For a moment, Beatriz only stares at him, and, for his part, he refuses to meet her eyes, instead keeping his gaze on the stone floor.
“We need to talk,” he says finally.
A few moments ago, Beatriz agreed with that sentiment. Over the last few hours, she’s had countless conversations with him in her mind, she’s railed at him and screamed and called him all manner of names. She’s demanded answers and then slapped him before he ever got a chance to give them to her. She’s thought of a dozen cutting remarks, each worse than the last but none of them quite awful enough.
Now, though, with him crouching before her in the window, his knuckles blanched where he grips the frame tight in his hands, the words leave her. Instead of telling him all the things she’s rehearsed in her mind, she takes hold of the open window again and slams it closed, catching his fingers in the process and making him cry out in pain.
The sound makes her feel a bit better, but that lasts only an instant before the window pushes open again and Nicolo is still standing there, balanced precariously on the sill.
“We need to talk,” he says again, and this time Beatriz hears the slur of his words.
“You’re drunk,” she says, biting out the words. “But I suppose you’ve been celebrating, Your Majesty.”
“Triz—”
She moves toward him quickly, grabbing him by the shoulders. “I could shove you out the window.”
He doesn’t look alarmed, doesn’t even go tense, just appraises her with calm, cool eyes.
“Not unless you’re keen on adding regicide to your charges,” he points out.
Beatriz doesn’t loosen her grip. “You reek of liquor,” she tells him. “Any sane person would assume you fell to your death attempting something foolish.”
“And you consider the members of the court sane?” he asks, his smile turning mocking.
“I think I’d like to test the theory.”
She pushes him back, and his hands grip the window frame tighter. Fear flashes in his eyes, and Beatriz feels a jolt of triumph rocket through her. She could watch him die, she thinks. Not a full day ago she was kissing him, and now she’s tempted to kill him with her own hands. How quickly everything can change.
“At least let me explain—”
“I assure you, I’m not so stupid I haven’t figured out the gist of it myself.”
“Gigi decided—”
Beatriz’s eyebrows arch up. “Hiding behind your sister now? How brave.”
He shakes his head, finally lifting his eyes to meet hers. “I didn’t come here to make excuses, Triz—”
“Don’t call me that,” she snaps.
He lets out a long breath before trying again. “I came here to fix it.”
Beatriz squares her shoulders and crosses her arms over her chest. “Oh?” she asks. “How exactly do you propose to do that? Let Pas and me go free? Relinquish the throne you stole to the person who belongs on it?”
It gives her some satisfaction to see him flush with shame. He forces himself to continue.
“Your marriage was never consummated,” he continues. “If you annul it and marry me instead—”
“You must be joking.” Beatriz laughs, then glances at where Pasquale is still sleeping and lowers her voice. “I wouldn’t marry you if you were the last person in this wretched country.”
He doesn’t say anything for a long moment, but she can tell she’s wounded him. Good.
“It’s the only way you can make it through this. We can spin it, say your marriage to Pas was a sham and you were desperate. How none of this was your idea. How he used you.”
Beatriz didn’t think there was anything Nicolo could say that would anger her more, she thought her temper had reached its limit. She was wrong.
“Let me see if I understand this,” she says slowly. “You would have me push all blame onto Pas in order to save myself?”
“There’s no saving him,” Nicolo says, shaking his head. “There are already powerful people at court who want him on the throne; pardoning him is too dangerous for me.”
Beatriz’s stomach tightens. “You’ll execute him, then,” she says.
He pauses, just long enough to let her know he’s considered it. “No,” he says. “It wouldn’t do to make a martyr of him. He’ll be exiled to the mountains. There’s a Fraternia there that will take him. He’ll be stripped of his title, his name even, and spend the rest of his days studying scripture and reflecting on his spiritual redemption within their walls.”
Not death, Beatriz thinks, but Pasquale won’t find it much better. She’s heard stories about Cellarian Fraternias and Sororias—cold, minimalistic structures stripped of all comforts and luxuries, where the only entertainment to be found is in the pages of scriptures and the only conversation allowed is when a Brother or Sister says the nightly prayers to the stars. They have Fraternias and Sororias in Bessemia as well, where men and women devote themselves to the stars and the reading of them, deciding to live a life without personal or material attachments, but they aren’t quite the same. Deciding being the main difference, she supposes. Perhaps some people choose the Sororia or Fraternia in Cellaria, but for most it’s used as a punishment. Just like now.
“So are those my choices, then? Marry you or I’ll…what? Be sent to the neighboring Sororia? I can see why Cesare chose you to succeed him—banishing a girl to that place for rejecting him seems like something he would do.”
Nicolo flinches. “I’m not trying to give you an ultimatum, but Pasquale is capable of protecting himself. He doesn’t need you suffering alongside him.”
Beatriz presses her lips into a thin line. “I want to make myself perfectly clear, Nico. I would rather be suffering alongside him than reigning beside you.”
Nicolo deflates, sagging against the window frame like a sail losing its wind.
“I tried,” he says after a moment. “Remember that.”
“I don’t think there’s any chance I will ever forget this moment,” Beatriz tells him. “I’ll remember it until my last breath. They say boredom is a constant companion in a Sororia, but I don’t know that I’ll ever be bored, not when I recall the memory of you showing up in my bedroom—drunk, desperate, and disappointed. A pathetic excuse for a person, playing at being a king. I daresay the memory will bring me joy even in my darkest moments. Now get out, before I shout for the guards. What would they say, to find their new king sneaking into the room of accused traitors?”
For a moment, she thinks he will call her bluff, but eventually he turns away, climbing back onto the window ledge without another word. When he’s gone, Beatriz slams the window shut, the sound echoing through the bedchamber.