“Let’s take this time,” she said. “This time here, to decide what we want to do. Together. As parents. For our child.”
Because their child should be able to run wild and climb trees, and pick berries. Because their child should live in a home with parents who loved them. Who didn’t fight. A mother who didn’t lose her temper and slap their father. A father who didn’t look at their mother with so much heat and outrage that it felt like they’d burn the whole house down.
She and Andrei knew how to resist each other. They’d done it for years.
If they could do it for the sake of the throne, surely doing it for their own child would be no more difficult.
Surely.
Chapter Thirteen
THE LIBRARY BECAMEtheir neutral ground. They spent much of the day separate from one another, and Andrei felt that it was a decent testament to how they would manage everything once the baby was born.
He could imagine, very comfortably, the two of them having a life here. They would be… Friends, he supposed. Something so much less toxic than his parents. Throwing dishes, shouting, disappearing to their room for hours.
His mother crying.
His father had been particularly good at twisting the knife in his mother’s ribs when he wanted to get a reaction out of her.
And his own love—as he’d known then, as he knew it now—served as a reminder of how emotions could be twisted and manipulated. He’d been so young. A vine that had been easily twisted around a trellis, to grow around the wrong ideas, feelings and conclusions.
It was only the royal family that had allowed him to understand love, but even then, in himself, he could not trust it. For good reason.
This place was so… Haunted. It held so many memories. Good and bad, and often the good and bad twisted around each other. He didn’t want his child to grow up that way.
And that made him feel all the more resolved in this.
They took meals together occasionally, but tonight Emerald was having dinner in her room. She was having bouts of sickness at all times of the day.
She insisted that it was normal, and all completely fine. She was on a diet of herbal tea and extremely pungent pickled cabbage that made his stomach curl, but that she seemed to enjoy.
Or rather, craved, which she had informed him was slightly different from enjoyment, and had more to do with necessity.
He had been an only child. He had never really been around pregnant women. It was an experience.
He heard her behind him, and he turned. She was wearing a nightgown, barefoot, her red hair swirling around her shoulders. There were circles under her eyes, and he wished he could go to her and wipe them away. But he didn’t.
Because that would be to break this spell between them.
Everything was good right now, and he didn’t want to break it.
“And how was your day?” she asked, floating into the room and moving to sit in his chair.
A little quirk of hers. Or, she was trying to be annoying. The thing that was really annoying about it was that he found it cute, and he supposed it was okay for him to find her cute. Maybe they would coparent. Maybe they wouldn’t even be a couple.
The thought of that made him taste something metallic in the back of his mouth.
“Fine. I did some work.”
“What work do you do exactly?”
“I have investments. Mainly in companies that make military grade weapons.”
“That sounds…”
“Like the most legal way to be adjacent to the kind of work my father did? You would be correct. But I understand it.”
“It wasn’t a judgment. I help run a country. I understand how these things work. Or I guess, I did run a country. Who knows what will be there when we get back.”
