Page 51 of Night’s Fall (The Four Realms #1)

“I liked her,” Errol announced, taking our attention to him. “ I really did. She just wasn’t marriage material.”

He was talking about Nata .

I gritted my teeth, something that helped loads with me holding my tongue.

It didn’t escape me that neither of those two males had directed one word to me yet.

It wasn’t like we had dinner together every night.

But seriously?

“If they don’t want you for you, Rol , and require promises you can’t keep, then they aren’t worth your time. Be the kind of male who makes that their loss,” Aleksei advised.

Errol hung his head in a manner I suspected, in the past, got him out of some serious shit.

Aleksei didn’t bother witnessing it.

He took my hand and off we went on another hike through the Palace , where I didn’t see much more, just a rehash of what came before but in reverse.

I waited until we were in his JetPanther , and he was waiting for course approval, before I asked, “ Our attendance at the ritual was overall positive?”

“When you mentioned Germaine , I asked Muriel to run some numbers.” The onboard computer announced our course was cleared, Aleksei took the stick, and we had liftoff.

“ Females sixty years and under, overwhelmingly positive. Older , they’re not happy.

Males , the results are mixed. Sixty and over, they’re pissed.

Thirty and younger, about half and half.

Males in between, we’re at sixty-five percent positive. ”

Boy, Muriel could run some serious numbers in a short period of time (however you did that).

“Germaine made it sound dire,” I remarked.

“She was riding the high of your approval rating and knows it’s undoubtedly taken a hit. But regardless, she takes any negativity about our family personally. And a warning, darling, there is quite a bit of it, as we suspected.”

“Ah.”

“Therefore, anything negative sticks in her craw,” Aleksei finished. “ If it happened without her input, she loses it, like I’m guessing she did.”

I didn’t confirm, but I didn’t need to.

With that out of the way, now the big stuff.

“I’m sorry, honey. My actions instigated what just happened,” I said quietly.

“Don’t think that for another moment, Laura ,” he replied tersely.

“ It feels like we’ve been racing to that scene since the first time Tim got the idea to douse me with ice water in the middle of the night, getting nothing but a mild dressing down.

Whereas I got a chat with my father about how I need to buck up because that’s the kind of thing that makes a boy into a male. ”

“I still need to learn that there might be larger ramifications for my decisions.”

“No you don’t. You already understand that.

We should have told Germaine . That was my mistake.

I mostly operate on my own, without her being involved.

With you by my side, that has to change.

But other than that, we can only be who we are, and if we’re good beings, it will work.

Does what we do reflect on an entire realm?

Yes . But as good beings, the decisions we make will reflect positively.

Like today. Not everyone agrees what we did was right, but we were there, we know what it meant to the people who mattered.

And for the most part, the rest of them understood.

But bottom line, in a day or two, no one will be talking about this.

They’ll find something else to be upset about. ”

This was true.

Moving on.

“I’m kinda confused about what just happened,” I told him.

“I assumed the mantle of the True Heir .”

No less confused.

“I thought you already were the True Heir ,” I noted.

“Back in the day, once the change occurred, the True Heir became de facto king.”

Holy Hecate .

I knew this, of course. You learned it in history.

But that was what the ancients did.

“This proved ineffective,” Aleksei told me something I’d also learned in history.

“ No thirteen-year-old boy should sit a throne, regardless that he was chosen by a god. Stupid shit happened. Laws were enacted. And the king, or queen, would continue to reign until the True Heir reached majority. Civilization advanced. Wars became less frequent. The need for a True Heir reduced, he seldom emerged, and we haven’t had one for two hundred years. ”

“Yes.” My word was breathless, because a good deal of heavy stuff was just occurring to me.

“I had no interest. And it’d been so long since the last Heir , people forgot,” Aleksei explained.

“Are you saying…did you…just become king?”

“No. I assumed the role of patriarch of my family.”

In these chambers .

Even if I was seated, and the path of the JetPanther was smooth, I felt shaky.

“Aleksei?”

“Yes, darling?”

“The True Bride …” I couldn’t finish.

He glanced at me. “ Laura , I already told you that you outrank my mother. The True Heir’s mate, the minute he finds her, is known as the True Bride .”

“Is that my title?”

“It is, and will always be, though on marriage, you’ll earn another one, and on the sad day of my father’s passing, you’ll have another.”

“I hadn’t…remembered that,” I said haltingly. “ About the True Bride , that is.”

“History hasn’t focused on females. They didn’t tend to start wars or order people guillotined, the juicy parts of history that are rabidly remembered.”

True, indeed.

“Aleksei,” I called again.

“I’m right here, bissi ,” he said quietly.

“Do we…there has always been…” I cleared my throat. “ Throughout history, there’s always been a need for a True Heir . War . Upheaval . Political strife. Tyrannical kings.”

He said nothing.

I tore my gaze from the skyscreen to look at him. “ Do you think you’re True Heir because your father is a pushover, or he was, and your brothers are problematic?”

“We can hope so,” he murmured.

He hoped so.

I hoped so.

But someone had gone to the trouble and expense of finding a witch to track me down. They’d tried to take my beast.

And then they’d tried to take his.

“Aleksei,” I said again, shakily.

“Engage auto,” he told the craft and turned to me.

Taking my hand, he held it firm, caught my gaze, and I saw in his what was now occurring to me had already occurred to him.

In fact, maybe he’d lived with it from the minute his eyes changed from his mother’s melting brown to the color of the skies.

“We live our lives, Laura , and if there’s something to know, we will know, we will face it and we will best it. But until then, we’ll just live our lives and be happy. We have no other choice.”

What he meant was, he had lived his entire life like this.

And now I was doing it with him.

“Yes, darling?” he prompted.

Again, I had no choice.

I was his. He was mine.

And we were in this.

I nodded slowly.

He held my gaze.

Unfortunately, until I could process it further, that was all I had for him.

He kissed my knuckles, let me go, resumed control of the craft and five minutes later landed us smoothly on the pad of our penthouse.