Princess Aikaterini of Zaccaria was having the worst day of her entire life.

She had thought she’d already hit that sad mark, and hard, one year ago. When the whole of her small island principality in the Aegean—and most of Europe—had gathered in the Grand Cathedral to mourn the death of their ruling Prince.

Prince Venediktos, Aikaterini’s husband, to whom she had been betrothed for as long as she could remember and then happily married when it was time. She had walked down this very aisle to marry Venediktos. Then, five years later, she had walked behind his coffin here, too.

Today she walked the same long aisle yet again. This time she was festooned in ceremonial garments that were in some ways more dramatic than the gown she’d worn the first time. Or perhaps it was only that she felt dramatic—as she was bound by law and tradition to do this vile duty and marry her husband’s successor.

Aikaterini rather thought she might be ill. Or would have been ill, that was, if the Princess of Zaccaria was allowed even a scrap of humanity in public.

But Aikaterini knew better than to let her mask slip.

The organ swelled and sang as she walked, her steps deliberate and measured. Her posture was perfect. Her face was dialed to its usual setting of approachable serenity, which was not as easy as it sounded. Every seat in the Cathedral was filled, though Aikaterini rather cynically wondered if the assembled throng was here to celebrate her upcoming marriage or if—like herself, if she was entirely honest—they were all a bit more fascinated by the archaic law that had brought all of this to pass.

It wasn’t that Aikaterini hadn’t known about this law. She had been raised to fully and wholly inhabit her position. Everything she’d done had been in aid of that from the time she was very small. Every scrap of education she had received had come to her under the umbrella of the many topics she would need to know as Venediktos’s Princess.

So, of course, she had long ago studied the marriage laws that stretched back to antiquity in much the same form as now. These were the laws that would govern her adult life, give it a particular shape that linked the current Prince and Princess to all those who had come before them. These were the laws that made Zaccaria its own sovereign state, to be distinguished from its powerful and often overbearing neighbors all across the Mediterranean.

As Princess, she had always upheld the laws and had always been happy to do so in such a public role.

Aikaterini had a vague memory of when she’d first encountered the law in question. This law that she was obeying today. She had been no more than twelve and she rather thought she’d been a bit younger, because she’d been a bit silly back then. Even romantic. She’d thought it made perfect sense that the kingdom should ensure that a widowed Princess without any children should have the opportunity to have those children with her lost husband’s successor.

She was quite certain that she had found the old law a lovely notion tucked away in the middle of so many tedious royal clauses governing lines of succession and treatises on property.

The reality, however, was a nightmare.

Because her beloved Venediktos’s successor was the most hateful man that Aikaterini had ever encountered.

She could see him, standing there at the other end of the long stone aisle, looking supremely unconcerned with the proceedings. He was good at that.

Despite herself, she knew entirely too much about him.

Because she had spent her entire year of mourning—not, as one might have imagined, a period of time set aside in deference to a widow’s feelings but rather a countdown to make sure that there could be no child growing within her to disrupt the line of succession, which was, of course, the only thing anyone cared about—studying up on him.

Aikaterini had not needed to count dates and wait to bleed. She’d known she wasn’t pregnant. Therefore she had also known what was coming at the end of the year, and no matter that she no longer found it even remotely “romantic.”

The newly minted Prince Kyriakos was Venediktos’s cousin. Venediktos had been educated, like Aikaterini, by a series of world-class tutors who had made it their business to provide a rigorous course of study from right here on the island. Where the heir and his betrothed had been expected to remain, always, as was tradition. Kyriakos, by contrast, had been sent off to England, where he had gone to one of those Oxbridge schools—Aikaterini always got them confused—and had then dabbled in finance in various global locations while simultaneously making a name for himself in the tabloids.

It was said that he was impossibly wealthy in his own right. That he had set out to make himself so, because he did not wish to suck from the royal teat. A direct quote.

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Aikaterini was not the only one who found the whole thing a bit tacky. Teat or no teat, Kyriakos had been a member of the royal family of Zaccaria since the moment of his conception and surely should not have been off tainting himself with common trade.

Yet, throughout his life, Venediktos had maintained an affection for Kyriakos that had never made any sense to Aikaterini. Kyriakos was older by some years. He was forbidding at best and never made the slightest attempt to observe the usual social niceties. When summoned to the palace—the old, medieval residence on Zaccaria that had once been a fortress and was now covered in flowering vines—Kyriakos had never seemed to appear without leaving a wave of disturbing intensity in his wake. Where Venediktos had been a fine, gently mannered, elegant figure of a man, Kyriakos was anything but.

