Golden Son (Red Rising Trilogy, #2)(41)

Leto sinks slowly to a knee, arms sluggish. His long hair tumbles over his face, then he seems to freeze in place, suddenly motionless in the center of the chaos. Sad eyes glow with the engine plume of a passing ship as it coasts peacefully into the horizon. He is beautiful in that moment before Karnus chops off his head.

“Leto!” Augustus roars.

His eyes widen and he pushes against the Telemanus men, who bear him away. I glimpse the Jackal tucking his silver stylus into his sleeve, the one he spun on his fingers as he proposed our secret alliance.

We lock eyes.

He grins toothily.

And I know I’ve made a deal with the devil.





13

Mad Dogs

We flee the top of the spire. I had to leave Mustang behind. She knows what she is doing. Somehow I had managed to forget that. She always knows what she’s bloody doing.

“They won’t hurt her,” Augustus says to me, and I believe it’s the first time I’ve seen emotion on his face. No. The second time. When he screamed for Leto, it was as if he’d lost a son. He looks that way now, face slack and older by twenty years. He lost his eldest son. He lost his second wife, the mother of his children. Now he loses the man he adopted to replace that son, and he fears for the woman who reminds him of that wife.

If they do hurt her, it’s on me.

I’ve set things in motion. For once, it couldn’t have gone better. Blood trickles down my hands, sheeting between the fingers, pooling around the cuticles in a horseshoe. Knuckles flex white where there is no blood. It disgusts me, but this is what my hands were made for.

We flee the place of winter and trees, having drenched it red. Many carry our wounded, nearly a dozen in number. Seven dead. Barely twenty unscathed in the entire entourage. Others are missing. Matchless Leto is gone, Pliny’s aide was cut apart, and one of our Praetors took a blade in her neck from Kellan au Bellona.

I carry the Praetor in my arms and try to staunch the bleeding as we take the lift down the spire. Hard chance. Victra presses a piece of her dress against the wound.

I’d give anything for a pair of gravBoots. We cluster tight around our lord. Razors out. Blood soaks my arm to the elbow. Sweat dribbles down my face and ribs. Red drops splatter at our cadre’s feet against the lift’s floor, dripping from hands, wounds, blades. Yet there are white smiles slashing the faces around me.

I’m hot in my uniform, so I undo the top buttons. Tactus bleeds beside me. His wound goes through his left shoulder. Clean thrust.

“It’s just blood,” he tells Victra, who worries over him.

“It’s a hole in you.”

“Not a strange thing.” He smiles at her waistline. “Goryhell. You’ve hole in you, and you don’t see me complaining. Sheeeeeeowww.” He yelps as she jams a bandage from her dress onto his wound. He laughs in pain a second more, then looks at me and shakes his head, eyes wild and happy. “Training with Lorn au Arcos, man. You sneaky ponce.”

He saved me from Cagney. I nod and bump bloody fists, past slights and wagers on my life temporarily forgotten.

Many of the other Golds, the Praetors, the knights, the martial men and women in particular—and we have more in proportion to our Politicos and economists than most houses—wipe their brows, leaving ruddy smears. These are the sort of Golds who would tell you the problem with being a Gold is that everyone is already conquered. Means no one worth fighting. No one to use all that training and all that power against. Well, I just gave them a fresh taste of battle. And even though their Governor’s ward is dead, even though their chief Praetor bleeds out on my shoulder and Mustang is in enemy hands, they want to play. And making corpses is the game of the day.

Old and young look at me hungrily. Waiting to be fed.

This is what it’s like being the alpha, the Primus. The others look to you for guidance. They can smell the tangy odor of blood on you before it’s even there. Age doesn’t matter. Experience doesn’t matter. All that matters is that I provide these sick sons of bitches with fresh kills.

Children cry around us, startling me. Such fragile things in a night like this. The sons and daughters of Augustus’s youngest sister. Their father strokes their hair to calm them. Snorting, his wife bends and slaps each child across the face till they cease their whining. “Be brave.”

Our Obsidians and Grays are not waiting for us on the ground. They’ve been taken somewhere. Neither are the Sovereign’s Obsidians or her Golds coming through the air. Which means she hasn’t yet decided what to do. Just as I thought. She can’t slaughter us. For a house to wipe out another house is one thing, but for the great leader to do it with the power and funds entrusted to her by the Senate? It’s happened before, and that Sovereign was beheaded by his daughter. The daughter who now sits on the throne.

Oh, she must hate me for this.

Below the lift, lights glow along the cobbled paths that cut through the huge forest of flower trees. The musicians no longer play. Instead, we hear shouts and screams and long periods of terrifying silence. Golds run beneath. Fleeing to the stone halls past the forest, where they can access their ships, fly home. Only, some aren’t fleeing. They are hunting.

Something has happened I did not expect. Other family feuds find satisfaction tonight. It felt the same at the Institute when the other students realized it wasn’t a game. That there weren’t rules. An eerie feeling, a notion that devils roam the grounds instead of men. Who knows what anyone will do now that the rules are gone?