before
I met a king when I was twenty-one years old.
But that’s getting ahead of the story.
First, about me, Embry Moore, son of the terrifying Lieutenant Governor Vivienne Moore. To the outside world, I must have looked like a prince. I grew up with horses and boats and my own fucking lake, went to the most exclusive schools, graduated college early, and went off to play war because it sounded like fun.
It was before the war had actually started, back when people thought the Carpathian separatists would settle down like they always had, and it seemed like the best kind of adventure to have: spend some time in the mountains, play soldier for a while, build a resume toward my inevitable future in politics.
Princes do it all the time.
Easy.
And it was easy…until my second month on base.
I wanted cigarettes, I think. That’s why I missed the beginning of the fight. Evening had fallen, a rosy gloaming that masked the squat ugliness of the base, and as I grabbed the silver cigarette case off my bed and trotted back down to the yard, I remember thinking that the world couldn’t get more beautiful than it was in that moment. The smears of orange and red and purple off to the west, the dark spurs of the mountains to the east, the brisk, clean air, and the promise of stars twinkling overhead. What could be lovelier than this? What else could stop my thoughts, stop my breathing, stop everything that wasn’t simply awe and unbelieving gratitude?
It shows how differently I used to think then, asking what instead of who.
I turned the corner into the yard, already pulling out a cigarette to light, when a blur of gray-brown-green crashed past me, making contact with another blur of gray-brown-green. I jumped back, the cigarette knocked from my hand and trampled underfoot, and I narrowly missed getting sucked into the tornado of fists and boots that was now drawing a crowd from everywhere nearby.
“That was my last cigarette, asshole,” I said to no one in particular.
A big guy called Dag—everyone had forgotten his real name by that point—was staring at the fight with his arms crossed and a keen expression of disgust. “Idiots.”
I grunted in agreement. The commissary had recently stopped carrying cigarettes as part of some new health initiative, and I really, really didn’t want to have to walk the mile down to the little Ukrainian village to get a new pack of smokes tonight. But now it looked like I had to.
“You going to step in?” Dag asked me, tilting his head toward the fracas in front of us.
“After they made me drop my cigarette? They deserve a few black eyes.” I said it jokingly, but Dag didn’t crack a smile. I added, “They’re not my guys anyway.” It was a big fucking base, after all, and I wasn’t about to exert all my energy for two idiots fighting over God knew what.
“You are the only officer around though,” Dag pointed out.
“Like you care one way or the other.” But I glanced around the yard, and sure enough, I was the highest-ranking soldier there.
With a long-suffering sigh for Dag’s benefit and after muttering something about not being a fucking babysitter, I walked forward to break up the boys and make it clear that one of them owed me a new cigarette.
But someone beat me to it.
A wide-shouldered man strode into the center of the fight, as calmly as you might walk along a beach, grabbed one soldier by the back of his shirt and yanked him back. He moved fast to restrain the other fighter, so fast that my mind only registered slivers of him. Flashing eyes, a full mouth. Dark hair. The kind of olive skin you were born with, the kind that stayed warm and bronze through the winter. Italian maybe, or Greek.
“Holy shit,” Dag said. He sounded impressed. Or maybe not. Sometimes it was hard to tell with Dag.
Percival Wu, one of our translators for the locals, came up behind us from the barracks. “That’s Colchester,” he told Dag and me in a low voice. “He just got here yesterday.”
In that moment, I didn’t care who he was. I was just relieved I didn’t have to step in. To be honest, I’d only left OCS a few months ago, and it still felt strange to be in charge of other people.
I grew up around power, around the kind of people who exercised authority with effortless ease, but I myself had spent most of my life dodging any and all responsibility. Consequences were something to be charmed and flirted out of, other people were worth only how much fun they could give me. I had next to no practice taking care of other people…I could barely keep myself out of trouble.
In fact, I rarely bothered to—why would I, when trouble was usually so much fun for everyone involved?
I know this all makes me sound selfish, and I was. I was a bad, selfish child who grew into a bad, selfish man…but don’t mistake selfishness for obliviousness. I knew how bad I was. I knew how sinful, even though I told myself I didn’t believe in sin. In the late hours of the night, after I’d drank or fucked or fought, depending on the circumstances, I’d lie in bed and watch the stars wheel through the sky outside and know—just know—that I was unnatural somehow. That some people were born wrong, born all warped and empty inside, that I was born without the parts that made people brave or pure or good. I knew that I was born without a conscience, or maybe a heart or a soul. I would think about this, then I would twist my body into the sheets and shove my face into the pillow. And as the air left my body, I would think about every awful thing I’d done that day. Every awful thing I’d ever done. And I’d hate myself for all of it. Hate myself for how selfish I could be, how thoughtless. I knew better than to chase anger or lust or escapism to their inevitable bleeding, sticky, intoxicated ends, but every single time, I did it anyway.
