CHAPTER 60
No enemy brings me greater satisfaction to defeat than the one who was once my friend.
—PHILLIPA PREW
I sleep for barely three hours before waking and taking a tram to the Genetic Engineering Facility. Exhaustion weighs on me, and I almost nod off in my seat as the Civilized Voice drones on the overhead television. Benjamin Bogart’s words drift into my ears through a haze of half-sleep:
My head leans against the seat, eyes slipping shut. But the thought jolts me awake once more, persistent and unyielding. I can’t sleep. I have to find it first.
When I reach my stop, I embrace the warm predawn air, the sky faintly blushing as if the sun is about to rise.
I use the light from my Bond to search the grounds where Edmund and I argued, walking the same stretch over and over, then dropping to my knees to crawl through the grass, examining between every blade.
Thirty minutes pass before I finally find it, flattened beneath a stone near the facility gate.
The wire daffodil he made for me.
I pick up the flower, and my heart aches as I try to twist it back into shape. When it looks as close to a daffodil as I can manage, I board the tram again, clutching it to my chest the whole ride back to the Green Dormitory.
Outside the window, the sun slowly rises above the buildings, flooding the streets with a soft, newborn light that feels hopeful, like the turning of a page.
I don’t know what awaits me in the next chapter, only that my second year at Grandmaster University will be different: better because I’ll be doing something worthwhile by helping Jerome infiltrate the Heretic network on campus; and worse because I’ll have to keep my distance from Edmund, loving him from afar.
The very thought makes me want to revolt, to tear the Aegis from my Blood Ring and throw it out the window, until I remember something Jack once told Charlotte: you can’t ruin something that’s meant for you.
And somewhere deep inside me, as certain as the force that shapes my being, I know Edmund and I are meant for each other.
At the third tram stop, I realize I’m close enough to walk to Belvoir Infirmary.
I’d planned to visit Charlotte today, but she texted that her dad had shown up.
She hadn’t expected him to come after the Pinkies notified him that she was injured, yet he’s with her now.
Besides attending the Ovation Ceremony tomorrow morning, her dad also wants her to fly home with him for the summer.
I don’t know why he changed his mind after all this time, but I hope it’s the first step toward fixing what was broken between them.
Charlotte needs him, just as I need my dad.
He’s flying in today, too, though not until this evening.
Mom was supposed to join him, but given how devastated Vivian is over Harrison’s arrest and the postponement of their wedding, she chose to stay behind.
While I wish Mom could be here, I understand her decision.
Vivian needs her now, and she’ll need me, too, once I get home.
When the tram reaches the Green Dormitory, I step off sluggishly, my hand closed around the wire daffodil in my pocket.
My eyes droop as I enter the elevator and ride it to my floor.
All I want is to collapse into bed and sleep, because waiting for Dad has become unbearable.
Every second without him feels like fresh pain, something I have to endure before I can finally earn the right to fall into his arms.
On the third floor, I trudge groggily to my suite. As soon as I enter, the scent of daffodils greets me with the sweetness of a faraway dream. I smile faintly, half-thinking Edmund must have sent a bouquet, until I hear a voice in the salon.
“Loredana?”
My head rushes with blood, and I shake it, certain I must be imagining his voice.
Still, my heart hammers as I push through the doorway.
And there he is—just as he always was after I finished a duel, waiting for me outside the piste with a smile and a bouquet of daffodils, whether I won or lost. Now he’s here again, ready to catch me after the final touch, after the longest duel of my life.
“D-Dad.” The word comes out in a sob. “I thought y-you were coming tonight?”
He shrugs, almost shyly. “I missed you.”
I stagger forward, my tears so heavy that his shape blurs before me.
Dad sets down the daffodils, hurries toward me, and catches me as if I were still a child.
I press my face to his chest, breathing in his familiar scent between sobs, clinging tighter and tighter until the heartache inside me begins to ease: the longing for Waldsten Mansion, for its endless corridors where I left memories like fingerprints; for the rose garden blooming wildly in the first weeks of spring; for the pine forest and the crooked roof of the tree fort Vivian, Hillaire, and I built in its center.
Because I have Dad back now.
And home is wherever he is.
Dad and I spend the day in my suite, talking from morning into late afternoon.
Between breakfast and lunch, which I finally have the appetite to finish, he tells me about his plans for the Governor’s campaign and how he’s working discreetly through a Brasscoat contact to uncover the plea deal Harrison took, hoping to help him.
I’m mostly content to listen, smiling in a daze of happiness as I watch his face, half-afraid it isn’t real.
