The most feared, loathed and reviled ruler in the string of islands that made up the Jewel Belt.
“You are my sister, you are not a political bargaining tool.”
“Sadly, Onyx, I am. That’s what it means when you’re born into royalty, and you know that. We have to do what is best for the country. There is no other choice.”
“There are many other choices.”
“King Lucian is liable to bring his fleet of ships to our island and raid the place to take me.”
Andrei shifted where he stood, his black gaze menacing. “He is welcome to try.” Even after all these years of living in Basilia, he retained hints of a Romanian accent.
His parents had been fleeing a crime family, so the story went, and they had stowed away on a boat bound for Basilia, but it had sunk and they’d drowned.
Andrei was the only survivor.
He’d washed up on shore, and it had been her mother’s and father’s natures to take him in like he was their own. That poor, lonely orphan had become a symbol of the welcoming nature of their country. But she knew it had never really been about that. It was about love.
It was only after that that her father and mother had been killed in a car accident, and her brother Onyx had ascended the throne at the age of sixteen. Andrei had been part of the family by that point. Onyx had appointed him as her personal bodyguard, and so he had become her shadow, wherever she’d gone. The three of them were bonded together by loss. By trauma, and she could understand the pushback from them now. But both of them were far too pragmatic to behave this way.
They weren’tchildren. Not anymore. They had to put away their fantasies of this place, being separate from the world and being their own personal haven.
They knew better than that. Onyx knew better than that, whatever he said. He himself was in a loveless marriage with a woman who didn’t care for him at all. Emerald and Andrei both hated to see it, and Onyx wouldn’t hear a negative word against his queen. Because he had chosen her for reasons of diplomacy. Nothing else, and that mattered to him more than anything. She understood that it was hard to watch your sibling take less than what they deserved, but she also understood why he’d done it. Ultimately, she respected him for it, because he was serving a greater need, a greater good.
That he didn’t see her as worthy of doing the same spoke to the fact that however much he tried to pretend that he saw her as an equal, he didn’t. It infuriated her. They were royal, they had a duty to their country above all else. Above all notions of love, passion or even personal happiness.
Her mother had given up everything she’d ever known to marry her father, and that marriage had united a kingdom.
How could Emerald do less? In honor of a mother who was no longer here, but who had shaped her in every way that mattered?
She decided to tell him as much.
“What’s good for you is good for me. What’s good for the future of the country is what I must do, just as you did when you married Circe.”
“Don’t speak ill of my wife. Do not compare her to a maniacal authoritarian.”
“The rumors about King Lucian are simply that. Rumors. We don’t know that he killed any of his wives.”
“Even if he killed one of them, it’s a wife too many. And anyway, they seem to always meet an end, don’t they.”
“There were only two. He’s hardly Bluebeard.”
