The anarchists wanted parliament to seize all land and holdings of the Rostov family, which was estimated to be in the hundreds of millions of US dollars. My mother and father would be exiled from the central palace and given a modest honorarium to see them through to their deaths.
Yours truly, the one TMZ dubbed “The Kosnovian Playboy,” would be out on my ass with nothing. I had no doubt that I would survive such a coup, but I would miss the comforts I had come to know and expect from life. Yes, I was a spoiled brat. But I was a prince. Royal blood flowed through my veins. I was allowed a bit of spoilage…
“There is but one hope for our family,” my father said when I met with him before coming to America. We stood on the balcony outside of his office on the third floor of the royal palace, looking out over the city square below. It was past midnight and the city square, a mecca of activity during the day, was dark and quiet. The temperature had dropped into the teens. The air brought a cold bite that chilled me to my bones.
My father, the strongest man I’d ever known in every aspect of the word, looked old and frail standing there next to me wrapped in a heavy blanket from his bed. His once coal black hair, bushy moustache, and pointed beard had all turned grey. His posture that had once been so straight and proud was slouching a bit, as if the weight of history were bearing down on his shoulders, causing his spine to bow.
He put a hand on my arm and said, “I received a message from the prime minister this morning. Parliament is going to consider the people’s demand that the monarchy be put to an end.”
“What? They wouldn’t dare.” I hitched my chin proudly in the air, but deep inside, I knew they would indeed dare. The monarchy was an endangered species. It had been since before my birth. It was just a matter of time until the palace was taken over and turned into a library or a school or some other building of public use. We both knew that we couldn’t stop progress. We could simply prolong the past.
I turned to face him. My breath clouded the cold air between us. “So, Father, what do we do?”
My father sucked in a deep breath and put a hand on my shoulder. “You must find a bride and produce an heir as quickly as possible, my son. It is the only way to preserve the life we lead.”
I regretted it now, but I had been my usual arrogant self. “Are you insane? Do you really expect me to get married and have a baby just so you can keep your throne?”
“Show me the respect I’m due, boy, or you’ll be picking yourself up off the floor,” he said, glaring at me from beneath his bushy eyebrows. “I may be an old man, but I am still your father and your king.”
The look in his eyes put me squarely back in my place. I was six foot three and all muscle from playing rugby at Oxford for the last six years. I held black belts in karate, taekwondo, and jujitsu. I was not afraid of any man and very few women (I didn’t just play rugby at school, you know).
My father was five foot ten and two hundred pounds of over-indulged fat. Even so, he still had the ability to make me feel like a little boy again just by giving me the look he was giving me now.
“Apologies, my king,” I said with a nod of respect. “But you can’t be serious. How am I supposed to find a wife so quickly?”
“You do what men in our family have done for centuries,” he said. He held out his hand and rolled his fingers into a fist. “You simply take the woman you want and make her your wife. She has no choice but to comply with your wishes.”
I rolled my eyes at him. “You can’t be serious. You truly expect me to kidnap a woman and force her to marry me?”
“It has been our way since your great-grandfather,” he said. “I took your mother, your grandfather took your grandmother, and so on and so on for generations.” He leaned in close and narrowed his eyes at me. “You are a future king of Kosnovia, Nikolay. It is your birthright to take any woman you desire, whether she desires you or not. Over time, she will accept her fate and come to love you for choosing her. Look at your mother and me. We have been married for nearly thirty years.”
“And according to her, she hated you for the first ten years because you stole her from her bed in the middle of the night and forced her to marry,” I said with a smile. “I’m not sure the old ways work in this modern age, Father. If I were to kidnap a woman and force her to marry me…well, I’m just not sure that is a viable option in the twenty-first century. It’s certainly not something parliament would approve of.”
“The public is calling for our heads, Nikolay,” he said with a heavy sigh. He braced his hands on the marble railing and let his breath go out into the night. “We have very little time left.”