Rejection was in every line of his body. ‘We were careful. I was careful. I took precautions, as I always do.’
‘Charming!’ She crossed her arms over her chest. ‘Tell me more about the other women you’ve had sex with, please.’
He ground his teeth together. He hadn’t meant that, and yet it was true. Sexual responsibility was ingrained in Matthias. Anyone in his position would take that seriously.
‘What the hell are you saying?’ he demanded, all the command his position conferred upon him in those words.
She sucked in a deep breath as though she was steadying herself. ‘Fine. Yes. I fell pregnant.’ Her words hit him right in the solar plexus, each with the speed and strength of a thousand bullets.
‘What?’ For the first time in his life, Matthias was utterly lost for words.
When his family had died and a nation in mourning had looked to him, a fifteen-year-old who’d lost his parents and brother, who’d been trapped in a car with them as life had left their bodies, he had known what was expected of him. He’d received the news and wrapped his grief into a small compartment for indulgence at a later date, and he’d shown himself to be strong and reliable: a perfect king-in-waiting.
She lifted her fingertips to the side of her head, rubbing her temples, and fixed him with her ocean-green stare. Her anguish was unmistakable.
‘I found out about a month after you left.’
His world was a place that made no sense. There were sharp edges everywhere, and nothing fitted together. ‘You were pregnant?’
She pulled a face. ‘I just said that.’
His eyes swept shut, his blood raced. ‘You should have told me.’
‘I tried! You were literally impossible to find.’
‘No one is impossible to find.’
‘Believe me, you are. “Matt”. That’s all I had to go on. The hotel wouldn’t give me any information about who’d booked the suite. I had your name and the fact you’re from Tolmirós. That’s it. I wanted to tell you. But trying to find you was like looking for a needle in an enormous haystack.’
And hadn’t he planned for it to be this way? A night without complications—that was what they’d shared. Only everything about Frankie had been complicated, including the way she’d cleaved her way into his soul.
‘So you made a decision like this on your own?’ he fired back, the pain of what he’d lost, what his kingdom had lost, the most important thing in the conversation.
‘Decision?’ She paled. ‘It was hardly a decision.’
‘You had an abortion and took from me any chance to even know my child,’ he said thickly, his chest tight, his organs squeezing inside him.
She sucked in a loud breath. ‘What makes you think I had an abortion?’
He stared at her, the question hanging between them, everything sharp and uncertain now. When he was nine years old he’d run the entire way around the palace, without pausing for even a moment. Up steps, along narrow precipices with frightening glimpses of the city far beneath him, he’d run and he’d run, and when he’d finished he’d collapsed onto the grass and stared at the clouds. His lungs had burned and he’d been conscious of the sting of every cell in his body, as though he was somehow supersonic. He felt that now.
‘You’re saying...’ He stared at her, trying to make sense of this, looking for an explanation and arriving at only one. ‘You didn’t have an abortion?’
‘Of course I didn’t.’
Matthias had a rapier-sharp mind, yet he struggled to process her words, to make sense of what she was saying. ‘You did not have an abortion?’
‘No.’
And something fired inside his mind, a memory, a small recollection that had been unimportant at the time. He spun away from her and stalked through the gallery, through the smaller display spaces that curved towards a larger central room. And he stared at the wall that had framed Frankie when he’d first walked in. He’d been so blindsided by the vision of her initially that he hadn’t properly understood the significance of what he was seeing. But now he looked at the paintings—ten of them in total, all of the same little boy—and his blood turned into lava in his veins.
He stared at the paintings and a primal sense of pride and possession firmed inside him. Something else too. Something that made his chest scream and his brow heat—something that made acid coat his insides, as he stared at the boy who was so familiar to him.
Spiro.
He was looking at a version not only of his younger self, but also of his brother. Eyes that had held his, pain and anguish filling them, as life ebbed from him. Eyes that had begged him to help. Eyes that had eventually clouded and died as Matthias watched, helpless, powerless.
For a moment he looked towards the ground, his chest heaving, his pulse like an avalanche, and he breathed in, waiting for the familiar panic to subside.
‘This is my son.’ More than his son—this was his kin, his blood, his.
He didn’t have to turn around to know she was right behind him.
‘He’s two and a half,’ Frankie murmured, the words husky. She cleared her throat audibly. ‘His name is Leo.’
Matthias’s eyes swept shut as he absorbed this information. Leo. Two and a half. Spiro had been nine when he’d died, the vestiges of his boyish face still in evidence. Cheeks that were rounded like this, and dimpled when he smiled, eyes that sparkled with all his secrets and amusements.
He pushed the memories away, refusing to give into them like this. Only in the middle of the night, when time seemed to slip past the veil of living, when ancient stars with their wisdom and experience whispered that they would listen, did he let his mind remember, did he let his heart hurt.
He turned his attention to the paintings, giving each one in turn the full power of his inspection. Several of the artworks depicted Leo—his son—in a state of play. Laughing as he tossed leaves overhead, his sense of joy and vitality communicated through the paint by Frankie’s talented hand. Other paintings were a study of portraiture.
It was the final picture that held him utterly in its thrall.
Leo was staring out of the canvas, his expression frozen in time, arresting a moment of query. One brow was lifted, his lips were turned into a half-smile. His eyes were grey, like Matthias’s—in fact, much of his face was a carbon copy of Matthias’s own bearing. But the freckles that ran haphazardly across the bridge of his nose were all Frankie’s, as was the defiant amusement that stirred in the boy’s features.
Emotions welled inside Matthias, for his own face was only borrowed—first from his father, King Stavros, and it had now been passed onto his own son. What other features and qualities were held by this boy, this small human who was of his own flesh and blood?
His own flesh and blood! An heir! An heir his country was desperate for, an heir he had been poised to marry in order to beget—an heir, already living! An heir, two years old, who he knew nothing about!
‘Where is he?’ The question was gravelled.
He felt her stiffen—he felt everything in that moment, as though the universe was a series of strings and fibres connected through his body to hers. He turned around, pinning her with a gaze that shimmered like liquid metal.
‘Where.’ The word was a slowly flying bullet. ‘Is.’ He