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“It’s our last night,” he said unnecessarily. “I thought we should make the most of it.”
“My sentiments exactly,” she agreed, pleased her voice sounded easygoing and breezy, as though she barely cared that they probably wouldn’t see one another again after this.
He turned back to the instrument panel, guided a lever upwards, and then the helicopter lifted off the ground with a bit of a lurch, before hitching smoothly into the sunset sky.
She settled back in her seat, looking out of her window at this beautiful city, as he navigated the skies with effortless ease, tacking them towards the Med and then heading north. The lights of the city gave way to forest, so she wondered if they wereflying over their hiking grounds? Little villages were obvious from the lights, which were more visible against a darkening sky.
Finally, after around a half hour of flying, they began to descend, so she craned forward, trying to get an idea of where they were going.
Eventually, he set the helicopter down, and a man in a military uniform appeared at her door, opening it once the rotors had slowed.
“Where are we?”
“You’ll see.”
“You keep saying that…”
“And yet you keep asking.”
She pulled her lips to the side. “You’re being mysterious.”
“This is something I wanted to share with you,” he said, simply. And yet, it wasn’t simple, because embedded in that explanation was both a promise of intimacy and a forever farewell. The dichotomy of that pulled at her heart.
She stepped out of the helicopter, looking around, waiting for Ares to join her. He surprised her then by taking her hand in his and lifting it to his mouth.
“Someone will see,” she cautioned, looking around and seeing two more guards.
“These are my inner circle,” he promised. “They are safe.”
She relaxed against him then.
“It’s good that you have people in your life you can trust implicitly.”
“I think I’d go mad without that,” he confided.
She nodded her agreement.
They walked towards a light in the near distance. As they drew closer, she saw it was a building right on a bluff, overlooking the ocean, which was illuminated by a very full, very bright moon. The milky colour streaked in a silver columntowards the shore and she sighed again, committing even that picturesque view to memory.
“It’s perfect,” she admitted.
“You haven’t even seen where we’re going,” he pointed out, as they began to climb a staircase, just wide enough to allow them to walk side by side.
At the top, she realized the building they’d been walking towards was a restaurant, though it was not a fancy, Michelin-starred place, but rather a weatherboard shack with big windows on all sides.
“What is this place?”
“It’s a kiosk,” he said, stopping to look at it, perhaps trying to see it as she did. “As a boy, we would holiday near here. There is a smaller palace about five miles away, and the beach, up until that headland, is private. It was the most normal thing we did, as a family.”
Her heart twisted for him.
“While we were here, we were just us.”
“In what way?”
“My parents were just…our mother and father. My mother was an excellent artist, and she would sit cross-legged and sketch us. Picture after picture. She always brought a selection of artists’ paper for us to practice on, too, though only my sister Aria seems to have inherited her talent. Our father loved sport, football especially, and he set up goals on a large lawn at the palace, so we could play together.”
“All of you?”
