Chapter 19
When we get back to New Washington, I request Becka to be my personal security on a walk. The second we step off White House
grounds, I take off sprinting. Apparently even she knows better than to follow me.
The subway entrance where Ettie pretended to lose her necklace just a few days ago lets me into the same abandoned subway
track and for once the darkness isn’t scary or oppressive. It means prying eyes can’t see me.
Callum lied to me. He used me.
I love you, too, he’d said.
Can I believe anything he’s said or done? Or has it all been an act, him pretending to be Orion?
I shake my head. It’s absurd. Orion is him. He can’t pretend to be a character based on him.
Or can he?
“You’re not supposed to walk on that,” a warm voice calls from behind me.
I turn, keeping my face in the shadows. Hux stands in the middle of the tracks, his hands in his pockets. He motions to my
leg, which does throb. When I glance down, I see that it’s bleeding through the gauze, a trickle of red. Somewhere between
nearly being sliced to bits by a hovercopter and making it back to the White House, I finally got some first aid for my daring
rescue attempt.
I don’t look away. I don’t have to pretend I want to. “How’d you find me?” I ask.
“Seriously?” Hux asks. “There are—”
“Cameras everywhere,” I finish. The streets must be crammed with them. I purse my lips and nod. “I’m not very good at this
cloak-and-dagger stuff, am I.”
I face him dead on, and his expression tightens at the sight of my tears. With three assured strides, he’s in front of me.
A hand presses my jaw up to force me to meet his gaze.
“I’m sorry,” he says finally.
“Thanks, but this one actually isn’t your fault.”
“Except.” He works his jaw. “Except it is. After I saw you sneaking out that night, I . . . checked in on you. I saw you’d
been getting messages from Lyceum, but there was something else. Your home network had been compromised. I’m a hacker, Ripley.
I needed to know who it was. I thought I could stop them. And I thought I did stop them. But then two days later . . . you were brought here.”
“But Lyceum had sold me out. And the Machs—”
“The Machs didn’t do shit. I told them they couldn’t. I told them if they did, I’d leave—”
“You threatened to leave the Machs?” I ask. “For me?”
He grits the word out: “Yes.”
“Why?”
He lowers his hands and turns, pacing a few steps before turning back to me. The low light throws his jawline into sharper
relief, and his eyes almost glow.
“It’s not logical. You’re just one person. If you could stop President Graves—if handing you over could give us a fighting
chance . . . it shouldn’t have fazed me. But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do it, Ripley.”
The tears dry on my cheeks as I stare at him. Huxley Finn. The boy I couldn’t stand. The man I thought was a heartless monster.
My heart thunders in my chest as I try and piece things together.
“You’ve had your mission, this whole time. You’ve been trying to complete it.”
I expect him to cower, to lie, but instead his eyes blaze, shoulders square, and he towers over me, every bit the Mach general.
“And I wanted to. I would have. That mission was clear-cut. But then I saw you.”
My breath catches as Hux steps closer, and slips his hand into my pocket. My body alights at the brush of his fingers through
the thin fabric, and he withdraws with the poker chip. Our poker chip.
“I don’t usually work with robotics,” he says, his voice detached. “But it’s just coding. And I’m very good at coding.” He flips it around, and I watch in surprise as little pincers and legs seem to sprout from the smooth surface.
A wave of understanding rushes through me. Huxley Finn, the boy who swore to kill the president, jeopardized the entire operation
to get me clear. He made the poker chip jump from my pocket, knowing that I’d run after it.
“That explains the car,” I say slowly. “But the copter . . . that almost killed me, Hux. Almost killed Callum. And you did
nothing to stop it.”
His eyes go tight. “I guess,” he says slowly, “I’m not very good at being a Mach. Because I can’t believe that one life is
worth sacrificing to save millions. Not if that life is yours.” He slaps the poker chip back into my palm. “I guess you win,
Ripley Hart.”
I laugh sadly, a million emotions warring within me. “You think I win? I was supposed to pretend to be the Girl Next Door,
make myself into this perfect fiancée, smile and simper like a brainless propaganda princess, and I couldn’t pull that off.
Jumping off boats and falling for another guy—”
I freeze, closing my eyes tight like that will take back the words.
Maybe he didn’t hear that. Maybe he didn’t hear that.
But with my eyes closed, the silence is only thicker, a presence that seems to press into my ears.
I feel him step closer, his boots sounding softly on the concrete below us.
