I think he’s threatening me until I see the heat in his eyes. It’s still a warning, but this one’s of a wholly different nature.

His arousal only pisses me off more, as does my response to it. He told me once that I’d be good at angry sex. I think he’s right.

“This is all just a game to you, isn’t it?” I say.

“Of course.” His face is only inches from mine. “But you already knew that.”

I straighten and speak low enough so that only he hears. “One day you’re going to underestimate the wrong person, and then your pretty empire is going to come crashing down.”

“I’M STILL DEBATING shooting you,” I say an hour later.

“I know,” Montes says next to me. “My pants have been tight all morning because of it.”

“You are a sick, sick man.”

We’re back to greeting people, just like we had at our wedding. The line of men and women eager to meet the king winds through the room and out one of the exits. This is not how I imagined changing the world—giving the privileged my time in a few empty lines of greetings.

“Perhaps I should just pull down your pants,” I say after the next round of guests leave our side.

That gets Montes’s attention.

“That way it’ll be easier to bend you over and let everyone here kiss your ass.”

King Lazuli stares at me for several seconds, then he lets loose a deep laugh, the sound carrying throughout the room.

He reels me in for a kiss. “Life is infinitely more interesting with you in it.”

It takes another hour to meet with everyone, and then we’re being shuffled down the hall to a conference room.

The entire time at least two cameras stay trained on us. They hover like flies, orbiting us, drawing in as close as they dare, then backing off before I get a chance to break their lenses. I’ve come close.

“They’re fascinated with you,” the king says as we walk. His silken voice raises my gooseflesh. “They’ve always been.”

I give a cameraman a hard look, and he quickly retreats.

Montes is right, but he’s also wrong. They’re not fascinated with me so much as they are our relationship. I’m the blood-soaked soldier that defended the WUN, and he’s the bloodthirsty king that captured my land. We’re enemies that became lovers. Two terrible people that rule the world together.

Montes’s hand skims down my back, and it’s a far more intimate gesture than it has any right to be. He’s undressing me with his fingers and his eyes, and even after all we’ve seen and done together, I still feel like a bug caught in a spider’s web.

Estes is already in the conference room when we enter, along with a handful of other faces I recognize from my time spent as an emissary. Several of them my father communicated with directly or indirectly. Back then they’d worked for the WUN—when they weren’t challenging and usurping each other’s territories. Now, only months after the war ended, they’re here fawning over the king.

For once I would like to meet with leaders who weren’t completely unfit for the job.

They eye me as I enter the room. Like Estes, they’re trying to figure out whether knowing me benefits them or not.

I decide to help them out.

I stop at the table and take them in. “Corruption looks good on you all.”

I render the room speechless—for a moment. Then, all at once, half a dozen people are speaking in Spanish, Portuguese and English.

Ah, southern WUN. They were always very vocal when they disagreed. It’s nice to see they’re consistent about at least something.

Montes cuts through the noise. “We’re not here to talk about prior alliances. The war has ended. South America now needs some stability; let’s focus our attentions on that.”

Only the king has the balls to make me look like a bad guy and him the martyr.

I take a seat at the table, hyperaware of the tension I’ve stirred up.

Their anger revitalizes me. People are easier to read when they take their masks off.

The chair next to me scrapes back, and the king sits heavily down. He picks up the papers his aides have set in front of his seat and spends a good minute flipping through them while everyone else waits.

Finally he sets them back down. “Thank you all for being here. I figure we might as well just dive right in: what are the main issues standing in the way of a unified South America?”

And thus begins the first hour of meetings.

“YOU HAVE MANAGED, yet again, to get an entire room of people to hate you in record time,” the king says as he closes our front door behind us. We’re back from the conference after four nearly unbearable hours. The only people the South American representatives hate worse than me are each other. Everyone wants a piece of the pie that Montes is giving to Estes.

That was the main theme of the meetings—who was going to get what. The only time anyone brought up the region’s general health and welfare was when they wanted to use it as a talking point for why they deserved something or why someone else didn’t.

I almost pistol-whipped the lot of them.

If that wasn’t bad enough, I have to see them again this evening at another one of those needless dinner parties.

I pass through the foyer, kicking off my shoes. This damn dress is a cage. It’s too tight around my stomach and thighs, and if someone attacked, I couldn’t run in it. I need it off.

“It’s probably the first genuine emotion they’ve displayed since we arrived,” I say, groping for my zipper.