“Did you and he…”

“No!” he said emphatically, slinging his hand downward. “Never.”

“Then please tell me, Maris. I swear I’ll never speak a word of it to another living soul. I’ll take it to my grave.”

A muscle worked in his jaw as he debated with himself. After a few heartbeats, he pinned her with a warning glower. “If you do, I swear I will kill you. I mean it. And don’t think that I can’t. I assure you, for Darling’s sake, I can and will be brutal.”

She nodded. “You have my word, and in spite of what you might think of me, I don’t break it.”

Even so, it took him several more minutes before he spoke again. “Darling was fifteen when he confessed to being gay.”

Which was all she’d ever heard about the eldest prince and his gender preferences. To her knowledge, he’d always been very open about it. “So he’s bisexual?”

Maris let out a bitter laugh. “No. Not even a little.”

“Then why would he say he was homosexual?”

By the expression on his face, she could tell he was having to force himself to continue. That rare loyalty caused her to respect him even more than she already did. Most people didn’t hesitate to betray a secret.

The majority of people she’d known in her life ran fast to be the first to reveal it. It was as if they took perverse pleasure in betraying someone’s confidence.

Maris was a rare man, and one of the best friends anyone could have. “He did it to protect his mother. You have to remember, Natale was only a baby when Darling was born. Widowed in her mid-twenties, she was extremely lonely. Because of her beauty, she was used to men paying a lot of attention to her, and she loved it. Lived on it, point of fact.”

Zarya sucked her breath in sharply as she saw where this was going. “She took lovers.”

Talk about a no-no in their society.

What had his mother been thinking? It was an automatic death sentence for the governor’s widow. But then that was something Zarya complained about all the time with most women her age. Way too many of them lacked good sense, especially where men were concerned.

Maris nodded. “Foolishly, she got caught… or rather her lover was found on his way out of the palace. To save her life and to keep Natale from being arrested, Darling said her boyfriend was his, and that her lover had been leaving his room.”

“But he wasn’t.”

“No, and thankfully there weren’t any surveillance cameras on the inside of the private wing at that time to refute Darling’s confession. And once Darling started the ruse, his mother seized on it. She used him to cover all her lovers from that point on, and he had no choice except to claim them or watch her die.”

Zarya winced at the cruelty of forcing someone to live a lie over something so ridiculous. The woman should have never put him in that position. How could any mother do such a thing?