Something Arturo took out on those daughters as well as his wife—as if it were somehow their fault and not his.

To protect them, Darling had done his best to keep his uncle’s anger directed at him as much as possible. He’d go out of his way to provoke his uncle so that his cousins would be left alone. And true to his nature Darling had considered it a moral imperative to make the man spin out of control as often as possible. He’d admitted to her that he’d been hoping to cause Arturo to have a stroke from the stress of dealing with him.

Only Darling would think of that…

But his incendiary actions had kept Arturo in a perpetual state of fury where Darling was concerned. And Arturo had made it his life’s ambition to take everything out on the nephew who didn’t dare physically retaliate for fear of what would happen to his family if he did.

Because of that, Darling didn’t like to sleep at all. And it was why he’d been wearing explosives on her arrival. Before Maris had brought her here, Darling had walked the palace halls, wrapped in them, refusing to rest until utter exhaustion forced him to it. Since his own guards had been the ones who’d thrown him to his uncle, and had done their own share of abuse to him over the years, he didn’t trust them to protect him now that he was governor.

It disgusted her whenever she thought about it, and the one thing she truly didn’t understand was why Darling had ever fought for the Resistance. Yes, his uncle was a bastard who needed to be put down, but Darling had been attacked even more viciously by the working class such as his guards who resented his royal blood, and who enjoyed having power over an aristo. She really couldn’t understand why he’d want to help them. If any aristo had ever possessed a reason to absolutely hate the pleb class, it was Darling.

Yet he didn’t.

“Some people need a reason to hate in order to live. It’s easy to despise someone you think has it better than you. Or who has more than you, especially when you think they don’t deserve it and you do. But at the end of the day, life sucks for us all. You do what you have to to get through it.

“Personally, I’d rather they hate me for who I am, rather than for the lies spewed by others. But either way, I can’t change their opinions. And I refuse to be like them and to hate them for something they can’t help any more than I can help being born a prince.

“The hatred has to stop somewhere. I’m not going to let resentment for someone else, especially someone I don’t know who has never harmed me, ruin what little time I have in this existence. I’d much rather focus on trying to be happy, than looking for a reason to be miserable.”