He remembered Melody’s words in the car that night. What do you think a saint is? she’d demanded, throwing the question at him with the first real spark of temper he’d seen in her. Something he should have celebrated, because wasn’t that what he’d claimed he wanted? Honesty no matter the cost?
Today it felt like a price too steep to pay. All of it.
Orion didn’t reply, too busy waving while below, the Royal Guard performed a particular march to celebrate Idylla’s Armed Forces. Griffin regretted saying anything. More than that, he regretted that he no longer seemed to have control over himself. He knew whose fault that was.
Who are you? Melody had asked him. If you have no one else to blame?
He couldn’t seem to shift that question off of him. It sat on him like a weight, thick and heavy.
When the event was finished and it was time to retreat back into the palace, he found himself hoping that some crisis had cropped up and Orion’s aides would sweep him off to tend to important matters of state.
No such luck.
“What is it you think I know?” Orion asked, dismissing the staff waiting for him with a flick of his finger.
Griffin took his time facing his brother. His King.
“You too?” he asked. Lightly, he told himself, though there was too much ice in it. He shook his head. “Is there no end to the lies you plan to tell me, brother?”
Orion stiffened. “I don’t think I—”
“I understand your need to protect me when we were young,” Griffin said stiffly, aware that he was crossing a long-held line. Knocking down a wall the two of them had left standing between them for a reason. “The responsibilities of your position have always come with all kinds of knowledge I doubt you wanted yourself. I don’t blame you for not sharing things out of a need to shoulder the greater share of the burden. It is why you are already a great king. But this? Asking my wife to lie to her own husband? How can you possibly imagine that falls within your purview?”
To his astonishment, his brother looked stricken.
“At first I thought it was a lie perpetrated on you as well,” Griffin forged on, not waiting to hear what Orion might offer as a defense. “That it was Calista who advised her sister to hide the truth about herself. I would put nothing past the Skyros family, after all. But I quickly realized that Calista was not her father or you would not have married her. Because I trust you enough to know your own wife.”
He realized as he said it that he had not spoken so harshly to his brother since long before Orion took the throne. But he did nothing to walk it back.
“I don’t think you understand,” Orion began, in that careful voice that won over fractious members of his court and made his ministers sigh with pleasure.
Griffin was not appeased. “You are mistaken. I understand completely.” He raised a brow, his gaze steady. “You don’t trust me to keep my promises, though I have never broken them. You know how I feel about lies, and yet you did this anyway. I have always thought that I was lucky because whatever service I provide my King is part of the joy I have in my brother. Thank you, Orion, for proving that joy is a one-way street. It is better to know that than not.”
Orion stood as if facing a firing squad. “That is not what I was doing. I didn’t think of it as a lie. It was a bit of misdirection, that’s all. Nothing more and nothing less than the harmless white lies anyone tells at the beginning of a relationship.”
“It was not up to you to decide,” Griffin bit.
“I am your brother first,” Orion said, his voice rough. And nothing like careful. “Always.”
“Alas, Your Majesty, I don’t believe you,” Griffin shot back.
And then, deliberately, performed a deep sort of bow more appropriate for lowly servants in the presence of the monarch than the King’s blood. To his mind, underscoring the truth of their relationship. It was royal. It was municipal. But Griffin was a servant to the crown more than he was a brother to a king, and he needed to remember that.
Then he turned, quitting the room before he began to say even more things he shouldn’t. He could feel them all bubbling up inside him, making a mockery of the character he’d spent a lifetime building, then playing. He was meant to be relaxed, at ease. He was the foil to his brother’s upright morality.
But who was he when there was no one to blame?
He tried to shove that question out of his head, but his walk back through the palace made it impossible. Griffin had grown up here. He’d spent his life in these very halls. And yet all he could see today was Melody.
Melody clinging to his arm when he now knew she could probably run down these halls without incident. Melody tipping her face toward his. Melody with her hand over his mouth, telling him to smile, to frown.
Melody everywhere, like a tune stuck in his head. Giving him no quarter and no peace.
He let himself into the side door of his house and then stopped, listening for her. Listening to see if he could tell where she was and what she was doing that easily, because he persisted in imagining that if he knew what she was doing he wouldn’t feel this need to go and see it for himself.
Yet once again, loath as he was to admit it, he felt drawn to her. As if he no longer had control over himself.
As if he couldn’t stop himself from shoving his fingers deep into his own wounds.
Griffin took the stairs two at a time, choosing not to question his haste.