Every. Single. Time.
But it was only dusk then, and night hadn’t come yet and neither had the self-loathing. In that moment, I only felt relief and a vague kind of gratitude, and the desire to go find another cigarette.
“Show’s over, I guess,” I told Dag, as I turned away to go down to the village. And then I felt a presence behind me. A presence that wasn’t the slender form of Wu or the hulking stone-faced Dag, and I stopped walking. But I didn’t turn.
Not at first.
“You want to tell me why your cigarette was more important than your men, Lieutenant?”
The voice was the kind that made you pause. It was deep, yes, and held this interesting mix of husk and melody, like a song whose notes had been burned around the edges.
But it wasn’t the sound itself that stopped you…it was its purity. The strength of it. And not the kind of strength men my age pretended to have, all unearned swagger, but actual strength.
Calm, clear, honest.
Unequivocal.
It was the voice of someone who didn’t lie in bed at night and wish he’d never been born.
I turned to face him, already thrown by the sound of that voice, and then I felt completely knocked down by the sight of his face. Dark eyebrows above eyes such a complicated shade of green that I couldn’t decide if they were truly pale or truly dark. A serious mouth and high cheekbones, and a square jaw shadowed by stubble. Given his hyper-fucking-regulation haircut and gleaming boots, I guessed that Colchester was not the kind of man to miss his morning shave. Just the kind of man who couldn’t keep a smooth face for more than a few hours.
But it was more than his features that struck you. It was his expression, his gaze. He looked to be my age, and yet there was something in his face that seemed older than his years. It wasn’t even about age, now that I think about it. It was about time. He looked like a man from a different era, a man who should have been riding horses through thick forests, rescuing damsels and slaying dragons.
Noble.
Heroic.
Kingly.
All of this I thought in an instant. And in the next instant I had the sudden, uncomfortable feeling that he had just seen all he needed to know about me, that he’d seen my selfishness and my empty carnality and my dissolute laziness. That he’d seen every night I’d pressed a pillow over my face and wished I had the courage to snuff out my own worthless existence.
And I felt a sudden flush of shame. For being me. For being Embry Moore—Second Fucking Worthless Lieutenant Embry Moore—and that pissed me off. Who was this pretty asshole to make me feel ashamed of myself? Only I got to make myself feel that way.
I took a step closer to him, squaring off so that our chests were only a hand’s span apart. With some satisfaction, I realized I had an inch or so on him, although he probably had a good thirty pounds of pure muscle on me. And with even more satisfaction, I realized his uniform had a gold bar on it. A second lieutenant like me.
I found my voice. “They weren’t my men, Lieutenant.”
“So you were just going to let them beat the shit out of each other?”
I rolled my eyes. “They’re big boys. They can take care of themselves.”
Colchester’s face didn’t change. “It’s our job to look out for them.”
“I don’t even know who the fuck they are.”
“So when you’re out there, fighting the Carpathians, that’s how it’s going to be? You’re only going to look out for the men directly underneath you?”
“Oh, trust me, Lieutenant Colchester, I always keep both eyes on a man directly underneath me. Both hands too.”
Dag and Wu laughed, and I grinned, but in the blink of an eye I was backed against the metal wall of the barracks with Colchester’s warm forearm pressed against my throat.
“Is this all a joke to you?” he asked quietly, so quietly that the others couldn’t hear. “Are those fake mountains over there? Fake bullets in your gun? Because it’s not a joke to the Carpathians. They don’t have fake bullets, Lieutenant Moore, and it won’t be fake IEDs they plant in the roads either. You’re going to be asking these men to follow you, even when they doubt you, even when you doubt yourself, and so you better believe it matters that you take care of them. Here, there, every-fucking-where. And if you can’t accept that, I suggest you march over to the captain’s office and ask for a transfer back home.”
“Fuck you,” I growled.
He pressed his arm tighter against the side of my throat, cutting off most—but not all—of my blood flow, and his eyes swept across my face and then down my body, which he had caged against the wall with his own. His eyes looked darker in the shadow of the wall, like the cold depths of a lake, but there was nothing else cold about him right now. His body was warm against mine and I could see the pulse thrumming in his neck, and for the briefest second, his lips parted and those long eyelashes fluttered, like he meant to close his eyes but forgot how.
“Fuck you,” I repeated, but weakly this time, weak from his arm against my neck and something else I didn’t care to examine.
He leaned in close and whispered in my ear. “I’d rather it was the other way around.” And he stepped back, dropping his arm. I sucked in a ragged breath, the fresh oxygen cutting through my blood like ice.
By the time my vision cleared, Lieutenant Colchester was gone.
