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Who was the real Rune Winters?
Not the socialite. Not the Crimson Moth. But the person deep down inside her.
Rune had been playing a part for so long, she couldn’t remember.
Once, she’d been a girl who liked to wear ribbons and silks, lace and pearls. Someone who enjoyed dancing with cute boysand gossiping with fashionable friends. A girl who took tea with Nan on the terrace and went to the opera.
But what made that girlRune?
She thought of the portrait hanging in her bedroom. Of a wild child in a white dress trying desperately to hold in her laugh.
If that girl were all grown up, what would she be like?
What would she do?
She would accept a challenge to swim naked in a frigid sea,thought Rune. That, she knew.
Slowly, she let her shawl drop. Reaching behind her, she tugged at the laces of her dress until they loosened, then pulled the cotton fabric over her skin and dropped it in the sand.
The warm breeze kissed her bare stomach and legs.
She took off her bralette next, then her underwear. Knowing all the while that he watched from the waves.
Standing naked beneath the dying sunlight, her hair whispered across her bare shoulders. Feeling mushy compared to Gideon’s lean, muscled form, she fought the urge to cross her arms over herself as she walked down the sand toward the surf.
Shewantedhim to look. To search her body for scars so he could find none. Rune had plenty of ordinary scars. Everyday cuts and scrapes collected over the years. But none were the silvery kind he’d be looking for.
As she stepped into the sea, the water sent a shocking jolt of cold through her.
“You are such a liar.” She hugged herself to fend off the chill. “I think a glacier melted in here.”
Gideon laughed, splashing water in her direction. She flinched as the icy droplets scattered across her body. But she continued to wade in, taking sharp breaths as the cold crept to her knees, her thighs, her waist.
What is he thinking?she wondered, hugging her chest tighter.Is he comparing me to other girls he’s seen undressed?
She wished she could wipe the questions from her mind. Because who cared what he was thinking? Not her.
When she finally reached him, the sea was as high as her throat and her feet arched to keep her toes on the bottom of the sandy bed.
“My grandmother used to bring me here as a child,” she said, glancing at the silhouetted island in the distance, and the causeway connecting it to the shore. “She would stand on the sand and shout at me not to swim too far. She was always afraid the current would sweep me away.”
Now would be the perfect moment to bare her soul. To tell him what being raised by a witch was like. After the secrets he’d entrusted her with, though, Rune didn’t have the stomach to lie, or fake a hatred she didn’t feel. But neither could she tell him the truth.
Like a true predator, Gideon sensed her weakness.
“Turning her in must have been very hard.”
Not at all,she would have announced if they were in an opera box or a ballroom or surrounded by her friends.
But they weren’t. They were alone, and playing a new game. One that was far more dangerous for Rune than for him.
Turning Nan in wasn’t hard,she thought. It was unbearable.
Rune drew in a deep breath and risked one small, true thing.
“Nan was my best friend.” Rune glanced away from him. “She was …the person I most aspired to be like.”
The day the Republic killed her, a part of Rune died, too.
