She’s apologizing for me, like I need or want an out for not remembering her name.

I stare at the rubies that drip from her ears. So this is how the rich bleed—elegantly.

“We’re so excited to see the king finally settling down. We thought that he would never,” she says as we join the group.

“Your Majesty,” the women echo, dipping their heads.

“This is Beatrice, Anouk, Isabel, Katarina, …” Helen introduces. I forget each name the moment my eyes move on to the next. Some are old; most are young.

They can’t all be the advisors’ wives. The way some of them are looking at me … if I had to guess, I’d say that the king’s mixed business and pleasure plenty of times in the past.

Jealousy lances through me before I can stop it. To think that any of them might’ve also experienced the king as I have …

The thought is followed by a good dose of self-loathing. For me to be jealous of the affections of the king—it’s unconscionable.

I square my jaw, forcing my emotions down. I swear the group notices my anger. They shift a little restlessly. I’m a predator among prey.

Someone breaks the silence that follows the introductions.

“Beautiful dress, and—” she gasps, “are those heels from Vesuvio’s summer collection?”

I glance down at my toes. Vesuvio?

“They are!” she exclaims. “I adore his entire summer collection. I would kill for a pair.”

My jaw tightens. “Would you?” I say, looking back up.

The woman falls silent, and the rest of the group tensely watches the exchange, some clutching their jewel-encrusted necklaces. They must sense how offensive I find it to even jest about killing over pretty shoes.

Finally, someone breaks the silence and asks the woman next to me about some recent trip she took. As the group gets swept up in the newest conversation, I withdraw further inside myself.

These women are nothing like the ones I’m used to. They care about the length of their skirts and the color of their face paint and the weave of their clothes. They have no idea what goes on outside these walls.

The women I lived with sharpened knives and oiled guns. I saw one fight through a bullet wound to the stomach, even though it eventually killed her. Another performed CPR on an unresponsive boy lying in the streets we patrolled while we were being attacked by local gangs. They were some of the hardest women I ever met, but they would die for you.

And they’d never give a shit what you wore.

Remembering is all it takes.

I leave right in the middle of the conversation. At my back I hear a chorus of soft-spoken protests. I ignore them. Some people you can’t change, and the effort of trying would be wasted.

My eyes sweep the room as I walk. The genders are divided. Men to one side of the room, ladies to the other. The women gossip and preen like all those exotic birds that died off first when war struck. They’re just like them—pretty and soft and so unenduring. The men swirl amber liquid, their faces ruddy. They look so damn proud of themselves. I want to shout at them that anyone can destroy a city.

And, amongst them all, there’s Montes. I never glance his way, but I feel his eyes on me the entire way out.

AS SOON AS I leave the room, the king’s guards fall into step behind me. I come close to threatening them, but even if I promised them death, they still wouldn’t leave me. Say what you will about Montes, he has some loyal guards.

I storm through the palace, heading for the gardens. I feel a great deal of disgust. This is what the new world order does while its citizens starve. I can’t be a part of it.

Once I push open the palace doors and the cool evening air hits my skin, I give into the impulse riding me since I entered that dinner party. I kick my shoes off and wipe my lipstick away with the back of my hand. I pull out the few pins in my hair and shake my locks loose. I pass through the gardens and bypass the giant hedge maze.

I break the delicate clasp of first my bracelet and then my necklace, and let them fall to the ground. Only then do I feel like myself again. I’m still in my dress, and my hands itch to tear into the fabric, but I hold myself back.

I walk across the palace grounds until the back fence comes into view. I head straight for it, my mind replaying the last time I ran towards one of the king’s fences. Odd how something as bland as a wall can conjure such memories.

My chest tightens. All my friends are ghosts, and all my memories are dust in the wind. Out here, beneath the stars, I can’t help but remember that I am hopelessly, achingly alone.

I stare up at the wrought iron fence. It took losing all that I held dear for me to learn a valuable lesson: only when everything is gone are you truly free.

CHAPTER 13

The King

SERENITY CARVED A path of destruction in her wake. She’s the untamable wilderness. Of course she can’t palette civilized company.

The women are speaking frantically to one another, their eyes darting in my direction. They’re worried about my anger, but I don’t blame them for being sheep and my wife a wolf.

I’m done sharing my queen anyway. I don’t want these politicians or their wives to have any part of her, and I don’t want her to give herself away to anyone but me. So after some parting exchanges, I head after her, moving towards the back of the property where my soldiers indicate she went.

Serenity leaves me a trail of expensive breadcrumbs to follow. A satin shoe here, a diamond bracelet there. I follow them to the edge of the palace grounds. She’s several feet away from the wrought iron fence that circles the grounds, and she’s staring up at it like she’s considering the best way to scale it.

“And here I was hoping that you might consider shedding your dress along with the jewelry.”

She doesn’t flinch at my voice, nor does she turn around.

“How do you live with yourself?” she asks, touching one of the wrought iron bars.

For one instant I fear that if I ever let her go, she’d disappear into the land, never to return. God, she’d want that. And I probably just caught her as she was tasting the possibility on her tongue.

I’ve been vacillating between anger and arousal since she stormed out of the palace. I settle on anger.

“You make a fool out of me and now you insult me?”

Finally she turns. Her wild eyes search mine, and it doesn’t matter that she’s broken in all the right places and whole in all the wrong ones. Or that out here with her bare feet and windblown hair, I catch a hint of the woman she should’ve been. That soul of hers, tempered by the hottest of forges, has been and will always be mine.