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“Me”, he replies quietly. Grunts again.
Then he turns around to look at me, and something I see in his face slices my heart in two. This look of intense torture and anguish causes a sharp pain in the middle of my chest, and the pain grows so much and so abruptly that it stops my breath. Suddenly, his face gets twisted in panic, and he’s running towards me, the bags dropping with a loud clank on the floor.
Next thing I know, I’m flat on my back on the floor, my legs bent, and he is leaning over me, his lips white.
“What?” I ask, sitting up, but I immediately want to throw up, so I lay back down. “What are you doing?”
“You fainted,” he says. “Well, almost. Your pulse is super low. Don’t get up, ok?”
My wrist is clasped lightly between his fingers, and he’s counting my breaths.
“I’m sorry,” I say, hating my voice, my weak body, and this whole entire situation.
“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 the 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?”
