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She surveyed them both, decided to take the role of cool, regalprincess. She wasn’t, of course she wasn’t. No matter what strange snatches of memory seemed to exist here. But that was the role she’d been brought here to play.
“If you must have a bit of manly fistfighting to make yourselves feel better, you should take it outside. And leave me out of it.” And with that, Alexandra left the room with its echoes of pain and violence. The strange tree door from her dreams.
She wanted this over now more than ever. But then, she would not have Lysias, and that was a new pain. To think of life without him.
She had to push away that thought. She couldn’tmakehim love her. Or be brave enough to love her. Maybe she didn’t need to. Maybe she could simply convince him that since they got along so well, they should continue to enjoy each other...until they didn’t.
Somewhat relieved by this plan, she walked back down the staircase. The men followed, though a few paces back.
Alexandra didn’t look around this time. She ignored the whispers and shadows. She wanted no memories. No snatches of this possibility thatshewas the princess. It was entirelyimpossible.
If Lysias put the young princess in the tunnel, and his parents did not get to her, then likely someone awful had. If she had not died, she’d likely met terrible things andthendied. It was far more plausible that Alexandra was simply from the island, that she’d been caught up in the violence of the coup—perhaps even her parents had been perpetrators in the whole thing. They or she had escaped or been exiled to Athens, and then she’d either been abandoned or orphaned.
A much more plausible story than being aprincess.
She swept into Diamandis’s office without waiting for him. There was an older gentleman standing next to a little table where a variety of small tools where arranged. She smiled at him, putting everything of the past hour behind her. “Good morning.”
He was clearly flustered that she’d approached him without the king, but Diamandis soon showed up, Lysias behind him, both looking thunderous. It didn’t appear as though they’d physically fought each other though.
So there was that.
“Dr. Nikolaou,” Diamandis greeted brusquely. “This is the woman I’d like you to test.”
The doctor nodded at her. “Simply have a seat, miss.”
So she did. Let the doctor swab her mouth with his little cotton swab and pack it away carefully like it might be gold. “That should be what we need,” the doctor said as he began to pack up his materials.
“When will we have the results?” Lysias demanded.
The doctor didn’t even look up. “A few days. Friday at the latest.”
“I don’t need to remind you of how important privacy is in this endeavor, Doctor,” Diamandis said coldly.
The doctor looked up at him, and maybe Alexandra was seeing things, or maybe she was overly suspicious. But there was something like hatred in the doctor’s eyes. “Of course.”
The doctor left without looking at her or Lysias. Lysias had said he was falsifying the results. Did that mean the doctor was under Lysias’s influence?
And would Lysias do as he’d promised and search for her real genetic family?
Diamandis turned his attention to Lysias. “You are both dismissed, and you will stay out of the family wing, or I will throw you in a cell. Again.” Diamandis did not look ather, she noted, so she moved before him.
She studied the angry man and decided to fight all that anger and rage with something else entirely. Because he’d become king at the age of fourteen after his family had been brutally murdered. Maybe like Lysias, maybe like herself, he had not seen gentleness since.
She approached him, took his hands in hers. “I look forward to the answers, Diamandis. It will never be able to answer all our questions, but I hope it will bring us both some clarity. So that you may set some of this anger aside.”
He jerked his hands away from her, but she did not let him respond in any other way. She simply turned on a heel and followed the doctor’s exit out of the large doors.
Lysias found himself standing shoulder to shoulder with Diamandis, watching Alexandra’s graceful exit. Much like upstairs.
She could be the princess.
But it was impossible. It had to be impossible. She found secret doors because she’d been a spy. She had nightmares because, much like him, something terrible had happened to her in her childhood.
But it didn’t mean it was thesameterrible somethings.
The odds were impossible, or so he told himself over and over again. But as the memories forced themselves on him, clearer than they’d been in years, he just kept seeing the princess in Alexandra’s brown eyes.
“She’s a liar,” Diamandis growled. “As are you.”