He was too tall. All of his various parts seemed carved from stone, brutish and relentlessly masculine, from his face to his feet.

It was as if he exuded ruthlessness when, by virtue of his elevated birth to the old Prince’s brother, he should have been a dilettante. A footnote in history. One more smiling, dismissible courtier.

Kyriakos did not smile, or at least, not at formal dinners. And he had always rubbed Aikaterini the wrong way—she had never claimed otherwise. She might even have asserted, once or twice, that it was his lack of gratitude. Or the way he swanned about as if it was the island that owed him something, instead of the other way around. It was true that she had concerns about him and that these were reasons why, even if she’d known, on some level, that these issues were ones only she had seemed to see in him.

To everyone else, he was the reasonably dutiful second-in-line who might have made some headlines when he was younger—and indeed, what inevitably famous royal allowed a life outside the palace did not?—but always supported the principality when called.

What was also true was that the real problem was worse. It was that he had always, with little more than a glance, made everything inside of her feel fiendishly tight and hotly uncomfortable. She had decided she must be allergic to him.

But the law was a law.

If the widowed Princess of Zaccaria was without issue one full year to the day from the Prince’s state funeral, she was to be married to the late Prince’s successor—no matter who he was.

And no matter what her feelings were about him, or the law, or her lost husband.

When it came to lines of succession and the ruling of countries, feelings were immaterial.

Something Aikaterini hadn’t cared too much about while Venediktos was alive. It was the world they lived in, she’d thought, rather placidly. It might have felt a bit stark and uncaring in the glare of so much attention at times. It was certainly too consumed with protocol, tradition, and duty. But that only meant that together, privately, they could create a sense of ease between the two of them.

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And so they had.

They had been best friends. Partners in everything. Venediktos’s father had abdicated when Venediktos was twenty-one, ahead of a set of medical issues the old Prince had not been certain he would survive. Indeed, he had not and Venediktos had ascended the throne. A year later, when Aikaterini was twenty, they had married.

They had spent five sweet years learning the contours of their reign together. They had always presented a united front. They had been in no rush whatsoever to produce heirs, because they had expected to rule together for the next five or six decades, at least.

Instead, Venediktos was gone, his hateful cousin stood in his place, and Aikaterini had found no sympathy for her plight anywhere.

The papers had waxed rhapsodic about her selfless dedication to her duty. Her own family had seemed shocked when she’d mentioned even the slightest hesitation about Kyriakos.

You belong to Zaccaria now more than ever, her father had reminded her, that faint frown between his eyes that she hadn’t seen in a long, long while.

Because she had done nothing to bewilder or disturb him since she was a toddler. She had always been dutiful. She had always obeyed. Her relationship with her parents had always seemed more like a business partnership, something that had continued throughout her ascension and marriage. They’d always been cordial and supportive, because in her parents’ eyes, Aikaterini had always behaved beautifully in her role. Just as they had taught her to do.

Only now did she realize how easy that had been when the prize for good behavior had been Venediktos.

Last night, she had lain awake in her bedchamber, entirely too aware that the new Prince had spent the day before their wedding moving into the chamber next to hers and its adjoining rooms that would now belong to him. They had been separated only by thick stone walls and a dressing chamber, which did not seem like nearly enough of a bulwark.

Every Princess of Zaccaria had slept in the same historic chamber, perhaps even in the same bed with its intricately carved posts—if, she hoped, a different mattress. The same tapestries had adorned the walls for centuries. The same windows let in the same bright Aegean sun. The palace had originally been built to stave off the incursions from the mainland—Greece, Rome, and hordes aplenty in between. It had been built for defense, not to let in the ocean breezes or captivating view. There were the gardens for that. The Royal Quarter of the island was more garden than anything else.

Usually, she slept with all the windows open, listening to the ocean and the breeze and letting the night-blooming blossoms scent her dreams.

Last night she had curled up in a ball, windows shut tight, as if Kyriakos might take to the battlements, praying for a deliverance that she knew would not come.

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And sure enough, her attendants had woken her too early, and not to effect her escape. They were there to prepare her, though she thought that it was only they who truly understood the somberness of the occasion. They had dressed her, making certain that she would shine no matter her mood.

They had done a wonderful job, she was sorry to say. Aikaterini looked appropriately sacrificial and serene, exactly as planned. She would grace the cover of every paper and magazine for days.

And now she was running out of aisle, and the sight of her soon-to-be new husband made everything in her clench tight like he already had her in a terrible grip.

