The Most Powerful Of Kings - Jackie Ashenden Page 0,40

father. And your little girl needs you.’

She’s right. And you know it too.

Hot anger and a smothering sense of guilt tore through him, though he tried to fight it. Because deep inside the heart he tried to tell himself he didn’t have, he did know it.

But being a father would always come second to being a king, and Ione had to learn that. Because one day she would have to make the same choices that he had.

‘Choose, Adonis,’ his father had demanded, the day after Adonis had successfully rescued his brother from captivity in the desert, risking the entire succession of Axios to do so. ‘I have told you again and again that you cannot be my heir and a brother at the same time, that there will always be an enemy who will use someone you love against you. So you must choose. Your brother or your throne? Which is it to be?’

Of course he’d chosen the throne. Every time his father had made him choose, he’d always chosen the throne. And not for the power, but because that was his duty.

Ione would have to learn that too when she was old enough. He wouldn’t teach her the way his own father had taught him, of course, but when it came time for her to become the Lioness of Axios, he would sit her down and explain why detachment in a monarch was important.

Are you so sure that’s true? Do you really want her to turn into what you’ve become?

Adonis crushed the thought. He had become a king. What was so terrible about that?

‘Ione is not more important than my subjects,’ he snapped, some of the anger that gripped him leaking out in his voice no matter how hard he tried to stop it. ‘I am responsible for millions—including at least a million children—so please forgive me if they take precedence over the needs of one already happy child.’

Anna’s expression flickered, something entering her eyes that he didn’t like the look of one bit. Her gaze narrowed and she took another step, her skirts brushing closer to him, and he was suddenly surrounded by the scent of musk and lavender, by the warmth of her. Making the breath catch in his throat.

‘But she’s not happy, Adonis,’ she said quietly, her voice very level. ‘And neither, I think, are you.’

Happy. What did he know about being happy? Happiness was just another useless emotion he couldn’t allow himself to have.

And your daughter? You want that for her?

He ignored the thought. ‘Happiness is irrelevant. Rulers do not need to be happy in order to rule.’

Anna’s gaze searched his. ‘No, but happiness is necessary for children, don’t you think?’

‘No,’ he said before he could stop himself. ‘My childhood was unhappy and I survived.’

Concern flickered over her face and she began to lift one of her hands, as if she’d been going to touch him before remembering where she was.

It was a good thing she stopped herself. Touching him would have been a bad idea.

‘Oh?’ There was concern in her voice now, too. ‘What happened?’

And, looking into her steady grey eyes, he felt the strangest urge fill him, almost as if he wanted to tell her.

To tell her about how, when he was seven, he and his mother had been carjacked on the way back to the palace from a function. How their enemies had been expecting the king to be riding with them and were disappointed, demanding to know where he was. And how his mother had refused to give away her husband’s location and so they’d hurt her. And because he’d loved her and because he was desperate to save her, Adonis had told them what she wouldn’t. She’d tried to grab one of their guns after that, to stop them, but they shot her.

About how his father’s bodyguards had managed to hold off the resulting attack, though Xenophon had been injured. And how afterwards his father had told him that her death was his fault, that if Adonis had only been strong in the face of her pain, the palace guards might have been able to rescue them and her death might have been avoided.

‘Choose,’ his father had said after her funeral. ‘You must choose, Adonis. The throne must come before everything. Even before your own mother. You can be my son or you can be my heir, but you cannot be both.’

He had chosen the throne, of course he had. His younger brother had been too little to take over