Chapter 286 Crown Prince
ADRIANA
Elijah stepped back out of the embrace with the controlled precision of someone removing themselves from a situation rather than pushing back against it. “Simone.” His voice was careful and flat in equal measure. “What are you doing here? You can’t walk into this house without—”
“That’s what you say after all this time?” She looked at him with the expression of someone who had rehearsed a different reception. “Ten years, Elijah. At least ten. And that’s your greeting?”
“Answer the question. What do you want?”
She looked past him then and found me standing there, and the warmth in her expression cooled with a precision that told me she was sharper than she was choosing to appear.
“And who is this?” she said.
“His wife,” I said. Not unkindly. Not warmly either. “Adriana. You are?”
She ignored me and looked back at Elijah. “You’re married. You told me you would never marry. You said it to my face that marriage wasn’t something you believed in, that’s why we couldn’t have a real future.” Her voice was steady but I could hear the edges of something less steady underneath it. “And yet.”
“What do you want, Simone?” Elijah said again. “Why are you here?”
She turned back to the young man and put her hand on his shoulder and brought him forward, and he came with the reluctant compliance of someone who had been promised something for participating in this and wasn’t sure yet whether it was worth it.
“The night before you left,” she said, looking at Elijah. “When we were together. I got pregnant.” She was very calm when she said it. Calm in the specific way of someone who had been saying something in their head for a very long time and had finally found the room to say it out loud. “This is your son.”
The room went entirely quiet.
I looked at the young man. He was older than Leo. I could see that immediately. There was something in the line of his jaw that I recognized and I hated that I recognized it and I kept my face completely still and looked at it anyway because looking away wasn’t going to change what I was seeing.
“Elijah.” I used his name, his actual name, not his title, the name that meant I was speaking to him specifically as my husband rather than as a king. “Tell me this woman is lying.”
He looked at me. My husband who I had been married to for fifteen years looked at me and for the first time in all of those years he could not look me in the eye and say the words, and the trying itself was its own kind of answer and we both knew it.
I turned back to Simone.
“I don’t know what you hoped to accomplish by walking into this house with this story and no warning,” I said. My voice was even. I was concentrating on keeping it even. “But let me be very clear about one thing before this conversation goes any further.” I looked at the young man and then back at her. “Whatever happened between my husband and anyone else before I entered his life is history. It does not walk through my door and announce itself as the present.” I paused. “And regardless of what any test or any court decides about who this young man’s father is — nothing that happens in this room today or any other day is going to touch my son’s position. Leo is the Crown Prince of this kingdom. That is not a discussion I am willing to have.”
Simone’s eyes went back to Elijah. “Tell her about us. Tell her what you promised me. Tell her why we couldn’t be together.” She moved toward him with the ease of someone who had been in his space before and still believed she had the right to it. “You said marriage was impossible for you. And then you went and—”
“That was fifteen years ago,” Elijah said. Something had come into his voice that I recognized as controlled anger, the very quiet kind that was more serious than any volume. “You cannot come here without warning and make claims like this without evidence and without any conversation and expect—”
“He looks like you,” she said simply. “You know he does.”
Another silence. Longer this time.
Elijah looked at Hazel, who was standing near the door. “Take them to the courtroom. Thirty minutes.” He looked at me. “Come with me.”
He held out his hand. I took it because this woman was watching and I was not going to give her the satisfaction of seeing a gap between us, and we walked out and the door closed behind us and I let go of his hand and turned to face him in the corridor.
“Fifteen years,” I said. My voice was steady. It cost me something to make it steady but I did it. “I need the full truth right now. Not pieces of it. All of it.”
He pressed his hand over his face. Exhaled. Looked at me with the expression of a man who had been carrying something for a very long time and had just run out of places to put it.
“She was someone I knew when I was seventeen,” he said. “I didn’t have feelings for her. There was one night — I was drunk and it happened and the next morning I left for training and I never went back and I never knew she was pregnant. I genuinely did not know, Adriana.”
“And the boy.”
He was quiet.
“He has your jaw,” I said quietly. “I saw it.”
“I know.”
We stood in the corridor with that between us for a long moment.
“Leo’s crown,” I said finally. “I need to hear you say it.”
“Nobody touches Leo’s crown,” he said, immediately and without qualification. “You have my word. Whatever this is and whatever it turns out to be, that doesn’t change.”
I nodded once. I went back to my room and I put my crown on because I was going to walk into that courtroom as the Queen and I was going to sit beside my husband and I was going to hear everything this woman had to say, and I was going to do it with the crown on my head and my back straight and not a single crack visible.
Simone was already seated when I walked in. The expression that crossed her face when she saw me enter was the most honest thing she’d shown since she arrived.
I took my seat beside Elijah and looked at her directly.
“Let’s start from the beginning,” I said. “Tell us everything. And I would strongly recommend the truth.”
She looked past me at Elijah. “Why is she here? This is between you and me.”
“She’s my wife,” Elijah said. “She’s the Queen. She goes wherever she chooses.” He looked at Simone steadily. “Answer her.”