Standing on the altar, Kyriakos looked every inch the devil, as far she was concerned. He, too, was dressed in ceremonial regalia and Aikaterini hated that the traditional epaulets seemed to bloom on his shoulders. As if they’d been made for such showy wideness and all of those distressing muscles.

She really couldn’t believe this was happening.

Her father had given her away at her first wedding. But she was already the Princess of Zaccaria today. Only she could give herself away, and more importantly, was compelled to do so by law. So as she arrived at the altar, she did so alone. She watched as the priest nodded his head toward the man who stood waiting for her.

He turned, and for a moment, it was as if everything fell away. The Cathedral. Her duty. Herself.

Because his dark hazel eyes slammed into her and she lost track of where she was. She wasn’t sure that she could breathe.

Kyriakos had the kind of face that belonged stamped on armor. He had dark hair and darker eyes and something about his bearing was like an insistent drumbeat, entirely martial and resonant of an ancient sort of warrior that could not possibly exist today. He reminded her of paintings she’d seen of the Zaccarian generals who had fought off the Greeks and the Romans and the endless hordes in turn, and had spent the whole of their lives crafting and honing their bodies into instruments of destruction for use on battlefields.

She tried to remind herself that the only battlefields Kyriakos encountered were bedrooms, and he did not so much fight in them as indulge in a bit of sport. If he weren’t so intimidating, they would call him a playboy. Or worse.

Aikaterini could think of a great number of other things she would like to call him and she wondered if they all showed on her face, because she was certain she saw an answering gleam deep in Kyriakos’s disturbingly intent gaze.

The priest bade them join hands and Aikaterini wanted nothing less, but she was too well trained to refuse or even pause. There were too many eyes on her. She had to live up to her role, always—but especially today.

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She told herself that the role she played today honored Venediktos and the sacrifices he had made for the sake of the country. That being so, how could she do anything less than her duty? No matter how little she wished to do it?

Duty wasn’t about personal likes and dislikes. Duty was about honor and tradition and the expectations borne of her position. There was no pretending she didn’t understand this. She always had—she just liked it a lot less now.

She slid her hands into Kyriakos’s and was somehow both unsurprised and filled with despair that she could feel his intensity. It seemed to wrap all around her, shooting deep into her limbs.

Like a creeping vine, she told herself, but it was like no other vine she had ever encountered. It seemed to wind all around her. It seemed to affect the most curious parts of her body in ways that not only made no sense but were embarrassing. Given where they were.

Given who he was.

It was only a wedding ceremony, she reminded herself, perhaps a bit sharply. It was a foregone conclusion with a bit of pomp and circumstance, that was all. Immediately afterward, it would shift into an even more archaic ceremony, where she would be required to pledge her fealty to Kyriakos, here before the country and the world. To the reigning Prince of Zaccaria, who would also be her husband at that point.

This had not been required at her first wedding, because there had been no doubt that Venediktos ruled, then. It was her widowhood that left her strangely ranked in the hierarchy of the principality. The law was clear on that, too. A new Prince was called the moment the old one died or stepped aside, and it was only if the widowed Princess was pregnant with the old Prince’s heir or already in possession of his heirs that things might change. The Princess would become a kind of regent, assuming her eldest child’s status as heir apparent until that child came of age. The successor was required to rule in concert with her until the rightful Prince was old enough to dismiss him.

Kyriakos had been bound over to his duty a year ago. Today, once she knelt before him as his wife and subject, he would rule in concert with his own wishes and no one else’s for the rest of his reign.

Aikaterini might have been Venediktos’s partner in the principality while he lived, but Kyriakos had made it clear over the course of the last year that he had no need of a partner. Aikaterini was to take her place as his wife and the mother of his children, and nothing more that did not fall into the purview of the Princess’s traditional role.

As the priest mouthed the ancient words, she couldn’t help but go back over every time she had ever come into contact with this man who was to become her husband in short order. While Venediktos was alive, it had been easier to handle him. Kyriakos would turn up when called back to Zaccaria for various functions, always a dark, sardonic cloud over any proceeding. As first in line to the throne, he had always been seated too near to Aikaterini for her comfort. Though she supposed it had given her some measure of insight into him, however unwanted.

Despite Venediktos’s wishes, Kyriakos had never produced a wife. When asked why, he would laugh. The world is filled with adventure, cousin, Kyriakos would say. If you ever left this island, you would know that.

Aikaterini had always found him disrespectful and disruptive. Their meetings throughout her year of mourning had not changed that opinion.

