Modern Romance September 2015 Books 5-8. Chantelle Shaw

began to shake when he slid his hand over hers and held it there.

      “You don’t have to tell me this story,” she said, and her voice was barely a whisper. “I didn’t mean to dredge up bad memories.”

      “My mother took a lover,” Kavian said by way of reply. His voice was so dark, leading them inexorably toward a terrible end. She could see that much on his face. She could feel it in the air around them, crushing her in a tense fist, but she made herself stand tall. If he could tell it, she could take it. She promised herself she could. “He was one of my father’s ministers, ambitious and amoral. But he was not content to simply defile my father’s wife. He wanted the throne.”

      “How could he take it? Was he related to you?”

      “The throne of Daar Talaas is held by the man who can hold it.” Kavian did not so much say that as intone it. “So it is written in the stones on which the throne itself sits. So it has always been.”

      Amaya had to press her palm that much harder against him, to remind herself he was real. Flesh and blood, not a statue in a palace hewn from rock. Not etched stones beneath an old throne. Far more than the story he was telling her. Far more than the darkness that was pouring from him now, his eyes and his voice alike.

      “I don’t know what that means.” It was more that she didn’t want to know. But she didn’t look away.

      “It means that while families often hold on to the throne for some generations, this is because they tend to consolidate their power, not because there is a blood requirement.” He shifted, which made his previous stillness seem that much more extreme by comparison. “My mother’s lover was no fool. He knew he could not take the throne by force. The Daar Talaas army cannot be manipulated. They serve the throne, not the man.”

      He had never looked as distant as he did then. Bleak and uncompromising. He stepped back, Amaya’s hand fell to her side, and she thought she’d never felt so empty.

      Yet Kavian kept going. “He slit my father’s throat as he sat at the dinner table, in a place where there is meant to be only peace, even between enemies. Then he killed my brothers, one by one. Then both of my father’s wives, including my mother. Especially my mother, I should say. Because even the man she colluded with hated that she was traitorous enough to betray her own husband. Her own king.”

      “Why did he spare you?” She hardly recognized her voice.

      That wasn’t a smile he aimed at her then. It was far too painful. It cut too deep.

      “My mother had a servant girl who she did not so much trust as fail to notice. The girl knew of my mother’s lover and enough of the plans they made that when the first alarm sounded, she ran. She took me out of the palace and claimed I was her own.”

      Amaya knew who he meant immediately. “The woman with the wise eyes. All the other women looked to her today.”

      “She is the wife of the chief here,” Kavian said, but there was a flicker in his gaze that told her she’d impressed him, and it warmed her. It more than warmed her. “Back then, however, she took a terrible risk in bringing me to her father’s tent, alone and unwed, with a toddler she could not prove was the king’s missing son. The elders might not have believed her. She risked her life and her family’s honor to save me.”

      “But they believed her.”

      “They did.” He studied her face. “And they are simple people here, not aristocrats with agendas. Good people who follow the old ways. Blood begets blood, Amaya. They raised me to avenge my family, as was my right and responsibility as its only remaining member.”

      Amaya couldn’t speak for a long moment. She thought of a tiny boy who’d lost everything and had been given only vengeance in return, out here in this harsh, desolate place without a single hint of softness. It made her heart hurt, as if he were the great sky pressing into her, as impossible and as far away. As beautiful and as untouchable.

      He had been a lost child and they had made him into a stone. And now he thought it was a virtue.

      “I’m sorry,” she said softly. “That seems like an undue burden to place on a child.”

      “You misunderstand me.” His gaze was too dark. His eyes glittered. “I am not telling you this story because I regret what happened to me. What is there to regret? I was lucky.”

      “You are also now the king.”

      “I am.”

      “Does that mean...” She searched his face, but he might truly have been made of marble then. He was that unyielding. “Blood begat blood?”

      “It means that I grew up,” Kavian said quietly. With a deep ferocity that tugged at her in ways she didn’t understand, as if his story was changing things inside her as he told it. Shifting them. “It means that I dedicated myself to becoming the necessary weapon to achieve my ends. And it means that when I had the chance, I exacted my vengeance, and know this, Amaya, if you know nothing else about me. My single regret is that the man who murdered my family could die but once.”

CHAPTER NINE

      IT WAS A TEST, Kavian reminded himself harshly. The most important one.

      This had all been a test. The long ride into the most remote part of the Daar Talaas Desert, abandoning her to see what she would do under the watchful eye of the woman he’d long considered his real mother. Then this. Throwing out the bloody truth of his family and his own dark deeds to see what she would make of them.

      To see what Amaya was made of, after all. Who she really was when there was nowhere to run. If she was, truly, the one woman who could embody all he wanted.

      Kavian stood there, stone-faced before this woman he had chased across the world, and awaited her reaction. It would determine the whole of their future.

      He told himself he didn’t care either way. That his heart was as much stone as he knew his expression was. There were some who had found his pursuit of vengeance unforgivable. There were others whose interest in his past had always seemed too avid for his comfort. This was nothing but a test to see where Amaya would fall on that spectrum.

      It would set the stage for how he handled his marriage going forward, nothing more. Either she would prove herself a worthy queen, a woman like his foster mother, who was braver than most men, his queen—or she would simply be a wife with a lofty title who would eventually give Kavian his heirs.

      It matters little which way she goes, he told himself then.

      But he found that he was frozen in place, awaiting her judgment, all the same.

      Amaya swallowed hard, but she didn’t shift her gaze from his. She still stood tall before him. The warm light from the lanterns made her look gilded, standing there with her glorious spill of dark hair all around her and her perfect breasts visible beneath that silky little shift she wore. She was still so pretty it almost felt like an attack. An assault. It rolled over him and flattened him. It took out his defenses like a kick to the knees.

      But he had no intention of showing her that.

      “You obviously expect me to clutch at my pearls and faint,” she said after a long, long moment.

      “Aim for the bed,” he advised her. “The rug is not as soft as it appears.”

      “Did you torture him?” she asked.

      He hadn’t expected that. He considered her more closely.

      “No,” he said at last. “He was the butcher. I wanted only what he took. If not my family, then the throne.”

      “Did it change you?”

      He blinked, and ignored that heavy thing inside his chest that seemed to bear down hard at that, as if his heart was still wrapped in those same old chains.

      As