Royal Protector. Dana Marton

had found that Kavian was utterly inflexible. Unlike the rest of the time, when he was only almost utterly inflexible. Which should not have amused her, surely. Where was her panic?

      What happens when you cannot bend? her mother had demanded, and what did it matter what Elizaveta’s motivations for asking had been? When instead you break?

      “The point is that the role of ‘princess,’ whatever that means, was never one I learned to play,” she said instead, because she couldn’t sort out was happening inside her. Because she was afraid this was what broken looked like, this absurd idea that she could be safe with a man this elemental, this raw and powerful. “I was never treated as a princess of anything anywhere we went after my mother and I left Bakri.”

      Quite the opposite, she thought then as the memories she usually kept locked away rushed back at her, thick and fast. There had been a long stretch of years when Elizaveta would fly into one of her cold furies at the very sound of the word princess and punish Amaya for it whether or not she’d been the one to say it out loud.

      She took a sip of the thick coffee and tried to swallow the unpleasant past down with the dark Arabian brew. “If anything, my mother downplayed it as much as possible.”

      That shrug of his was still a cool, harsh weapon, and then he turned his attention back to the papers before him, which only made it worse. “Because you outrank her.”

      The shrug was a weapon and the words a blow.

      For a moment, Amaya simply reeled. She placed her mug back down on the glass table very, very carefully. She blinked.

      “My mother doesn’t care about rank,” she said, and she couldn’t have said why her voice sounded like that, as if there were rough and terrible things simmering there beneath the surface. “She walked away from Bakri of her own volition. If she cared about rank she would have stayed in the place where she was queen, not taken off into the big, bad world where she had no means of support.”

      “No means of support?” Kavian shook his head when she frowned at him in confusion. “She had a walking, talking bank account at her disposal. She had you.”

      That sensation of reeling, of actual spinning, only worsened. “What are you talking about?”

      “You,” he said very distinctly, his gaze a fierce shot of intense gray in the bright room, “are the daughter of a king. Your mother did not live by her wits or her charm or even her looks, Amaya. She lived off the trust your father set up in your name, for your support.”

      Amaya couldn’t speak. Or move. She felt as if he’d hammered a giant nail straight into her and pinned her to her chair.

      She thought of all the times Elizaveta had lectured her about her expectations, her terrible entitlement. She remembered the many, many times her mother had embarrassed her in front of others by claiming that Amaya was “her father’s daughter,” in a manner meant to suggest Amaya always selfishly wanted far more than her share, that she was greedy and ill-bred, that she was entirely, deliberately heedless of reality. She’d excused these things, one after the next, because she’d understood where her mother was coming from, what Amaya’s father had done. She’d assumed these things came from her mother’s panic at having to find ways to support them all on her own.

      “I treat you like an adult because you would otherwise grow up coddled and spoiled like every other member of the Bakri line,” Elizaveta had said when Amaya was perhaps eleven. “The truth is that we have nothing. We are dependent on the kindness of friends.”

      She’d meant her many lovers, the men who she’d never stayed with for too long, because they had always required such careful handling to put up with a woman with a sulky daughter in tow. Or so Elizaveta had always claimed.

      “I don’t expect you to be as grateful as you should—that’s your father’s influence in you, I’m sure—but you must comprehend what there is to lose if you don’t do as I say.” Elizaveta had glared at Amaya as if she’d expected her daughter to argue, when Amaya had long since learned the folly of that kind of thing. Even then, even as a child, she’d known it was better to bend to those who could not. “We’ll lose everything. The roof above your head and the clothes on your back. Is that what you want?”

      That had not been what eleven-year-old Amaya had wanted. The very idea had given her nightmares. And Elizaveta had never been a perfect parent, certainly. Life with her had always been complicated, but Amaya had been sympathetic because she’d understood that her mother hadn’t said those things to be cruel. Amaya’s father had broken something inside her, and sometimes it came out as poison. Amaya had learned not to take it personally... Or anyway, she’d tried her best not to take it personally.

      “You are mistaken,” Amaya said to Kavian now when she could speak without that rough-edged thing inside her taking over and revealing too much. “I don’t know where you heard such a thing.”

      “Had she married any of the men she found, she would have had to return you to your father and worse, to her way of thinking, give up her access to your money.” Another shrug, which made her want to throw her plate at him. A flicker in that gray gaze made her think he knew it, too. “This is not an attack, Amaya. This is simply a fact. I did not hear this through some grapevine or other—I’ve seen the paperwork.”

      Amaya shook her head, so hard it almost hurt, and noticed her heart had started to kick at her, almost as if she was panicked.

      “My mother was a self-made woman. She had nothing when she left Ukraine. She talked her way from minor dance halls into the fashion houses of Milan. She had nothing but her wit, her charm and her looks. That was how she entered her marriage to my father, and that was how she left it. If anything, I was a complication.”

      It was only when she was finished speaking that Amaya realized her voice had risen, as if every sentence were a plate thrown, a blow landed on his wholly impervious form.

      “She also had ambition,” Kavian said softly. He was so much more dangerous the quieter he got, she knew. She sucked in a breath against it. “Never forget that. She left Bakri because she was losing the sheikh’s favor. Better to leave and tell a sad tale across the years to a thousand receptive audiences. Better by far to hold the king’s daughter as ransom than to remain in Bakri as a neglected, forgotten wife. The sheikh would have banished her to one of the outlying residences, far away from the palace where she would wither away into irrelevance, and she knew it. That, azizty, did not suit your mother’s ambitions at all.”

      Amaya stared at him, willing herself not to react in the way she suspected he wanted her to do. Her lips felt bloodless. Her stomach twisted—hard. “You don’t know anything about my mother. She was not ambitious. She was in love.”

      She shouldn’t have said that. She shouldn’t have uttered those words. Not to him, not here. Not out loud—and she didn’t dare ask herself why that was. But Amaya couldn’t take them back, no matter how much she wished she could. She couldn’t make that taut, near-painful silence between them disappear, or do anything about that sudden arrested look on Kavian’s austere face. She straightened in her seat instead, and forced herself to meet that edgy gray gaze of his straight on as if she felt nothing at all.

      “My father was a convincing man when it suited him.” She heard that catch in her throat and she knew Kavian did, too, but she pushed on. “He convinced a woman who had been born with nothing and raised to expect little else that he adored her. That he worshipped her. That he would remake his world in her honor.”

      She didn’t point out how familiar that sounded. Just as she didn’t give that searing blast of temper in Kavian’s dark gaze a chance to form into harsh words on his lips.

      “He lied. Maybe he meant it when he said it—what do I know? But my mother believed him. That was why she thought there was something she could do to regain his favor, to win back his attention once it drifted. Anything to make him love her again. But what my father truly loved was collecting, Kavian. He was always looking for his next acquisition. He didn’t