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Their first private meeting had taken place precisely two months after the funeral. In retrospect she now realized that those two months were the only real mourning she’d been permitted, because after that it was back to work. If in limited ways.

Her meeting with the new Prince had taken place in one of the private sitting rooms in the palace. She knew that he had moved into one of the other buildings on the property, in deference to her period of mourning, but she had been happy enough to never lay eyes on him. That day, Kyriakos had already been in the room when she’d entered it, which she had thought showed a shocking lack of protocol and decent manners.

What was more, she was certain he knew that.

You should know that I find this law archaic, she had told him at once. Barbaric, even.

I assure you, Princess, that my tastes run less to ice sculptures and more to full-blooded women who claim their own pleasure. When she’d blinked at him, not certain she understood or cared to understand what he meant, he’d let out a sardonic sort of laugh. What does it matter if it is archaic? Your wants and my wants are equally immaterial.

It had not occurred to her that he might have some objection to their mandated marriage. She wasn’t sure she liked thinking of him as a person with preferences instead of simply as her nemesis.

She didn’t remember much else from that first meeting. It had all been too grueling, so soon after Venediktos’s sudden, shocking death and with the Sword of Damocles in the form of their inevitable wedding pressing in on her. Nonetheless, after that, she’d seen him once a month.

My uncle is now first in line should something happen to me, he had said at one of those meetings. And he’s the sort who I wouldn’t trust at a meal. Far too likely to sneak arsenic into something. He’s wanted a throne his whole life.

If you mean Panayiotis, Aikaterini had said frostily, I have never known him to be anything but a decent man.

How would you know the difference? Kyriakos had returned, with a certain silken menace.

By then, she had understood that the way he’d lounged about on all the furniture, threatening to snap it beneath his dizzying height and vulgar, muscular bulk with every breath, was deliberate. That everything he did was deliberate.

That he was a study in quiet ferocity and his every move was considered before it was executed.

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It had been easier when she’d imagined him the feckless playboy she’d always thought he was, despite his demeanor. A man after notches on a bedpost and little else. The male version of an airhead.

I am conversant on decent men, Aikaterini had snapped, letting her temper get the better of her—something that had never happened before. Or not in as long as she could remember. What a pity that the definition of one escapes you.

Even now, all these months later and currently stood on the altar of the Grand Cathedral in as public a manner as possible, she could remember the way he’d looked at her. His hazel eyes so dark they’d seemed to haunt her in real time.

Then that slow curve of his mouth. She would not call the shape it made a smile.

And the way he’d said, We will provide the principality with heirs, Aikaterini. Unlike in your previous marriage, we will make it a priority.

She had been flustered. Disturbed, she’d told herself.

I don’t know when I’ll be ready for that, she’d told him, her voice rather more shrill than was ideal. Shrill and shaky.

Conditions that had only worsened the longer he’d studied her, remaining entirely too still for such an unseemly, oversize man—like he was a predator ready to pounce.

I imagine it will be sooner than you think, he had said.

It was funny that she’d thought about that exchange just about every night since. She was thinking about it now.

And it was an odd thing to think about when there were so many other things that should have been foremost in her mind, she thought crossly.

The vows were exchanged and she decided she didn’t like the way that Kyriakos’s voice resonated throughout the cathedral. He sounded so calm. So sure. As if he really was more than ready for this role of his.

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But then, she sounded the same when she spoke, because it was expected.

Princess Aikaterini always, always did what was expected.

Up to and including this forced wedding.

They exchanged rings. There was far too much hand-holding. She did her best to avoid his gaze as he slid the same ring Venediktos had once given her back onto her finger. They had taken it from her a year ago because it belonged to the principality and now it was returned to her anew, but she couldn’t help but think of it as tarnished.

Tarnished and twisted into something different, because it was Kyriakos who put it there.

She slid a ring on his hand as well, though it was far less showy. She did not, she told herself fiercely, notice for even one moment how different his hands were from Venediktos’s. Venediktos’s had been soft, smooth. Aristocratic.

Kyriakos clearly used his hands…in ways she could not begin to imagine. There were faint calluses on his palm beneath each finger. And the hands themselves were much larger than hers. No doubt proportional to the rest of him, she thought.

And there was no particular reason that idea should seem to root its way into her and make everything inside her feel…warm.

Perhaps she was coming down with something, she thought.

But no, it was only time for the kiss.

First there was a long speech from the priest, but it seemed to her to go much quicker than it should have. Then there was no escaping it. She knew the ceremony. She’d already done it once before.

“Your Serene Highness, you may now kiss your bride,” said the priest.

