Six weeks later
“YOU’RE PREGNANT, MIA.”
Her ob-gyn’s soft declaration had kept ringing around in Mia’s head all day as she set the high school soccer team through its drills as their new assistant coach.
Sheila, who had also known Mia since their mothers had dropped them off at the same elementary school, had held Mia’s hand. “After everything you’ve been through this year, I... Mia, say something. This news could be a shock in itself but—”
“It’s a shock, yes, but, oh...” Mia didn’t know where the words had come from. She’d been alone for so long, but all she felt was overwhelming joy, a profound sense of anticipation in her chest. That night had been the beginning of a new chapter of her life and a child was the result. “I want this baby, Sheila. I...will love this baby.”
That night back at the two-bedroom apartment she’d been allotted at the campus, Mia still couldn’t stop smiling nor looking at her stomach in the mirror. Nor had her mind wavered even a little bit. But then, she’d always known her mind.
Accepting her new job, moving out of the apartment that Brian and she had shared—it had been the right move. Standing on the sidelines, watching young, ambitious players give their soul to soccer, it was fulfilling, yes, but life stretched ahead of her, a chasm of loneliness.
A baby would change everything, fill her days and nights. A baby she would love without conditions.
Even though there had been curiosity in her eyes, Sheila hadn’t pressed Mia for details about who the father was.
The father. Mia fell back onto the couch in her living room with a soft plop.
Nikandros... Cold sweat gathered on her forehead.
This baby belonged to Nikandros too.
Not a day had gone by in six weeks that Mia hadn’t thought about that night or him.
How could she escape it when every news channel was bleating on and on about the tiny principality of Drakon, the Mediterranean’s Jewel, and the decline of its King Theos into madness, a fact that had been hidden from the media and its people for a long time? When every social media site covered the smallest movement of its Princes?
With a greed she couldn’t curb, Mia had followed the news of the royal family. The media had been lambasting Nikandros yet again, for dereliction of duty and apparently not caring enough about the country.
Only Mia knew how much returning to Drakon had affected Nikandros, but even she found it easy to forget in the face of his merrymaking.
Not once had he answered the media’s questions—would he stay in Drakon now and shoulder the responsibility of its people? Would he share his brother Crown Prince Andreas’s burden?
Only deep silence from Nikandros. The pap had already caught him partying at a friend’s nightclub, racing a dangerous curve in Drakon in a hell-on-wheels red Ferrari. The media then pronounced that the reckless Daredevil Prince Nikandros had reverted to form three days after the public announcement of his father’s madness.
It was clear that the Daredevil Prince was not going to change his spots and settle down into responsibility. He had seemed so serious, so full of an unnamed pain to Mia, but now this, in front of his entire nation.
Had it all been just an act? Would he even acknowledge a child who had accidentally been conceived after a one-night stand as his?
Swallowing away the ache in her throat, the urge to share the news with him, Mia decided to wait to inform him.
At least, until she was strong enough to face Nikandros without weakening again. Until she was strong enough to face his reaction to their unborn child.
* * *
Nikandros stood on the ramparts of the King’s Palace and stared out at the panoramic views offered of Drakon and the harbor. The smallish hill on which the eight-hundred-year-old palace stood had provided a strategic defense location from the numerous attacks through the centuries, from various regional and global powers who had always wanted to assimilate the small Mediterranean gem for their own.
But the House of Drakos—his ancestors, with this palace as their stronghold—had clung on, despite the attacks and defended the little jewel.
As a kid, stuck in the palace hospice during hot summers and mild, wet winters alike, Nikandros had loved the history of Drakon.
A dragon and its treasures and one band of fierce warriors, the stories had sustained him through a wretched, ill childhood. He’d inhaled the old volumes in the vast library, breathed in every arch, wall and wing that had been added to the King’s Palace by each generation, making it impregnable. With no children to play with, he had weaved elaborate dreams picturing Andreas and himself as modern princes who would deliver Drakon from its various nemeses.
Crown Prince Andreas, his older brother, would command him, and Nikandros, his loyal knight, would jump to do his bidding.
“Why won’t he visit me, Maman?” He’d relentlessly plagued his mother with the same question every time they had seen Andreas on TV, standing proudly by their father.
“You’ll join him when you’re feeling better, ma cherie,” his maman would say.
But Andreas had never had time for the attention-craving, mostly ill Nikandros. Nor had King Theos ever shown any interest in him beyond inquiring of the doctors if his spare was going to make it.
Not until Nikandros had turned nineteen and finally, against all medical predictions, seemed to have cast off the sickness that had plagued him all his life. And then, only then, had Theos entered Nikandros’s life.
“I should have sent the guards to this terrace to look for you,” came the deep voice of his brother, Crown Prince Andreas. A small smile flitted over Andreas’s lips, as if this was one of those sweet memories that siblings shared. That is, if the siblings had come from a normal family and were not the much-adored son and heir of a little mad, power-obsessed King and the spare he had barely tolerated and known even less.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Nik drawled in a careless voice, forcing himself to relax his tight grip on the stone wall.
“The nurses used to run over the palace looking for you, only to find you here amongst these ramparts, waving that rubber sword around with barely a stitch over your body. This was your favorite place,” finished Andreas, coming to stand by Nik.
“How the hell would you know?” When you barely ever saw me, he didn’t say.
“The study in my wing has a window that provides a perfect view of this very terrace. I would watch you brandish that rubber thing, fighting off imaginary enemies. If not the ramparts, it would be stables. Third choice, the kitchens.” The wistfulness in his brother’s voice cut Nikandros.
Thick silence descended over the terrace. Nik stared at the gaunt hollows of his brother’s face shadowed in the waning light of the sun.
Theos was slipping, had descended into the final stage of the dementia that had claimed him for the past few years. The sight of his once-proud and overbearing father with that crazed look in his eyes, and fragments of gibberish falling from his lips—it had shaken him deeply.
And yet it was the look in Andreas’s eyes that rooted him to the spot.
Andreas had been dealing with his father’s madness for years now, and the country’s declining morale, and the power-hungry Crown Council.
Guilt twisted deep and low in Nik’s gut. He’d known what was happening but had refused to come. “It is a little late to pretend we share a brotherly bond, Andreas.”
The infuriatingly amenable expression did not budge from