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When Olivia Lavenz is twelve years old, he finds his name.
The palace library is grand and sprawling, chestnut and cherry wood, smelling like crinkled paper and candles. There are no windows here — fear of prematurely aging the books is great.
Emilio Morales is daring. He’s a prince from a kingdom far, far away, and he sneaks away from his princely duties to assist at the village apothecary. Everyone who visits for his healing falls in love with him, and he falls in love with them right back. Olivia falls in love with him a little bit too.
Privately, he begins to call himself Emilio. Nowhere it could be seen, just in dreams and in his runaway imagination. In long court proceedings which he would much rather not be at, he traces it on the fabric of his flowing dresses.
He tells the man who will eventually take flesh from his body and sew the skin back together, and he begins to learn from him. Herbs and remedies. Nothing that will draw the eye of his father the king.
When he meets Max, it has been many years since then, and Emilio Lavenz is daring. He’s a prince from his own kingdom, and he sneaks away from his princely duties to kiss a brown-haired commoner with fire in her eyes. She doesn’t know Olivia, probably doesn’t even care enough about the royal family to know there ever was a princess.
Olivia wasn’t treated like a human, really. He was a doll. A pet to be dressed up and trotted through the gardens. That was his purpose right from the start. The king wouldn’t take a wife to conceive a child, wouldn’t even pay a whore for it discreetly. Olivia was the youngest daughter of a common family miles away. They lived near a roadway. Emilio doesn’t remember much from his true home. The smell of pigs, maybe. Wisteria growing in the garden. A mother who clearly cared more about wealth than her daughter.
Olivia was winked at, stroked, petted. He was eyed up like a pig for slaughter, or like a sheep to be shorn. Not many could have paid his bride-price, or handled the weight of his dowry.
Emilio drinks only a little too much, and knows how to sew. He makes eyes at girls in clubs, but never when they’re alone. Never on the street.
He crosses the street when there’s a man coming his way, even though all he gets these days is a nod of acknowledgement and a silent passing.
Max disappears sometimes after their outings. Off into rooms with Bea, leaving Joseph and Emilio to make idle conversation while behind the door, Emilio hears the softest sobs, the ones he knows intimately, the ones that taste like too many stares, too many fingers where they shouldn’t be.
He stains the sheets in their bed one night. He hadn’t been keeping track of it, and he strips the bed without a word.
Max is staring at him.
“Why is there blood on the sheets?”
Her eyes are wide and her mouth is downturned, like she’s worried but she doesn’t know why.
“I’m —“ Emilio gestures to himself, awkward like a virgin. “It’s that time of the month.”
Her eyes are like pancakes. “You get those?”
This is the price you paid for euphoria , he thinks.
When Max crowns herself king, her chest is heaving, and blood trickles from the corner of her mouth. Emilio can still see the head of his father rolling in the dirt.
When Max crowns herself king, she makes Emilio her queen, and the throne hugs his hips, feels like Olivia. Olivia loved to run his fingers over the red velvet cushion. He spent hours in a throne just like this one, trying not to fall asleep.
Max rages to Emilio now, but it’s different. Bea’s gone, and Emilio doesn’t get Max’s fear. He is the receiving end of her rage, her spite, her revulsion of the men who crush her toes and break her spirit. Not Emilio, never Emilio, but always men.
He tries, one day. Sympathy.
“I remember when my father was first letting me be considered me for marriage —“
Max cuts him off. “Emmie, you won’t get it. It’s different for us. You don’t have to worry about men looking at you like you’re their next trophy, asking questions that are just them biding their time until they can slip a hand under your skirt. Even being king doesn’t take that curse from me.
You will never have to worry about that.”
Olivia did, though, he wants to shout. Emilio will always be the scariest thing in a room full of women, but Olivia was always the mouse underneath their feet.
Olivia was a scared little thing. He hid in books and plucked at the fabric of his dresses.
Olivia feared marriage like any sensible woman does. Emilio reveled in the thought, when it arose. It always looked like fiery eyes and brown hair, from the moment he considered it. Olivia would have never even questioned it.
Olivia brushed his hair every night, put it into a braid with careful fingers that longed for a scalpel.
Olivia quaked under the gaze of the moon on a night away from the palace, surrounded by men with intentions unknown. Even when nothing happened, Olivia trembled with the knowledge that it could. It always could.
It’s been years since that name was uttered in Emilio’s vicinity. Max calls him Emilio, Emmie, and on particular nights, my Lord.
Max won’t look at him. Something’s happened. A man said something at a ball, copped a feel or sent her a glance that leered this side of leery. She had him imprisoned, of course she did. But the point, Emilio knows, is not that she took retribution. It’s that she had to deal with it happening in the first place.
They lie back to back, and Emilio listens to Max sniffling herself to sleep.
His hands are shaking, and with his left, he traces Olivia into the bedsheets over and over again.
His right hand is between his teeth, and he is just beginning to draw blood.