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Kyriakos moved closer and pulled her into his arms and they had not discussed this. In truth, Aikaterini had been putting this inevitable moment out of her mind.

But he seemed to know exactly what to do. Not simply to lean in and kiss her, but to do it in a way calculated to please the crowd. Which was, after all, the point of this moment.

So there was no reason whatsoever that when he leaned in close and pressed his mouth to hers, she should feel it as if he’d dumped scalding water over the top of her head and let it pour all over her.

There was no reason that she should feel shaken, down deep to her core.

His mouth was warm, unsmiling, and somehow deeply austere as it pressed against hers.

And it felt seismic within her.

Then he lifted his head, and there was something assessing in his gaze, something hot and knowing.

She looked away.

The priest stepped back, the ministers approached, and another procession made its way around the altar. Kyriakos—her new husband, which still seemed wrong and impossible—took her hand as if he meant to help her kneel.

That, too, was for show. Aikaterini had practiced this for months. Because as hateful she found this moment, and this man, she knew perfectly well that her obeisance was the point of all of this. It would be the image seared into the minds and hearts of the principality, and she’d known that no matter what her true emotions might have been, this was the moment that she had to make her own.

This was the moment that could make or break Kyriakos’s reign.

And with it, her own legacy.

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It had been tempting to deliberately ruin this moment because of that, but she didn’t have it in her. Venediktos had cared too much about the principality for that. The truth was, so did she, and her legacy was his, too.

So she let Kyriakos hold her hand as she swept around and stepped down so that she was below him. Then, making sure that her dress swayed out behind her—she’d practiced that too—she sank gracefully to her knees before him and bowed her head.

“It is my honor to offer you my fealty, Your Serene Highness,” she said, making sure to project her voice.

“Raise your head,” Kyriakos commanded her.

She had studied this moment when it had happened before across the history of the principality. It had usually been quite dry, according to all reports, though the widowed Princess’s willingness to submit to the new Prince in such a public fashion was always deemed of great importance.

Yet Kyriakos was making this…different, somehow. He did not let go of her hand, for one thing. She couldn’t help but think that somehow, he’d made what was no more than a legal requirement into something private. Almost intimate.

Still, she lifted her head as he commanded her.

“Do you swear to me your loyalty?” he asked her, gravely.

“I do, and gladly,” she replied.

These were stock replies. The palace staff had pulled them from the history books and scrolls to make certain that this ritual, which had not taken place in at least a century, hit all the right notes.

But none of it felt to Aikaterini as if it was being delivered by rote.

Kyriakos’s dark hazel gaze bored into hers. She felt him everywhere, as if he had climbed into her and—

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She had no idea where her head was right now.

His eyes gleamed, but he continued. “Do you give to me, willingly and without reservation, your body and soul, heretofore considered the exclusive property of the principality?”

She felt herself flush, as if he was asking her something very different. Then again, he was, wasn’t he? She wasn’t sure how it had never occurred to her until now that all of these vows and declarations hinged entirely upon her body.

What she intended to do with it. And who she would allow to access it. They made it a solemn ceremony but, in the end, it was all about sex.

Had this been the reason she had reacted so badly to this man from the start? Had she always known that should something happen to Venediktos, she would end up having to contend with Kyriakos’s rampant masculinity and that white-hot blaze of a knowledge she was sure she wanted nothing to do with in his gaze?

Aikaterini didn’t know.

But the nation was waiting.

She felt him crowd into her, though he did not move closer. Still, she felt him everywhere.

“I do gladly give myself to you,” she said, and the old words felt like wine on her tongue, “so that I may serve you for the remainder of our days, in whatever manner you wish and command as my husband, my protector, and my Prince.”

“Rise then,” he commanded her, “and serve me as my wife, as mother to my heirs, and as Princess of Zaccaria once more.”

She rose in the same graceful way she had descended, and suddenly it was as if the two of them were the only ones in this huge, graceful cathedral, because his gaze still seemed to be the only thing she could see—

Until his eyes flashed and he spun her around to face the gathered congregation, who all rose as one.

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“So it is done,” Kyriakos intoned. “And now, together as man and wife, Prince and Princess united, Zaccaria shall continue.”

“Zaccaria shall continue!” all the people cried, here inside the Cathedral and outside, too. She could hear the cheering.

The ancient ritual was done.

Zaccaria would survive intact.

Kyriakos would see to it.

Yet deep inside, behind the mask she always wore in public and her very deep fear that he could feel her trembling, Aikaterini found herself wondering if she was going to survive as well.

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