Foul Heart Huntsman (Foul Lady Fortune, #2)

by Chloe Gong

It was hard to fall into a trap if you were the one setting the bait. Hard to be taken unaware when you drew the whole game board.

To disappear well was to partake with her surroundings, to understand their rhythm and reasons instead of hiding and hoping she wasn’t seen as an ill-fitting intrusion.

“I’ve successfully caught up to you alone, though.” “And yet you alone cannot bring me in.”

It was near impossible to intimidate Alisa Montagova when she had a level of self-importance that inflated up to the sky, and anyone who tried only

“Damn you,” Rosalind muttered under her breath. She wasn’t sure who she was talking to. Dao Feng, maybe. Or the world at large for setting her in this role.

Now he was gone, and Rosalind felt utterly off-kilter. As false as their marriage had been, Orion Hong had molded himself onto her like an extra attachment of the flesh. Being cut away wasn’t something she would eventually get used to: it was an invisible wound that refused to close like her bodily ones did, and the damage had been carved into the deepest part of her heart. If she pulled her ribs open to look at the organ, she could point to its exact site… at last, an injury that wasn’t healing over at rapid speed. If she didn’t get him back, eventually she would bleed out entirely.

She wanted to love more than her city; she wanted the love that had been wholly hers for that gasp of a moment.

Which only meant they talked about her behind her back enough that the habit had passed on. At least they were gossiping respectfully.

It wasn’t as though her past would be helpful here. Not that it had ever been helpful for anything except coloring this idea of her that everyone seemed to have.

Do anything that did not fit with their objectives, and she was not needed here anymore.

Maybe the marriage had been fake, but his devotion to her was real. She faulted others for abandoning her, yet it seemed that was all she was capable of doing too. Turning away. Running. Fleeing. “I reject that,” Rosalind whispered. Her voice shook, barely audible to herself, never mind to General Yan. “He loved me, and I left him.”

Those matters were not loathed in equal amounts, of course, but she was peeved enough to be silently fuming about everything at once anyway.

“We’re here to help you, though,” Silas protested. “Three heads are better than one.” By all means, he was correct. Rosalind should have taken her coat off, sat back down, and put her raw, vulnerable thoughts onto the table so that Phoebe and Silas could help her pick them apart. Then she could find their best way forward, be a good friend. But she was clearly made to be an actively derailing train wreck instead, because Rosalind only gave them a tight smile and said, “No, I mean it. I need to take a walk. Stay here and finish your drinks. I’ll be perfectly fine.”

One of the men opened fire again. This one—it was aimed right into her chest. Sank to where her heart was, already throbbing and raw and red. She had spent these past few weeks locked inside, told to sit in wait while people who hated her circled like vultures, and what was the point? Her heart had been hurting long before these bullets. It would keep on hurting even after this bullet was pushed out too, landing as emphatically as a teardrop shaped like death.

She was supposed to have a greater hand on this city, greater than senseless anger in its alleys.

She had wanted to make amends by causing equal damage, desperate to answer for what she had done, to even the scales in the other direction.

Classic propaganda. With each year that passed and each sea change in foreign grappling, the national government couldn’t settle on who their enemies were, and neither could the city papers.

Rosalind would show them just how recognizable Lady Fortune was.

She wished he would talk to her. Oliver had operated for so long understanding secrecy to be the line between life and death that she wondered if he even knew that he was allowed to talk to her.

Pit one brother against the other. The little sister caught in the middle. That had been the last four years of her life, and Phoebe was endlessly tired of her own family being the epicenter of a war.

“Trust me, Hong Feiyi. It is difficult to keep people in the dark, I know, but it keeps them from having to make difficult decisions. And more often than not, you won’t like the decision they end up making.”

Loyalty was a complicated thing.

Sure, she was no intelligence operative, but people letting their guards down around her was her prime specialty. She had been making use of it all her life, had been exploiting the way the world saw her since the moment she was born.

True immortality is something for the hands of gods. She doesn’t need to play God. She just needs something so undeniably powerful that the Japanese will perceive her as one.

