Golden Son (Red Rising Trilogy, #2)(37)

I rise to whispers. This is no simple squabble now between boys. It is the battle of houses. Champion against champion.

“Hic sunt leones,” he says, tilting his head—part challenge, part benediction. What a vain swine of a man. He knows my desperation to stay in his good graces. He knows he stands playing with matches on a powder keg. Yet his eyes glitter lustfully, hungering for blood and the promise of power as I hunger for air.

“Hic sunt leones,” I echo.

I pace back to the center of the circle, nodding to Tactus and Victra. They touch the handles of their razors, as do the other aides. Our pack mentality is keen. “Prime luck,” Tactus says.

High above, ships swim quietly through the long-night. Trees sway in the breeze. Cities sparkle in the distance. Earth hovers like a swollen moon as I unravel my razor from my forearm.

Mustang comes to me as Cassius’s mother kisses his forehead.

“So you’re a pawn now?” she asks quickly.

“And you’re a trophy?”

She flinches before her lips curl into a slight sneer. “You say that to me? I don’t even recognize you.”

“Nor I you, Virginia. Serving the Sovereign now?”

But I do recognize her, despite the terrible gulf that now makes her feel more stranger than friend. The tightness in my chest is of her making. So too is the awkward tension in my hands as they yearn to touch her, yearn to hold her and tell her this is all a false guise. I’m not a pawn to her father. I’m more than that. All this is for good. Just not their good.

“‘Virginia.’” She cocks her head at me, smiling sadly as she spares a glance for the two thousand waiting Peerless. “You know, I’ve wondered over these last years … I suppose I should have wondered from the start, but you cut such a rare character—it was distracting. But I’ll ask now.” Her bright eyes cut through me, searching, judging. “Are you insane?”

I look over at Cassius. “Are you?”

“Jealousy? That’s ripe.” She leans in with a harsh whisper. “Shame you don’t respect me enough to suppose that I have my own plan. You think I’m here because my aching loins thrust me into Bellona arms. Please. I’m no bitch in heat. I protect my family by any means necessary. Who do you protect but yourself?”

“You betray your family by being with him.” I have no false answer that may parallel the truth. I must suffer being a villain in her eyes. Yet I can’t meet them. “Cassius is a wicked man.”

“Grow up, Darrow.” She looks like she’s going to say something deeper, but she just shakes her head and, turning, says, “He’s going to kill you. I’ll try to convince Octavia to end it early.” Her words fail her at first. “I wish you hadn’t come to this moon.”

She leaves me, giving Cassius a squeeze on the hand before joining the Sovereign’s entourage on the raised dais.

“Alone at last, my old friend,” Cassius says slashing me with a smile.

Once we were like brothers. We shared food and raced that first day at the Institute. Stormed House Minerva together. How he laughed when I stole their cook and Sevro their standard. We galloped over the plains that night underneath the light of twin moons. I remember the woe in his eyes when they captured Quinn. When my kin, Titus, beat him and pissed on him. How I felt the tears welling then, when we were like brothers, before it all fell apart.

The cinnamon-and-orange-flavored snow still falls. It settles in his curly hair. On his broad shoulders. It was in the snow that he last fought me. Buried rusty steel into my lower gut and left me dying in my own filth. I have not forgotten how he twisted that blade to make sure the wound did not close.

His blade is ebony now.

It curls in front of him, over a meter of narrow sword when solid. More than two meters of lashing razor whip when loosed with the toggle on the handle, which sends a chemical impulse through the blade’s molecular structure. Golden marks line the blade, telling the lineage of his family. Their conquests. The Triumphs thrown in their honor. Old, arrogant, powerful. My blade is naked, absent of embellishment.

“So, I’ve taken what’s yours,” he says, walking closer and nodding to Mustang.

I laugh, “She was never mine. And she’s certainly not yours.”

The White arrives, hustling forward in his robes. Head bald. Back crooked.

“But I’ve had her in ways you haven’t.” His voice lowers so only we might hear, “I wonder, do you lie alone at night, thinking of the pleasures I give her? Does it vex you that I know how she kisses? How she sighs when you touch her neck just so?”

I don’t answer.

“That she moans my name instead of yours?” He doesn’t laugh. He may loathe what he says, but he’d say anything to hurt me. In most ways, he’s not a bad man. He’s just my bad man. “In fact, she moaned as I went inside her this morning.”

“What would Julian say if he could see you now?” I ask.

“He’d echo mother and beg me to kill you.”

“Or would he weep at the devil you’ve become?”

He uncoils his razor and ignites his aegis. My own aegis hums as I activate it—an ion-blue transparent energy shield that bows slightly outward from my left glove, one foot long by two feet wide. Snow melts when I sweep the aegis near the ground. A corona of haze forms around the blue light.