“Ripley,” he murmurs.
I shake my head. “Ripley’s not here right now, and you didn’t hear that.”
He growls, something between a chuckle and a groan. “Oh, I heard it.”
“I was talking about someone else?” I try, my voice pitching up in a quiet, pathetic, desperate attempt at joking.
“Open your eyes, Ripley,” Hux demands. He’s closer now. I can feel the heat of his breath.
I squint one eye open, and then the other, like I’m staring at the sun. He looms over me, his chest heaving as he stares down
at me with a fiery expression. My heart stutters in my chest.
“You going to tell me to play along?” I whisper, and Hux gives me a lopsided grin as he wraps a massive hand around the back
of my neck.
“Oh, Ripley, I’m not playing about this anymore,” he whispers back, pulling me flush to him. And this time, when he crashes
his mouth to mine, I realize what it’s like to actually kiss Hux. For real.
My hands fly to his waist, gripping his dark shirt in my fists and pulling him as close as I can. It’s still not close enough.
He opens his mouth, and I tilt my head, deepening the kiss as our tongues tangle, breath mixing as he groans against me and
I let out a half laugh, half gasp.
I’m kissing Hux. I’m kissing Hux for real, I think, my mind spinning. He straightens as he tightens his arm against my back, lifting me. I wrap my legs around his
waist on instinct, and he spins, pinning me to the wall.
We devour each other, my breath coming in short gasps when he pulls back just to get enough air to kiss me again. I run my
fingers through his hair and over his jaw, loving the feel of his scruff and how the muscles of his jaw tighten as he moves
his mouth over mine.
It could be moments—it could be years. The moment my brain boots back up, I pull back, as thought becomes marginally possible.
“Wait. Wait,” I say, and Hux pulls back immediately, setting me down on the ground. He lifts his hands, bracing them over
my head as he stares down at me, his chest still heaving in tandem with mine.
“But the copter. Who’s trying to kill us?”
Hux groans. “Can’t we just go back to kissing?”
I shake my head.
“Fuck,” Hux breathes. “I hate you.”
“You don’t, though,” I tease, feeling a smile pull at my lips.
He runs a finger along my cheekbone, like he’s memorizing every contour of me. “I hated you for ruining my mission. And I
hated you because it was easier than admitting that I was falling in love with you.”
I reach up on tippy-toes and plant my lips on his, and Hux kisses me back softly. Sweetly.
He pulls away too soon, and he puts his forehead to mine. “I thought we weren’t kissing,” he says, that same smugness in his words.
“Then figure it out, Huxley Finn,” I press. “The faster you figure it out, the faster we can get back to”—I trace a finger
along his lips—“other things.”
His eyes go black. “You’re a demon.”
“I’m motivational,” I press. “Tell me.”
He sighs. “The car was us. I just got you clear in time. For the copter, well, yes, I’d rigged it. But what you saw me doing,
I was trying to stop it. When I saw that someone had remoted in, I was trying to find and stop them—when they set it off.
I thought I had more time. We had hours on that damn boat. But—something else came up.”
“Something else?”
Hux breathes through his nose, almost like he’s trying to calm himself down. “The Machs have known that someone was trying
to access our servers. I was on that boat to figure out who it was and Trojan horse my way back into their system. And I did.
Because I’m very good. But I wasn’t prepared for what I found.”
“Which was?”
Hux pauses. “Um. Pictures of you. Footage of you.”
I close my eyes. “It was Callum’s server.”
“I’d hoped not,” Hux says. “But I knew I had to delete the files. It was taking too long—and the White House cybersecurity locked on to me. I knew I should pull out, give up. But I stayed. Deleted all those photos. Unfortunately, the White House security was able to send a virus our way. It wiped our servers.”
“The Machs’ servers are wiped?” I ask.
Hux winces. “Yeah.”
I think. “Wasn’t the whole fail-safe plan to kill Graves on that server?”
Hux takes a second, and then nods. “Yes.”
My stomach twists. I still don’t want Graves dead. But we also can’t let him take over our country.
“I don’t understand,” I say slowly. “You were on the yacht to hack Callum. You did that, and you found all his files . . .
on me. How did it get out to the press?”
Hux sighs. “I needed you to know. You deserved to know. I-I tried to delete all the files, send just a few so that you would
know what he did. I thought it would be safe to upload them the one place you’d find them—Spindle. I didn’t account for just
how quickly someone else would find them. I was rushing, with the encryption. Your story . . . it has a lot of fans. Who’ve
been waiting for the next chapter.”
