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She winces at that last part.

“Darrow, I want to explain something.”

“You don’t have to,” I say, waving her off.

“With Cassius it—”

“Mustang, you don’t owe me anything. You weren’t mine. You aren’t mine. You can do what you want when you want with whomever you want.” I pause. “Even though he is a gorydamn jackass.”

She snorts a laugh. The humor fades as fast as it came. There’s pain in her eyes. In her half-opened mouth. Her idle knife and fork hover over her forgotten plate. She looks down and shakes her head.

“I wanted it to be different,” she says.

“Mustang …” I rest my hand on her wrist. Despite her strength, it’s frail in my hard hands. Frail as the other girl’s was when I held her in the deepmines. I couldn’t help that girl. And now I feel like I can’t help this woman. Would that my hands were meant to build. I would know what to say. What to do. Maybe in another life I would have been that man. In this one, my words, like my hands, are clumsy. All they can do is cut. All they can do is break. “I think I know how you feel—”

Mustang jerks back from me. “How I feel?”

“I didn’t mean—” I pause, hearing a noise.

We look over and the cook stands there awkwardly with another tray. He tiptoes forward and then leaves the room, backing away awkwardly.

“Darrow. Shut up and listen.” She peers fiercely up at me through the strands of hair that have fallen across her face. “You want to know how I feel? I’ll spit it out at you. All my life I’ve been taught to regard my family over all else.

“What happened with my brother at the Institute … when I handed him over to you, that set me against everything I was raised to do. But I thought that you …” She takes a deep breath that wavers at the end. “… were a person who earned my loyalty. And I thought that it would be so much more important if I gave it to you in that moment than to Adrius, who has never lifted a finger on my behalf. I knew it was the right thing to do, but it was a repudiation of my father, of all he taught me. Do you even know what that means? He has broken families as easily as other men break sticks. He wields unimaginable power. But more than that. He is the man who taught me to ride horses, to read poems and not just the military histories. The man who stood beside me, letting me raise myself up by my own strength when I fell. The man who couldn’t look at me for three years after my mother died. That is the man I rejected for you. No,” she corrects herself, “not for you. For living differently, living for more. More than pride.

“At the Institute you and I decided to break the rules, to be decent in a place of horror. So we made an army of loyal friends instead of slaves. We chose to be better. Then you spat in the face of that by leaving to become one of my father’s killers.” She puts a finger in the air. “No. Don’t speak. It’s not your turn just because I pause.”

She takes her time in gathering her thoughts, folding her hands.

“Now, I’m sure you understand that I felt lost. One, because I thought I’d found someone special in you. Two, because I felt you were abandoning the idea that gave us the ability to conquer Olympus. Consider that I was vulnerable. Lonely. And that perhaps I fell into Cassius’s bed because I was hurt and needed a salve to my pain. Can you imagine that? You may answer.”

I squirm on my cushion. “I suppose.”

“Good. Now shove that idea up your ass.” Her lips make a hard line. “I am not some frill-wearing tramp. I am a genius. I say this because it is a fact. I am smarter than any person you’ve ever met, except perhaps my twin. My heart does not make my brain a fool. I sought out a relationship with Cassius for the same reason I let the Sovereign think she was turning me against my father: to protect my family.”

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.