Maxwell remembers when Liam was born. Well, not remember as much as it was a popular story amongst the idle courtiers.
Queen Carmela is said to have had Liam in a thunderstorm, over the edge of her four-poster bed while squatting on a pile of blankets.
Much is pandered about the feeling of chaos at the palace, as the roads down the hills were closed and the power was cut by a stray branch, but if her portrait is anything to go by, he preferred to imagine it a different way. If anyone were to ask him, he would say she kept him snuggled close to her breast, whispering gently in his ear that he would be great and loved above all. Her son's bright eyes and toothy smile would break her as she remembered.
Maxwell did not expect Liam to die like that.
Anytime he clenched his eyes close, Drake's pallid face would twist in his overactive memory. He'd relive the moments when their commoner friend busted through the doors at Beaumont Manor and, rather uncharacteristically emotional, told them that Liam died at the strike of a hundred stab wounds by assassins posing as guards.
Maxwell watched Riley.
She was so young. Them all are so very young. Her, however, seemed to him at the moment so resembling a doll, with sunlight tainting her skin a brownish gold and eyes the colour of the seas.
Liam has always had good taste, in his humble opinion.
"Would you like a refill on your iced tea, Maxwell?" Savannah asked from the doorway.
That was what brought him back to the present. They were all in Georgia, at Mrs Walker's ranch, which he heavily suspected was financed almost exclusively by Drake's excessive Crown Attorney-General salary, hiding from the public eye.
Sponsor and sponsored sat at the porch, observing the expansive fields of Southeast United States. He had remembered Riley spoke fondly of American iced tea, and had the Walker women to maintain a steady influx. Preferably, with a touch of peach, he ought to indulge himself a little, too.
"Would you like some tea, Riley?" He asked. The woman shook her head without sparing him a look. "Please drink it, or eat something. Now, above it all, is not the time to behave as if Liam had just one person who loved him."
"I'm sorry, Maxwell," Riley said, "but I'm just not in the mood to drink tea or do anything."
Maxwell felt like he was supposed to insist, to use force if necessary.
Riley did not mention anything, but what ran through her mind at the moment, and most of her waking moments ever since, was Madeleine coming to her in the middle of the night, invading her tiny one-bedroom apartment on a modest neighbourhood near the old town in Valona.
With an emotionless glance, her trademark at this point, Madeleine told Riley that she knew it all.
"Liam is dead," Madeleine said, "and I know you fucked him."
In the kitchen, Hana and Savannah cooked dinner, Bartie watching the odd couple work. Drake must be pacing nervously at the living room, where he was banished for pestering Riley.
Them all should be overhearing whatever Maxwell and Riley discussed on the porch, but neither seemed to have the energy to care. It was still a huge step up from the unnerving watchful eye of Cordonian society.
Nobles and commons alike.
It made sense for them to find Riley and have her to join them in the United States. The Parliament was seeing into instating a regency, trying to make sense of the realm's outdated laws and figuring out who would head the State the forthcoming years.
They had an heir to think about.
He sipped his tea.
Riley did have sex with Liam in the palace's hedge maze the night he announced his engagement.
It was not a good experience. Sloppy and painful was more like it. Even as a young man, Liam was intense. So prim and proper, so contained, but it is all an act.
Liam was a ticking time bomb, if nothing else. The eternal burying of true thoughts and feelings that burst on the first dedicated provocateur.
She had had magical moments only a girl would dream of, but they meant nothing compared to the time Liam confessed to her.
It happened in Valona's warmest summer day. They held a ball for the closing of Parliament, as they did for about any other occasion. She had attended the celebration as Drake's date, who, despite now being of nobility himself, could hardly stand social gatherings, much less those attended by the crowned heads of the realm.
Claiming to feel ill, he escaped to the gardens, leaving her all to herself at the bar.
As the party went on, and it gradually evolved from partisan soirée to plain, old upper crust debauchery, as it often did in Cordonia, Liam approached her seat to ask how she was doing. A blur, then he told her he still loved her. Their kiss was not hot, sloppy, and uncomfortable then.
Better, it was much more like sweeping her off her feet, or falling into a fiery storm with a man she never thought she still wanted. Not after his own betrayal.
In that regard, Riley related their escapade to being forced back into a burning house. They stayed in her room. She rocked her hips over him, arched her back over her knees with her hands pressed over plush sheets, and took him in her mouth.
She spent the night on her back with his lips touching the tip of her ear. With each thrust, and a shuddered voice, he told her he could not let her go.
Then, she decided she should be the one to let go, and yet she tried to, but Liam always grasped and dragged. He would kneel and beg and hold her hips and cry, begging her to stay.
She wanted to end it the month before he died, but he walked into the guest room of the Seehof in Davos and locked the doors. Liam took her mouth in a wet spin and she could not help but go along.
He had her propped on her vanity and took her. Sweat and skin slapping gently with wet slicks that echoed in the bedroom.
"I love you so much."
And she forgot his wife and the world, kissing him back and murmuring the same. She was glad she did.
Riley did not talk the entire time while the fine, upstanding ladies of the Kingdom of Cordonia smuggled her to Georgia.
Bartie was yet too small of a child who still didn't understand the sin his godmother committed, and while Savannah did understand, her romantic, dramatic mind seemed to find a way to excuse it. Olivia watched her from a distance without saying a word to her. Hana tried to seem like she cared, but Riley knew she was just as angry as the rest of them.
As the men, Drake and Maxwell, joined them on their third night in the Deep South, they brought no happiness or energy with them, but rather added to the knitting circle of sorrow at the too-small of a house.
She thought she was alone in all of this, doomed to a dishonourable exhile, until some palace maid called her a concubine on her way home from sitting on the sands by the beach.
She could have done something, but in a blur of red and white, Olivia had the poor woman face down on the marmoreal floor in a chokehold until her face began to turn blue.
She did not speak until Hana screamed for Olivia to let go, until Drake had to restrain her physically.
It was of little consolation.
She had just fornicated with a man twice her age but dressed well enough to be presentable when Liam asked her to meet him in the lower dungeons.
This was the night before he died.
Sunken, Liam looked like a cart dragged him half a mile around the countryside, tired and forlorn as never before. "I need you to do me a favour."
"Oh? And what would that be, your Serene Highness?"
She'd been playful, all swollen lips and sore legs. Liam never asked for favours, he was too independent, too protective to do it even when necessary, but he looked at her so long that she let go of the playfulness.
"She's expecting." He said, simple.
"Which one?" Was the response.
In all fairness, it was a question that needed to be asked.
Liam glared. Olivia always figured out his secrets, no matter how much he tried to hide them from her. It was frightening, even if he was sure she would never talk of them.
"I need you to look over her. Just in case something happens."
Olivia laughed with a quirk of her lips, "You speak as if you're facing death. Thinking of leaving us so soon?"
Liam smiled, "Just in case."
Riley's face crumbled. Olivia did not understand. They were talking about the weather, and how Georgia's damp summer was so dreadful, she would rather the dry heat and foliage back in their homeland.
It was all fine, until Olivia reminded her that Liam would hate to be at Georgia with the humidity.
Olivia did not want to think about it. She squeezed until Riley's body felt warm and her thin arms latched on around Olivia's neck.
"We'll take care of it. You will not be alone and you will have a healthy one, just as the doctor says. Do you understand?"
Riley held her tighter, fingers digging deep into her skin.
She watched Riley walk on the fields to sit and listen to the sounds of crickets and cicadas singing praise of the season.
Just as fast as Riley wept in her arms, Olivia knew that she let Liam go off into the orange and purple skies as the bugs lapped around her feet.
Pitiful girl.