He bows his head. “I’ve always felt such … discontent. Even as a boy. It didn’t matter what I achieved or what I was given. I wanted more. Always more,” he murmurs, staring at his glass. “To hunger for success—that’s a good trait to possess as a businessman and a conqueror, but it needs to be balanced with temperance, morality, and wisdom. I’m not sure how much I have of any of those. Even now.”

His gaze moves up to the stars. “I can’t tell you how many nights I wished upon your Pleiades. For you to heal. For you to live. Once you were gone, for the first time in my life, success was overridden by something else.”

I feel a lump in my throat. I couldn’t speak even if he asked me to.

Montes looks at me. “How have I changed? I fell in love. I needed you, and you were locked away in a Sleeper. And the only way you were getting out of that machine was if I found a cure for cancer. It changed my entire focus. I began to understand loss in a way I hadn’t before—I began to feel the weight of your life and your suffering. Of everyone’s suffering. I couldn’t ignore it. God, did I try, too. But after a time … well, even an old dog like me can form new habits. Better habits.”

I’m gripping my glass so tightly I can feel the blood leaving my fingers.

He shakes his head. “You go so long without someone and fear can eat you up. The idea of you sustained me for decades but—and it’s inexplicable—I felt that once you were healed I couldn’t wake you. And I had all sorts of reasons for it—and so many of them are legitimate—but at the end of the day I don’t know, I just couldn’t make that one leap.”

Montes is finally explaining his decision to me. Really explaining it.

I take another swallow of my drink, and this time I don’t feel the burn, grappling with my thoughts as I am.

“You and I are the only people who know the world as it once was,” he says.

I shiver. Right now I feel like Montes and I are the only two beings in the entire universe, tied together by love and hate, time and memory.

“Us—and your former advisors,” I say.

“They aren’t people,” Montes says.

I take a deep breath. “Neither are we.”

We are all just self-fashioned monsters posing as gods.

“You’re wrong, Serenity. You and I cling to our humanity more fiercely than anyone else.”

He has a point. We cling to it because we know just how close we are to losing it.

“Your Majesties!” Heinrich dashes out to the patio. The alarm in his voice has us both standing.

Almost reflexively, Montes steps in front of me.

I frown at his back. I never wanted the old Montes, but he became mine anyway. I want this newer version even less. This is a man whose evil deeds I can truly forget. And I don’t want to forget. I want to remember to my last dying breath that even though the king might now be the solution, in the beginning he was the problem.

Just as soon as that thought comes, another follows in its wake.

No one is beyond forgiveness.

Both my parents used to say that, and that was something I had almost forgotten.

“We just got word from our men who were supposed to change guard for the regional leader of Kabul,” Heinrich says. “They said the place is a bloodbath—our soldiers are dead and the family is gone.”

Chapter 33

Serenity

“You’re not going,” the king says.

He and his men are equipping themselves in the living room.

A mercenary king. I hadn’t expected that from Montes. I don’t know whether I’m more surprised that he’s joining the unit assigned to the task, or that his men seem unfazed by this.

After all these years, the king has finally come down from his ivory tower.

“I am if you are,” I say, checking the magazine of my gun to make sure my weapons are fully loaded. My new gun isn’t. I haven’t had a chance to replace the spent bullets I fired off in Giza. I cross the room where box of communal ammunition rests. I pull out my own bullets and compare.

A match.

I begin to slide them into the magazine. The soldiers around me tense, their eyes darting between me and the king.

“Anyone have a spare magazine?” I say.

Just in case we run into any difficulties.

One of the soldiers lifts one sitting next to him and begins to hand it over.

Montes catches his wrist. “Don’t,” he says. “Serenity won’t be joining us.”

I finish loading my magazine and force it up into the chamber of the gun. “Who’s going to stop me?” I ask.

Many of these men saw me kill today, which means they saw my lack of hesitation, and now they’re seeing my lack of remorse.

Some of the soldiers look uncomfortable, but I also catch some suppressing grins.

Montes steps forward, crowding me. “Don’t force my hand, Serenity.” His voice has gone quiet.

“Then don’t force mine.”

We stare each other down. Us and our impasses. Montes knows just how easy it would be for me to lift my arm and point this gun at him, and I know how easy it would be for him to have his men detain me.

He knows I can hold my own if something bad should happen. I’ve proven that to him over and over.

“Let me into your world,” I say softly. My plea cuts through the tension in a way that none of my previous words could.

Montes’s nostrils flare and his lips press together. It used to be that the king couldn’t resist me when I got physical. Now it’s something else. Every time I tear down an emotional wall of ours, I make headway with him.