“So!” I clap my hands. “I’m going to need your help. We need to find someone decidedly less criminal and frequently less homicidal, and steer him toward her.”

The beneather looks me up and down, squinting like he’s not sure who I am. Finally, he nods. “All right.”

“Fantastic. Make sure he and I don’t meet in the halls. Make sure he stops staring at me during banquets. If he starts talking about me, change the subject to another girl. Better yet, take him out to meet other girls.” I beam at him. “If you do it well enough, I might even compensate you.”

He raises one brow. “With what? Y’shennria is gone. You have nothing. Not even the dress on your back is yours.”

you have nothing.

I laugh. “You used to love flattery, Mal. I’m sure I can scrounge up a blushingly good compliment or three somewhere.”

The clacking of horseshoes pulls my gaze to the palace steps, where Varia’s black carriage awaits. I move to the door when a cool hand grabs my wrist and I’m rooted in place. I look back to see Malachite’s pale fingers, his eyes fixed on me like two rain-dimmed garnets.

“Did you ever truly care for him?”

Yes. Of course, yes.

I shrug. “Not for him, particularly. Just for the heart in his chest.”

Malachite is quiet, and then, “Was all of you…was all of it fake? Everything?”

No, I want to say. I’m a sixteen-year-old girl, nineteen, really, but still just a girl. I trained with Y’shennria, not in a theater troupe. I’m not a noble, with a perfect mask learned from the moment I was born. The two weeks I spent with you, Malachite—and Lucien and Fione—the laughter, the anger, the joy; all of it was real.

I was me, even as I was trying my hardest not to be.

But no one needs to know that. Not Malachite, not Fione, and especially not Lucien—it would only make moving on that much harder.

I throw my coyest smile back at Malachite and nod. “Everything.”

His grip loosens, and I can feel his eyes watching me down the steps, into the carriage, as far as the last bit of road out of the palace grounds.

…

I turn Lucien’s dark-blue kerchief over in my hands as the carriage moves through the city—stroking the embroidered roses on the edges.

Feelings aren’t jewelry.

A heart like Lucien’s can’t be easily swayed or unswayed. I put the kerchief to my chest, pain winding tight silken strands between my ribs. Apparently unhearts aren’t easily unswayed, either. But I can’t, under any circumstance, make the same mistake twice. I couldn’t afford to make it even once, and yet here we are. He will not stop me again from getting my heart. No matter how badly that heart wants him.