That’s something to remember about men: the trickiest ones know how to hide their temper, so one should never assume the absence of anger equates kindness.

The floor beats with the sound of his own telltale heart, buried six feet deep.

Patience lived paper-thin inside her these days, always one wrong fold from scrunching into something unsightly. Her anger itched to turn ugly, begged to be let out at the slightest provocation.

She could see her reflection out of the corner of her eye. When Rosalind turned to look, every snarl was plainly written on her expression. At once, she hardly recognized herself and saw herself more clearly than ever. She wasn’t enough of a fool to believe that she could have the world’s love, and yet she was enough of one to stick around wanting it anyway.

“I haven’t,” Rosalind said. “I have always been like this. I merely forgot who I was for some time.”

Here was something else Rosalind Lang had forgotten: she was a born performer. Before she was an agent, she had been a dancer. Before she was an assassin, the stage had been hers.

No answer out of her mouth was the complete truth. Nor did any qualify as a full lie. Only a story, woven from fractured pieces.

Let them flip the table—let her stand here wondering if she ought to ask for his input, and she clammed up in an instant. It felt so much worse imagining her requests denied. Instead, she could let them hover forever in ambiguity, in that space where she was neither accepted nor rejected. If she never asked, she wouldn’t have to face the possibility of a terrible answer.

There was too much riding on her shoulders to wish for another life.

Phoebe, to the world, came across as nothing more than a vacuous girl. She liked it that way. It made her feel as though she had control over herself. Over how much she was giving away and putting down.

People can be capable of terrible things and hold love in their hearts at the same time. That’s the complexity of mankind.”

“Well, for her sake, I hope she’s not in love with him,” Celia muttered. “It can only make everything a dozen times more complicated.” “For Orion’s sake, I hope she is,” Oliver countered. “Maybe it’ll save him when nothing else will.”

No matter how foolish it might be, he was intent on putting his next steps into action.

Regret is an emotion reserved for the powerless. There is no need for it here.

This part, Celia hadn’t told Oliver. She knew he would ask the question she didn’t want to answer: whether she was actually improving their plan or plotting to help Rosalind from the sidelines. Whether she was even working toward the ultimate endgame of securing their asset, or if she only cared to make sure the soldiers weren’t impeding her sister.

“I’m not even going to pretend to understand,”

Alisa let out a shriek. Rosalind stiffened, except when Alisa ran forward and launched herself at the stranger, she realized it wasn’t a sound of alarm but sheer delight. “Oh my God,” the man said. He wrapped his arms around Alisa tightly, holding her up. “Oh my God, Alisa, you’re so big now.” He was speaking Russian. And his voice sounded… familiar. Slowly, Rosalind turned to the woman. Holy shit. She was seeing ghosts. The woman yanked the square of fabric off her face. “Biǎojiě,” Juliette Cai said, grinning. “Don’t you recognize me anymore?”

“I’m sorry,” Rosalind sniveled. She didn’t know what exactly that was directed at. An apology for messing up the handkerchief or a general apology that wanted to cover every wrong she had done.

When Rosalind hugged her cousin and exhaled, it felt like she was breathing differently for the first time in five years.

He had changed so much over the years, and yet he hadn’t seemed to have changed at all.

Besides, it wasn’t malice curling between her tongue and salting her words. It was only the dim sort of loneliness that came from spending so many years alone, vigilant and independent and putting so much effort into marching forward without knowing what exactly she was marching toward.

“I would have found you anywhere.” He reached forward. Tugged that piece of her hair, then tucked the curl behind her ear. “Across the world and under it. No matter how well you hide. It doesn’t matter where you go. I’ll always find you. Understand?”

“We’re never going back, Alisa. At least not permanently. Wherever home once was, it’s not there anymore. But I didn’t want to influence you on where you needed to be.”

Somewhere along the line, her happiness had faded and left someone else behind.

As much as her brothers were suffering worse consequences as a result of their respective infamy, she knew what it was like to be treated as someone discardable, the tack-on to a family merely because of the outward image she presented.

“I’m sure anyone sensible can understand a library must stand regardless of ruling party.”