DUALITY /#Wattys 2021

Chapter 35

After dinner that night, Ridley crept to the corridor to the King's room. She waited until Reb was in the bathroom, but her mother saw her go and stared after her. Ridley ignored her. She had never gotten up the courage to tell the King what Devane had told her about the Queen, and she felt guilty about that. After this afternoon, now was the time.

The King's door stood ajar. Inside, a small lamp glowed in darkness, like candlelight. The King stood with his back to her, clad only in his pajama bottoms. A satin spread gleamed purple in the lamplight. The King picked up a small mechanical clock from a bedside table and adjusted the knobs on the back.

Ridley expected to see the pockmarked scars like moon craters along his side and disfiguring the back of one arm; he had been in a fire, after all. Considering what he had been through, he had gotten away with little scarring. But the raised striations on his shoulders didn't look like they came from any fire. Ridley blinked, confused; then, with horror, she realized what they were.

He turned, and she shrank away from the door, trying to compose herself.

"Ridley? Is that you?"

Another agony of embarrassment. Ridley coughed, trying to get her voice to work. "Yes, sir."

"It's all right. You can come in."

Ridley hesitated, but that didn't look good, either. She pushed the door and crossed the threshold.

"Something I can help you with?" Facing the door, his scars barely showed. His pale body reflected the lamplight, more trim than Simon's, with slender, straight shoulders, a lean torso, and a shape that tapered to his small hips. The vee the muscles made in his long neck, pointing gracefully between his collarbones, showed Ridley the shape he was in.

The clear blue eyes and the handsome face above this vision gave Ridley a rush. After Simon, she thought she would never be attracted to another man ever again.

She'd been wrong.

"Excuse me," said the King, and turned to a closet set into the wall. He pulled out a bathrobe and put it on. As he turned, the full extent of the scarring along his left side and arm stippled the lamplight into shadow, and the striped ridges on his shoulders gleamed like knife blades.

He turned, and his eyes registered the look she knew must be on her face.

She met his somber gaze. "Is that ..." Her throat caught, and she tried again. "Is that how strict your father was?"

He gave her a slow nod.

The moment wrested her deepest heart from her. "I'm sorry," she said.

Her pulse jerked inside her chest; then the King shrugged one shoulder. "It was a long time ago," he said.

Ridley tried, for the briefest of seconds, to imagine herself doing such a thing to the precious baby lying asleep at the other end of the house, and the thought tore her like a dagger. "It doesn't matter," she said.

The King stepped to a small writing desk that sat in a gloomy corner, pulled out a chair, and sat down. Long, bony bare feet with crooked toes showed white below his dark pajama legs, as if a pair of slender white boots stood there. Then he turned on a desk lamp. They both blinked.

"Well, you grew up in Holstonia," he said. "My parents were desperate for us kids to have a better life somehow. He wanted me to succeed. If I could pay for a good degree, the whole family could move to Midgarde. You know," he said. "Plus, my father drank. That didn't help things."