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“You are freaking sorry aboutnothing,” he says so vehemently, so shakily, that some spit comes out. “You shouldn’t be. This is so messed up.” He glances at me, lets go of my wrist. “That pulse is picking up,” he says, “probably because I’m yelling. I’m sorry,” he adds immediately. “I’m not yelling at you. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
He gets up and places the bags of guns closer to the door.
“You’ve prepared for this,” I repeat, sitting up carefully. It’s not so bad this time. I gather my legs up to my chest. I just want to understand, but nothing is making any sense.
“I have,” he says simply.
“For the time when I’ll get killed,” I add.
His hands go absolutely still and he reels back as if he’s suddenly dizzy.
“For then time when I’ll save you,” he says, but there’s something wrong with his voice, it’s kind of too low and guttural.
“It’s… Things are really bad, aren’t they?” I close my eyes, waiting for his answer.
“They are,” he replies simply. And that’s all he says for a while.
He checks a few more guns he has stashed in various corners, then grabs three pistols and straps them to his boots. Then we sit and wait.
To die.
“Why?” I ask into the silence. “Why do they want me dead, whoever they are?”
“You,” Marco says, “are Franz Ferdinand. He was…”
“I know who he was,” I interrupt him impatiently. Fear and terror are making me so angry that I am seething, but I’ll take the rage over the numbness, the frozen-cold immobility fear had previously petrified me into. As long as they don’t make me numb or too crazy with grief, I’ll take any feelings right now over the nothingness. This is no time for giving up. Not yet, at least. “He was the Archduke, heir to the Austrian throne, who was assassinated in order for the first world war to begin.”
He chuckles drily, without mirth. “More or less,” he says. “And guess who else is heir to the Austrian throne right now?”
Realization hits me so hard I stop breathing.
“I am,” I say. But that’s not all. I am simultaneously heir to the Greek throne, not that there is one, but I belong to that royal family as well. And the heir to Asteria’s throne, of course. My grandparents were also French and Russian. Six countries meet in me. I have been told that since I was a baby.
And what better way to piss off all four European countries at once, each of them powerful in their own way, than to assassinate someone valuable enough for all of them?
“One bird,” I say.
“One stone,” he nods.
“Jesus.”
“Yeah.” He’s silent for a bit, then: “Add to that an American assassin, and… What you have is an instant war between the whole freaking existing world.”
“What American assassin?”
He shrugs. “Me, for example,” he says.
Me, he says.
He says, me.
And that’s when I realize it, although I think he already said that to me once before, but it did not register. How could a thing like that register in my brain? How could it be true? I suppose it’s possible I’m hallucinating from the fear, the cold and the trauma. I’m pretty sure I need a hospital right now, and food and sleep and someone to tell me that this is all a horrible nightmare. Or, preferably, that I’m already dead and this is hell.
Because it is. It is hell.
The dead bodies, the exploded car, the icy lake with Marco’s lifeless body plunging into it… The letter scribbled on my bathroom wall “DIE”, the news that hit me, my father’s lies, my father’s betrayal… Nothing even begins to compare to this.
This boy… this half-boy half-man, too young and too old to be either, this guy that I’m half in love with already, that I was attracted to, that I kissed, that I slept next to. That I gave my phone to. That I gave my life to. That I gave my trust to.
