Reign: A Royal Military Romance by Roxie Noir Read Free Book Online Page B

American laugh.
    It’s a problem. I’m the head of my father’s small council. I’m his advisor, Minister of Military Affairs, and Lord of the Realm. I’m an important state figure.
    I cannot sleep with the daughter of the American Ambassador, and I especially can’t now.

7
    Hazel
    I manage to behave myself for several days. It probably qualifies as a miracle.
    It helps that my parents and I don’t attend any more formal events with the royal family, so at least I can’t embarrass myself in front of Kostya any more. He’s already had to rescue my drunk ass once, and even though he was very polite about it, the fact remains: I made a spectacle of myself, and his father sent him to do damage control.
    We only catch glimpses of each other. Walking down hallways in opposite directions. On either end of a big room. Him in the garden, me on my balcony, enjoying the sun. I do my best to ignore the way my insides twist when we make eye contact.
    The king seems intent on making our stay at the Summer Palace as pleasant as possible, and his office arranges outing after outing for us.
    We stroll through the beautiful seaside town of Velinsk, which is almost impossibly charming. Like the palace itself, it mostly went without being noticed by the Soviet Union, so it’s still quaint and lovely, unspoiled by the brutalist architecture that so many other towns sprouted during that time.
    A friendly, English-speaking tour guide takes us up and down the coast, past beautiful cliffs filled with sea caves, past pristine white-sand beaches unreachable except by boat. We have champagne picnics and cook fresh fish over a fire.
    Another day, we visit the roman ruins in the town. It was only ever a small outpost, but the Romans maintained a presence there through the fall of the Byzantine Empire. Now the ruins are stark and beautiful, no more than a few low walls, columns without a roof.
    I ask how much archaeological work has been done on them, and the tour guide just shrugs. Behind a low wall, I find a single empty wine bottle lying on its side and wonder if the ruins were cleaned up for our benefit.
    Velinsk isn’t big, and we cover most of the town in a few days. The people seem bright, happy, and wholesome, and they all speak excellent English.
    One evening, sitting in a cafe and sipping strong Turkish coffee, I look at a map of town. Once, it was split into quarters — the Russian quarter, the Svelorian quarter, the Roma quarter — but they’ve done away with that.
    All except one sliver of town. On the outskirts, to the northeast, away from the coast, is the Shadow Quarter. The tour guides haven’t taken us there. They haven’t taken us anywhere near there, though we’ve been to nearly every other part of town.
    I take a sip of coffee and frown at the map.
    “What’s over here?” I ask the tour guide, tapping the Shadow Quarter with my index finger. He looks at it, and I see a frown pass over his face quickly.
    “That’s the old industrial section of town,” he says. “It was built up under Soviet rule. They wanted to make Velinsk into a fishing town, so they built a few sardine canneries on the outskirts. But they were abandoned when something else closer to home drew their attention away.”
    He smiles, but it’s not a smile that reaches his eyes. It’s a learned smile.
    I don’t let it bother me, because it’s obvious by now that smiling doesn’t come easily to the Svelorian people, and it’s nice that he’s trying.
    “The Svelorian people did not exactly clamor to get Soviet attention back on themselves, so the canneries remained abandoned. It’s a very tedious, boring part of town. There’s nothing to do there,” he says.
    “Can we go?” I ask.
    “Why?” he says.
    “I’m curious,” I say. “I haven’t learned much about the Soviet occupation here.”
    “Frankly, we’d rather forget it happened,” he says evenly.
    He takes a sip of his coffee. My parents have both finished theirs, and