“Hux,” I breathe. Spindle isn’t designed to take video uploads like that. And it isn’t secure, not anymore.
“You deserved to know,” he repeats. “Even if it meant losing the Machs. Even if it meant losing our chance to finally kill
Graves. And I tried to scrub the entire mission, undo the bug on Graves’s copter. I just couldn’t do it in time. You were
more important.”
Right. Because the president switched with us, right before takeoff.
My head spins.
“You can’t forgive him,” Hux says. “And you also can’t forgive me.”
“You tried to help me,” I say.
Hux shakes his head. “When we were eleven. When we first met. I thought you were . . . a force, Ripley. You remember those
recesses, on the playground? You and Nef, running around and telling stories. Well, I overheard one. About a boy with forest-green
eyes and the bravery to save a galaxy.
“I thought you were talking about me, Rip, and it terrified me. You knew exactly who you were, but you got it all wrong about
me. I wasn’t brave or selfless or larger than life like the boy in your stories.
“So I told you that we couldn’t be friends. Because I knew I’d only disappoint you. And I also knew that it would disappoint
me, to be friends with you.”
My breath catches. “Why?”
“I don’t want to be friends with you, Ripley Hart.”
“I think,” I say slowly, “I’d like to get back to kissing now.”
When Hux feels my body sag against him, he laughs and shows me a secret door. It’s a bedroom, which should be glorious on
its own, but then I see around the corner. A bathroom. With a shower.
My mouth drops open. “What is this?”
Hux holds his arms out. “You weren’t in Lyceum long enough to get any of the perks. All their safe houses have rooms like this. Librarians are notoriously sleepy people.”
I walk over to the bed, pressing down on the soft comforter with a filthy hand. It gives just enough. It’s perfect.
I look at Hux. “I could kiss you,” I say.
“Could you?” he jokes, and I grab his shirt and yank him close, following through on my promise. When my attempt to climb
him like a tree has me stumbling into the bed—mostly from exhaustion—he laughs and rights me before heading to the bathroom,
where he turns on the water and it sputters to life. As I stare, he tests the temperature, then shakes his hand dry. When
he looks back at me, a smirk curls up the side of his mouth.
“Shower, Hart. You smell like righteous indignation and jet fuel,” he jokes, brushing past me. He takes off his shirt, and
I blush hard before realizing he’s wearing something under it.
He thrusts the shirt to me. “Here. Sleep in this.”
I bring it to my nose, inhaling Hux’s smell and grinning like a fool.
I watch him leave, and then strip down and jump in the shower. I scrub the day away—the ocean, the crash, the I love you, too that turned rancid.
I get out and brush my teeth, slipping into Hux’s shirt and hitting the light before opening the door.
Hux is on the bed, his boots still on. He’s asleep, one arm splayed out while the other rests on his chest. My gut twists at the sight of him. The boy who I got totally wrong, but who sees me for who I really am.
I tiptoe to the bed and crawl beside him, snuggling up to his side.
His eyes flutter open, and he moves to sit up. “Sorry. Long day.”
I put a hand on his chest and push him back down. “Don’t. I don’t want to be alone,” I whisper. “I haven’t slept well in . . .
I don’t know how long. I don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow. But I know I can rest if . . . if you’re here with me.”
Hux swallows, nodding as he pushes up to give me a soft kiss before lying down. I grab a folded blanket at our feet and pull
it up over us. He wraps his arms around me, and I wrap mine around him.
And I sleep, safe in the arms of the boy who is not my friend, never my friend. Because he’s something more.
Hux and I sneak back into the White House early in the morning. He uses his key card, which is a risk—we don’t know if Becka
has outed him to the rest of the Machs, who might have kicked him out. Not to mention what would happen if she had outed him
to President Graves. But if that was the case, we probably would have been arrested the second we reached street level.
We walk far apart as we enter the main courtyard.
At first glance, it will look like a Hammer is walking the president’s future daughter-in-law to her room.
Thankfully, no one is looking too closely.
Hux snuck off and found me some clothes from Lyceum’s storeroom; I’m swimming in a massive flannel shirt and black sweatpants.
I sneak open the French doors—remembering the squeaky hinge—and slip inside with Hux. The second we’re alone, his eyes go
dark and playful, my only warning before he sneaks a kiss as I switch on the light. At which point, I scream.