When he asks me questions, I answer. I tell him about Edmund, that I’m no longer in his entourage but that we’re on good terms, even after he found out about Charles.
The only thing I keep secret is my Aegis.
Jerome said I could tell Dad about it, but I’d rather wait until we fly home.
I twist my Blood Ring around my thumb, feeling the weight of the Aegis inside it as Dad takes a call about the progress of the political response to the Ranger attacks in the Green District.
Eventually, exhaustion pulls me down, and I curl up on the sofa with my head against a pillow.
I drift off to sleep to the familiar sound of Dad’s baritone voice, like I did so many times in the living room of Waldsten Mansion.
I sleep so deeply and dreamlessly that it feels like I only dozed off for a few minutes.
But when I wake, blinking into the bright sun, I realize I’ve slept through the night.
It’s morning, the day of the Ovation Ceremony, when the academic awards will be handed out.
Dad sits beside me on the couch. His light brown hair is mussed, and his tie is loosened at the collar, as if he stayed beside me all night.
He doesn’t notice I’m awake. His phone hangs forgotten in his hand as he stares out the window at a young Green couple waltzing on the neighboring balcony.
His expression is wistful, tinged with sadness, as if remembering how he and Mom used to waltz after dinner every Saturday, humming the music when they’d had too much wine to care how off-key they sounded.
Sometimes Mom would take the lead, teasing Dad for dragging his feet through the turns, until he’d finally scoop her up, laughing, and carry her upstairs three steps at a time.
But that was before the knife of politics carved their bodies into shapes that they no longer seem to recognize.
I haven’t seen my parents dance in years, since I was ten and small enough to crouch behind the porch bench, watching them waltz through the garden as though, if only for a moment, they’d forgotten the color blue.
“Dad,” I say softly.
He stirs, blinking out of his daze, then smiles at me. “Hi, honey. How’d you sleep?”
“Good.” I rub my eyes and sit up. “Did you always want to be a politician?”
He frowns, caught off guard. “Why do you ask?”
“I’m just curious.”
He rubs his mouth and thinks for a moment.
“Honestly? No. If it were up to me, I’d have played sax in a jazz band.
But I figured out pretty quickly that I was good at politics—really good.
I won the political theory award at the end of my first year here, and then again in my third and sixth years.
I was shocked to come out on top, but even more shocked that I was happy about it.
” He shrugs, then lets out a short laugh.
“I was so happy that first year, I tap danced down the stairs from the stage.”
I smile as I picture it. “Got any footage of that?”
“Reeve does. Why do you think I try to stay on his good side?” Dad winks, then lifts his leg and flicks his shoe. “I’ve always had two left feet. Your mom’s the real dancer.”
I nod slowly, remembering she gave up her own dreams, too. Before marrying Dad and working with him to raise Vivian, Hillaire, and me, she’d wanted to be a professional dancer.
“I made plans,” Dad goes on, “but life makes its own. I saw there was a need, and I thought… well, maybe I wasn’t half stupid enough to screw it up.”
“Do you think you were called to do it?” I ask.
He smiles faintly, then reaches over and takes my hand, giving it a gentle squeeze. “Sure. You could say that.”
For a moment, I want to tell him how much I’ve grown to like politics this past year, how it’s become more than his world; it’s becoming mine, too. Instead, I ask, “And what about Reeve? Do you really think he can stand up to so many of his own and win?”
Dad leans back on the sofa, his arms loosely crossed over his chest. He remains silent for a while, his eyes fixed on a dried dirt stain on the carpet that my Pinkie missed.
Finally, he says, “An old Brasscoat friend of mine once told me something I never forgot. He said everyone’s got a chain of weakness hidden somewhere.
Find it, tug it once, and they break. That’s how you control them.
The Blues who hate Reeve have been hunting for his chain since the day he set foot in politics.
They’ve never found it. I’ve known him for more than twenty years, and even I don’t know what it is. ”
“You think he doesn’t have one?”
“He probably does. We all do. But Reeve’s better at hiding it than anyone else I’ve known.”
“What about you, Dad? Do you have one?”
His eyes narrow on me, and a grin breaks across his face. “Sure, I do. Got four of them, in fact.”
I know who he means. I smile, rest my head on his shoulder, lace my fingers with his, and hold on for the last few minutes before we dress for the Ovation Ceremony.
Like Dad, I have chains of my own. But the one I carry for him, wound around the center of my heart, is the only chain I know I couldn’t survive if it were pulled and broken.
As long as Dad is standing, I’ll have hope, because as long as he’s whole, the world feels whole, too.