23. Twenty-Three #2
Antoli stepped up onto the dais with a predator’s patience, his white hair catching every spare ray cast by the chandelier.
Arrow put his back to the crowd, protecting every angle, but the Old Man only had interest in one thing—me.
He lifted a lone glass from the passing tray and knocked it against Arrow’s, the clink as clean as a pistol’s hammer.
“To the bride,” he said, his voice cutting through the hush. “To the union. May it outlive its parents.”
No one had heard him speak above a whisper in years, unless he was calling for a life or a favor. Every head bent to collect the directive.
Arrow lifted his glass in reply and gestured to me. Every eye followed the motion, every rival and ally faced the spectacle, and for three seconds, I was less a girl than a comet, burning across the old city’s memory.
I raised the glass Frank pressed into my hands, and met the room head-on, exposing the necklace Arrow had chained to my throat.
I let the light catch every bruise, every story scabbed or painted fresh onto my skin.
I didn’t smile; I just raised the flute, high and slow, and met Antoli’s stare with the polonium glare my father had bequeathed in place of love.
He smiled and drank. Arrow drank. The room followed, and the communion was unbroken.
Antoli turned and spoke a single word in Russian—a joke or curse—but the only people in the city who would have understood were already dead or in this room.
The effect on the gathering was instant.
Chatter collapsed to a reverent hush. He signaled, and three men peeled from the bar and orbited him, forming an ad hoc throne of bodyguards and acolytes.
Frank nudged my elbow as Antoli took the longest possible route through the crowd, watching for cracks in the ballroom’s illusion of safety.
“See?” he murmured. “Asked and answered.”
“What did he say?” I asked.
Frank waited, as if savoring the taste of secrets on his tongue. “He said, ‘She’s not your daughter anymore.’”
It shouldn’t have landed, but it did—a gut swoop, the kind you never acknowledge in public.
“Good,” I said, bitterness warping the word.
He set his jaw, silent and gray with worry, but I didn’t offer more.
Below, Antoli gave a zero-degree bow to my father, then pivoted to Arrow, who accepted it with not one iota of submission.
Arrow didn’t look up again until the old man took a chair near the judge, immediately expelling the closest five bodies to the margins of the floor. That was the center to which all things would migrate, eventually, by gravity or threat.
Frank tilted his head. “They’ll expect you to join him now.”
I didn’t move. “Let Arrow come to me. The crowd needs the story—Virelli girl, Romanov wolf. If I float down now, I look like a coin he’s already spent.”
Frank smiled proudly. “That’s my girl.”
“He’ll come.” I sipped, let the dry fizz coat my tongue, and watched the room begin to heal at the seams from Antoli’s disruption.
The ambient noise of the party grew first in nervous shushes, then galloped back to its crescendo, the tension converted into gossip so fast it was almost beautiful. I counted ten heads bowed together in urgent discussion before the glass even left my lips.
After ten minutes, Arrow excused himself from Antoli’s orbit and started for the stairs, his path a current that displaced even the most aggressive courtiers.
Watching him ascend the spiral toward me, I felt the weird, hot, clean terror of someone seeing a bomb approach and wondering for the first time if it would detonate or just skew the earth beneath your feet.
Frank inclined his head and stepped into the shadow of a granite pillar, leaving me alone at the apex, all lines of light converging on the spot where I waited. I didn’t let myself fidget, but the fine quiver that started in my hands was real enough to vibrate the flute glass.
Arrow climbed the steps—slower than gravity, somehow—and when he reached me, he didn’t speak immediately. He just stood at my shoulder, one hand braced on the rail, eyes fixed on the crowd below.
He looked at me for a long beat, then laced his hand through mine.
“You didn’t run,” he said.
“Wouldn’t have made it past the first floor. You have half the crowd paid to tackle me.”
“I would have let you go this time.”
“Liar.”
A small smile twitched at his mouth. “I love to watch you not believe me.” He gestured at the party with a tilt of his chin. “Truth is, they’re more scared of you now than they are of me. That’s how you know you’re winning.”
The words ought to have felt like flattery, but instead, they buzzed dirty through my veins, another flavor of poison.
I said nothing, training my gaze on the expanse of glassware, the topography of predation and allegiance reshuffling at every perceived shift in power.
If any of these people believed I was a Romanov already, it was because Arrow held my hand like he’d never let go.
My father’s face across the room told me everything. He looked smaller now, outflanked by the Romanov clan’s silent declaration of ownership over me.
Arrow leaned his body against mine at the hip, a balance of threat and comfort that perfectly mapped the space we were supposed to occupy together.
Down below, I saw my father cut his way through an argument at the bar, glass crushed between his fingers, every inch of him wound up in the effort to look like someone who hadn’t just lost his only bargaining chip.
“Antoli won’t live another year,” Arrow said, so idly it could have been about the weather. “He’s dying, and he wants everyone to know the world will be exactly as he made it when he goes.”
“And you?” I said. “What do you want it to look like when you’re done?”
He laughed, abrupt but soft. “I haven’t decided. Maybe I’ll let you tell the story.”
Flexing my hand in his, I let his fingers thread between mine until the chill in my palm steadied.
He leaned in, lips barely ghosting my temple. “They’ll be waiting for us to fail. Every hour you survive, you win.”
I laughed. “You make it sound like life support. Do you need me to survive, Arrow?”
It was meant as a jab, but by the look that glazed his face . . . maybe I’d grazed something truer.
He clamped my hand, then set it to his shoulder, his other arm boxing mine into a partial embrace—the kind that could be mistaken for lovers. Frank melted into the perimeter, unsuspecting as always, not taking his eyes off the old enemies orbiting the open bar.
“I need you alive,” Arrow said. “There’s nobody else left worth the trouble.”
* Princess