She looks down at her food.
“I’ve always been able to manipulate people. Men, women, it makes no difference. Cassius was a walking wound, Darrow, raw and bloody despite the fact it has been two years since you killed Julian. I saw it in him in a second, and I knew how I could make him love me. I gave him someone to who would listen, someone who would fill the void.”
The sternness in her voice fades. She looks around as if she could escape the conversation she started. If she stopped, I would be happier for it.
“I made him think he could not live without me. I knew it was the only thing that could keep the rest of my house safe. I knew it was the best weapon I could wield in this game. Yet … I felt so cold. So horrible. Like I was the cruel witch snaring Odysseus, making him fall in love, keeping him for my own selfish aims. It seemed so logical. And when he put his arms around me, I felt like I was drowning. Like I was lost, suffocating under the weight of all I’d done, suffocating knowing there was a life ahead of me with someone I did not love.
“Yet it was for family. It was for the people I love even if they don’t deserve it. Many have sacrificed more. I could sacrifice that.” She shakes her head, the tears that build there mirroring those that well in my own eyes. They fall when she says, “Then you walked in at the gala, and … and it was like the ground had broken open to swallow me. I felt a fraud. A wicked girl who’d contrived a reason to do something stupid.” She tries to wipe her eyes. “Can’t you see why I did it? I didn’t want you to die. I don’t want you to die. Not like my brother, Claudius. Not like Pax. I would have done anything to stop it.”
“I can stop it.”
“You’re not invincible, Darrow. I know you think you are. But one day you’ll find out you aren’t as strong as you think you are, and I’ll be alone.”
She goes silent as all that has welled up inside her breaks loose. She does not sob. But the tears come. She’s the type of woman to be embarrassed by them.
It breaks me to see this.
“You are not wicked,” I say as I take her hand in mine. “You are not cruel.” She shakes her head, trying to pull away. I take her jaw between the fingers of my right hand and bend her head till her eyes find a home in mine. “And what you do for the people you love cannot be judged. Do you understand?” I deepen my voice. “Do you understand?”
She nods.
It should not be this way. The Golds have everything, yet they demand sacrifices even from their own. This place is sick. This empire broken. It eats its kings, its queens, as hungrily as it does the paupers who mill its earth. But it cannot have this woman as it had the girl I buried. I will not let it devour her. I will not let it devour my family in Lykos. I will break it.
I wipe the tears from her face with my thumb. She is different from them. And when she tries to do as they do, it cracks her heart to the core. Looking at her, I know I was wrong. She is not a distraction. She does not compromise my mission. She is the point of it all. Yet I cannot kiss her. Not now when I must break her heart to break this empire. It would not be fair. I’ve fallen in love with her, but she’s fallen for a lie.
“You can’t trust him,” she says quietly.
“Who?” I ask, startled by her sudden words.
“My twin,” she whispers as though he sits in the corner of the room. “He’s not a man like you. He’s something else. When he looks at us, when he looks at people, he sees sacks of bone and meat. We don’t really exist to him.” I frown as she clutches my hand. “Darrow, listen to me. He is the monster they don’t know how to write stories about. You cannot trust him.”
The way she says it makes me know she understands our pact.
“I don’t trust him,” I say. “I need him.”
“We can win this war without him,” she says.
“I thought you said I wasn’t strong enough.”
“You’re not,” she says with a smile. “Not by yourself.” She dons her lopsided grin. “You need me.”
If only it were so simple.
I leave Mustang for my rooms soon after. The halls are quiet, and I feel a shade drifting through some metal realm. I don’t know how to accept her help. Or how I should handle her. Seeing her with Cassius wounded me more than I’ll ever tell her, and part of me knows not all of it could have been a manipulation. He was never a monster; and if he ever becomes one, I know it will be because of me.
The door to my suite hisses open. A hand settles over my shoulder. I turn to see Ragnar’s chest. I didn’t even hear him. “Someone breathes inside.”
“Theodora probably. She’s my Pink steward. You’ll like her.”
“Gold breath.”
I nod, not asking how he knows, and take my razor from my arm. It whispers into a sword as I step through. The lights are on, muted. I search the suite’s rooms with Ragnar to find the Jackal sitting in my lounge with a sherry. He chuckles at our weapons.
“I do admit, I am quite threatening.”
He’s wearing a bathrobe and slippers.
I excuse Ragnar. With his wounds, he should be in the medical bay. Reluctantly, he trudges out.
“Seems no one sleeps on this ship,” I say as I join the Jackal on the couch. “I imagine we have to restructure our arrangement a bit.”
“Fond of understatements, aren’t you?” He sips the liquor and sighs. “Thought I’d drown in that damn lagoon. I always thought my death would be something grand. Launched into the sun. Beheaded by a political rival. Then when it came …” He shudders, looking so very frail and boyish. “It was just a careless coldness. Like the rocks of the Institute falling all around me again in that mine.”
There is no warmth in death. I cried like a child when I thought I was dying after Cassius stabbed me.
“Obviously this changes our strategy, but I don’t believe it must change our alliance.”
“Nor do I,” I agree. “We’ll need your spies more than ever. Pliny won’t take my ascension lightly. And you’re stuck here in your father’s court. The Politico will try to remove us both.” I make no mention of the Sons of Ares. As I guessed, they were forgotten by all as soon as I tipped that wine onto Cassius’s lap.
“Pliny will have to go. But you and I should maintain social distance until then so he doesn’t know the threat against him is unified. Better for him to misunderstand our individual resources”