Foul Heart Huntsman (Foul Lady Fortune, #2)

by Chloe Gong

Have mercy on my soul. I do what I must when there are greater matters at stake—

She was in and out: aim, shoot, run. The work of an assassin had to be quick. Whatever happened afterward was none of her business. Only the initial shot was.

Whether or not she made it out of here alive was up to fate now. Phoebe had made her peace with it—Priest was never supposed to be an eternal deity. She had only been created to serve the people she loved.

Her tears had dried. There was only its remaining hollowness, gnawing up her insides.

“No, listen to me.” Her sister was firm. Unyielding. “Can you use any of this immortality to get us over the bridge? What are you going to do? Sacrifice yourself in a blaze of bullets and fire? What would that achieve except a great spectacle? War isn’t a place for heroes, Rosalind. War is a place for survival until those above us have tired us out.”

You are a person first and an operative second. How many times have I taught you that?

If I am to do some good, then I must make peace with my own limits.

It wasn’t that he didn’t have a good relationship with Oliver, the roar wanted to tell him. He was angry and he was betrayed, but with every harsh word and threat of violence he delivered, it was because he missed Oliver so badly, because he had been left behind when he wanted the big brother who took him around Paris on his short visits and bought him ice cream—

“Because I abandoned you. I abandoned you once, and then I kept abandoning you over and over again each time I left you to fend for yourself.”

The two of them possessed the exact same attitude. Holding the entire world on their shoulders and blaming themselves when it felt too heavy.

He had just been plucked from a prison cell, and his head was still thinking about work. Or perhaps there was never a moment when their sheer existence wasn’t about work anymore, because the moment they had been born, they had turned into living, breathing assets malleable for someone else’s use.

“It’s not a crime to be born into privilege,” Oliver muttered like he hadn’t heard him. “What matters is using it instead of closing your eyes to it.”

They were doing exactly what she always grumbled the nation itself did, sniping at each other and making terrible hits while actual danger loomed shortly beyond. They weren’t their factions. She knew this.

“I didn’t know, yet I wasn’t surprised. You can feel those sorts of things, I suppose.”

In every gesture and every word of advice he tried to turn on me at the dinner table, I knew he would brush whatever he needed under the rug if it meant holding on to his place in society. I hated what I saw. He and my mother alike—it was not the family they loved but the ultimate image of what it could be.

“But I know how it goes. There’s always the old order with its flaws and the new order that wants to fix them. Then the new order starts to turn old, starts to pick up its own flaws, perhaps turns even worse, and suddenly the cycle begins again.”

I will love you if I please. I will make you my altar, I’ll put you above everything else in this world, I’ll revel in every morsel you are made of. It’s simple—just tell me you don’t feel the same, and I’ll let you go. But I won’t accept anything else. I won’t accept your refusal on the make-believe grounds of our work.”

“Maybe I am afraid,” she whispered. “How do I live with myself if there ever comes a day you get hurt because of me?”

“You accept it,” he replied simply. “Because that’s what it means to be alive. That’s what it means to fight for something—to love something. The country is good enough for us to die for. Why wouldn’t you be?”

“That’s terribly morbid,” Celia muttered. “It is only the truth,” Oliver returned. “Either accept it or resign the both of us to live miserably forever.”

She had enough of a personality to make something that felt real, but when asked who she was and what she believed in, Hong Feiyi was only one part of a constructed picture, split again and again for different people to the point that she had lost track of where she placed each individual fragment.

No whole picture existed. Because no one would care to like her like that.

They could fall apart and split onto sides at two different ends of the universe, but they would still find their way back here. There was nothing that could truly pull them far from each other.

“Because when people care about you, they hold on to you.”

She needed unrestricted parameters to run wild. That was just how it was.

For certain people, though, she supposed she could allow some reporting in.

It felt like she’d had new air injected directly into her lungs. Like she had leaped off a precipice expecting to hurtle to her death and grown the ability of flight instead.

“I love you,” Orion said in lieu of a reply, in perfect replacement of any straightforward answer. “I love you, I love you, I’m sorry I said so many stupid things. I can’t believe I asked why we couldn’t cross the Suzhou Creek.”

for once in her life it felt like she had found the curtain into backstage, allowed her to shed her mask and show her true face.

“I will combust if I don’t pace,”

“I already died once,” she answered quietly. “I think I have always accepted that I was on borrowed time.”

“You listen to me,” he said, grabbing Rosalind’s face with both hands. “You are bound to me in matrimony. If you break it and descend into another plane of existence, I will chase after you and snatch you back.”

In his experience, the truly neutral players were the most unpredictably dangerous,

“Even if she shakes us off, we’re not leaving her on her own this time.”

Though Phoebe and Silas practically had to scream to be heard, their conversation felt enswathed, unaffected by the world falling apart.

I was so fascinated because I could see the parts of you in her. I’ve loved you this whole time, just split in two.”

She kissed him, and the feeling was as electric as picking up a real pistol for the first time.

“My mission has never been more important than you are.” Her heart was making a racket against her ribs. “Don’t die,” she whispered. “I’m not done hitting you.”

“If this is going to work between us, you have to let me decide what’s good too,” she said quietly. “You can’t keep me out of matters. You allow me in, and you accept it if I disagree. If I want to draw the plans instead.”

“What is it?” she asked. “Whatever happens,” Orion said, “I love you.” “Oh, shut up.”

“Then we have a whole lifetime for you to tell me,” she said quietly. “Let’s fight this first.”

Alisa trusted who she trusted, and wasn’t often swayed to open that circle.

“How can I say this in a forgivable way?” Orion said quietly. “If I do this, I know the consequences will weigh on my conscience forever. But my conscience will be much worse off if you drop dead without warning when I could have prevented it. The country might still have a fighting chance if I go”—he swallowed hard—“but I am scared that you will not if I don’t.”

The night was bone-cold, but it wasn’t the temperatures that sent a chill down her spine. For so long, she had wanted to be a priority in someone’s eyes. She had craved the embrace of being irreplaceable. But this… this bore too high a cost.

The two of them were never meant for nation-changing responsibilities. Mere individual people were not meant to make decisions this grand.

The softness in his gaze didn’t match his tone; his gaze was for her alone, to apologize for the sacrifice he was willing to make.

“What is stopping you?” “Must you even ask?” Phoebe answered in a fury. “Because I don’t want that. I don’t want your aspirations. I want love. I want safety. I want to feel as though my world won’t crumble around me at any second, which, by the way, began when you walked away from us.”

“Don’t you know what damage you did?”

Her mother ignored her. “You will let us leave,” she demanded. “You are surrounded,” Jiemin called steadily. “Where do you think you will go?” “You may get out of the way, no?”

There was only the desire to run after her mother. Only the acceptance that perhaps she would always exist in this space where she both loved and hated her.