Harbor (On the Wind #3)

42. Tybalt

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

TYBALT

“ T onight?”

Orestes blinked at me. “What, tonight?”

“Do you think we could... ?” I lifted my brows significantly at him.

For a moment, Orestes’s teeth pressed into his bottom lip. He smiled, and I thought he felt the same heated tickle that swept up the back of my neck just looking at him.

Then, he sighed.

“I don’t know.” His eyes shifted back and forth, like there might be a threat somewhere in the room that he hadn’t picked out yet. At the moment, there were only children tucked in bedrolls on the floor, the curtains pulled shut against the light outside while they tried to nap. “It’s just”—Orestes grimaced when he looked at me again—“if someone wants you dead, I don’t want to make their job easier by making you ill.”

I let out a breathy laugh. “So you want me to believe that you love me, but because you love me, you can’t be with me.”

“Tybalt,” Orestes said, breathy and stricken as he reached out to cup my cheek. His callused fingers stretched, slipping past my hairline. “I can .”

I swallowed hard, fighting down another flush.

Thing was, he could. Like this—small acts of such staggering sweetness that I didn’t know how to make sense of them. They were more intimate than him pinning me to the bed and taking what he wanted, but that—that all worked. I understood the transaction of it.

This? Him giving kindness even when I was prickly and demanding?

No, that didn’t make any damn sense to me and I’d very much like to get back onto a field I understood the rules of.

And since I didn’t, and since I felt uneasy, I huffed and leaned back from his touch. “You know what I mean,” I snipped unpleasantly. “Don’t be obtuse.”

Yes, I knew I was being an absolute brat when I got up from our low table where we’d been eating slices of apple left over from the children’s morning snack, chewing quietly. They were tart and crisp and I’d made the mistake of thinking how much I’d like to taste them on Orestes’s tongue and so, I had every intention of spending the rest of the children’s nap time pouting about things I had no right to demand but wanted anyway.

I’d only just sat in the seat beneath a window when I felt a tug on my sleeve and looked over.

Olive.

She didn’t look sleepy eyed and must not have been napping, to catch me out so quickly. It wasn’t like I’d stomped my way across the room, and Orestes had hardly made a sound.

We often kept an eye on the children when they were napping. It was easy, and it gave their teachers a chance to rest.

Across the room, Orestes had gathered up the rest of the apples, his broad back to me. Maybe this time would be it and he’d finally get sick of my griping. As much as I doubted it, as much as I trusted him, I still felt a prickle of fear work its way across my skull. That, at least, was familiar.

I turned back to Olive and swept my hand across her back. “Couldn’t sleep?”

I didn’t really expect her to answer, but I shifted so she could crawl into my lap if she wanted to. I... knew that feeling too. Wanting to be held close, warm and safe. As much as I might’ve balked at offering that to someone else, Olive was?—

I didn’t know. She was kind and afraid, and she’d lost her father. I might not understand why she turned to me when I was arguably the least able person in any room to provide comfort, but I wasn’t going to turn her away. So instead, I did my best to give what she seemed to need.

Olive pursed her lips, and I figured that’d be it, when she pressed in against the windowsill and whispered in my ear. “Do you think Uncle Eric is a”—she leaned in and lowered her voice further—“a witch?”

A bitch, maybe. But that wasn’t the sort of thing I could say to Olive. She barely spoke—not to me or anyone else—and I didn’t want to discourage her by being snarky and sarcastic when she was so sincere.

I wrapped an arm around her and she snuggled in close, her sharp little shoulder pressing against my ribs as she stared worriedly up at me.

The story I’d read to them before nap time had had a princess and an evil witch who’d tried to steal everything from her. In the end, the princess prevailed, but not before the witch had cursed her and sent her into a slumber so deep she appeared dead.

Perhaps that hadn’t been the best story to tell right before asking these children to shut their eyes.

“No, Olive. Your uncle Eric’s just a man. No magic there.” Once upon a time, I’d have told her that there was no magic anywhere, but the platitude died on my tongue when I looked over at Orestes.

There was magic in the world, sure. Not even just the kind that turned men into birds and let them fly.

There was the unfortunate, distracting flutter of my heartbeat and?—

Gods, I was a mess.

Olive, her next inhale shaky, remained unconvinced.

“I don’t want you to die,” she whispered hoarsely.

“What?” I stared at her.

She’d been there for—well, for more conversations about assassinations and revenge than she should’ve been, perhaps. I really was just terrible at actually creating safety for her, or even a basic feeling of safety. My only solace was that I hadn’t dragged her or Penelope into all of this. That honor belonged exclusively to my father.

All right, and perhaps a little to her own unfortunate relations.

I opened my mouth to speak, but Olive crawled onto the bench with me, kneeling in front of me with her hands on my shoulders. “Uncle Eric. He made Daddy die. He... with his belt, he?—”

Her eyes had begun to shine, but I thought my own might be even wider than hers while she spun her horrible story.

“He took his air. Daddy went—” She tipped forward, pressing her face into the center of my chest, but I saw how purple she’d gotten, fighting through feelings she didn’t want to acknowledge and had pushed down for months. “Red. He choked.”

I could see how, to a child without an intimate knowledge of violence, that might seem like witchcraft.

I combed my fingers through her hair slowly, though they felt numb and chilled. “Your uncle killed your father,” I whispered, not only to keep from rousing the other children, but because I had lost my voice in a rising panic.

She nodded.

“Does your mother know?”

All she gave was a sniffle and the tiniest shake of her head.

I’d . . . misread everything.

I’d thought Penelope wanted my father, wanted to be queen, and she hadn’t.

I’d thought Father finding her was simply a chance to bypass me, and it was so much more insidious.

I’d never, for a single second, considered that Olive’s father had been taken from her because her family—people who ought to love and care for her, had decided they needed more of her than she’d already given.

A simmering anger closed my throat. For so long, I’d thought whatever disappointment my father felt because of me, however he’d treated me, it’d all been my fault. Well deserved. I was a disaster, after all, not fit to be prince and certainly not to be king.

But if someone like Penelope wasn’t good enough to warrant kind treatment, perhaps there was nothing any of us could do, with the way things were, to build ourselves a decent life free of horrors committed by our own families.

It was easier to target my jaw-clenching rage at her brother, rather than look at my own situation, but my anger built all the same.

Fuck Urial. And fuck Eric besides.

For a long time, we just sat there in silence. I felt the wetness of her tears seep through my shirt, but after a while, she stopped shaking. I didn’t know if she ever got that nap in, but when the other children began to wake, I held her arms and eased her back.

“I promise you,” I said, looking into her big blue eyes, the whites now faintly red, “witch or no, Eric will not hurt another person. No one else. Olive, I am so sorry.”

She sniffed pitifully, shaking her head. That, too, was familiar—deny that anything was wrong because there was nothing you could do to fix it.

Fuck that. Olive had Prince Tybalt on her side, and I might be indecent and unwanted by the Urial court, but I was done being trampled and I was not going to tolerate this poor girl’s tears going unanswered.

“I’ll take care of it,” I swore to her, pressing a kiss to the top of her head.

Eric might think me an easy target, but I wouldn’t make his attacks any easier from now on. I didn’t mind letting him roll right over me when it was only for myself, but this was intolerable.

Paris had hoped I was something other than a rake.

Mercutio had asked me to be more than a fop.

Orestes deserved my very best.

And still, it was Olive who’d earned my vengeance and my action.

“Afterward, we’ll tell your mom together, all right?”

She nodded at me, and I stood, because if I?—

If I didn’t act that very moment, I feared I’d lose my nerve.