Reyna kept searching.
Searching, searching, searching.
She didn’t want to admit who she was really looking for. She didn’t want to hope that he might be here. Or face what it might mean if he wasn’t. Her heart couldn’t take the desire to see him, just to have it dashed. Hope was the death of the oppressed. It made you hunger, only to be crushed inevitably under the oppressor’s boots.
More applause brought her attention back to Penelope, and she gasped. Her hand flew to her mouth.
There he was.Beckham.
Draped head to toe in a fuckable black suit. His dark hair, his obsidian eyes, scruff evident on his sharp jawline. She didn’t know if it was her mind conjuring every minute detail, but it was all there just the same. Right before her. Fifty feet and a soundproof glass window separated them. It might as well have been a mile.
She couldn’t tear her eyes away. She drank him in like a person lost in the desert, seeing a mirage and drinking the sand to satisfy an impossible, unquenchable thirst.
Beckham was evenmorethan she had remembered. Her dreams, though tempting, didn’t even come close to doing him justice.
He took over the space. Overshadowed the entire ballroom. He was menacing and terrifying and threatening in one glance, and in the next, he was devastatingly handsome. He could snap a neck in the blink of an eye and then cradle her in his arms in a loving embrace. She didn’t deny that he was vicious, that he may have done horrible things before her, before the rebellion, but she could see through the terror and past his mask to the tortured soul beneath.
She wanted to reach out and end this atrocity. But he couldn’t see her. He couldn’t hear her. He couldn’t feel her. He didn’t even know she was here.
He wrapped an arm around Penelope’s waist. He was there…with her.
Reyna felt like vomiting. This couldn’t be real. This couldn’t possibly be what he had been doing while she had been suffering all these weeks. Parading around with Penelope and playing their parts for the crowd as the Saint and the Martyr, the nicknames the press had given them when Beckham had carried Penelope out of the fires. He couldn’t be at her side. He just couldn’t be.
Reyna closed her eyes against the blurry vision before her. This was a trick. It was a plot, a con, a setup.
Harrington had done this on purpose. He knew. He fucking knew.
She had been able to hold a lot back from Harrington. The real reason Becks had never drunk from her for almost all their time together—that he had still been drinking from Penelope. The extent of their relationship. Everything that Beckham had told her about the rebellion and his involvement with it. She had never betrayed him. But she couldn’t hide her feelings for him.
Harrington wanted her to see Beckham tonight. He wanted her to see that Beckham looked happy and prosperous, that he had moved on. Harrington wanted her doubt and her unease. If he had those things, then he could use them against her. He could make her realize that she was better off with him than Beckham. She’d be better living a life of luxury rather than miserable waiting around for something that could never be.
She forced herself to look back at the stage. To see Beckham there with Penelope. To see the truth of his happiness. To know what was really happening.
This was a mask. The one he had shown her over and over and over again while she had lived with him. He was presenting this version of himself to Visage and his colleagues and the entire city. Showing them exactly what they wanted to see.
This meant one very important thing: his cover wasn’t blown.
No one knew that he was secretly part of Elle, the rebellion surge against Visage. No one knew that Penelope had gotten him involved with it in the first place. No one knew that he had been complicit in the underground fires or secretly working with Elle to take down the company he worked for from the inside out. When Everett had turned Reyna over to Harrington, he hadn’t ruined everything Beckham had been working toward. Even if it meant losing her.
Logically, Reyna knew all of this. She saw it for what it was. She trusted and believed in Beckham beyond reason, beyond thought, beyond her very existence. That didn’t mean it didn’t hurt to see him down there.
Even if, miraculously, she was able to escape, she could never be with him likethat.
Down there, he and Penelope looked like the perfect couple. A power couple. A blending of Visage and the government. How could Reyna compare? Reyna would never be able to provide him the sort of power that a Sky had or the cover that she had given him these last few years. If the goal for the rebellion was a better world, he was better off down there, on the arm of the most powerful woman in the city.
Not to mention the fact that Reyna was a warehouse rat from the wrong side of the tracks who had stumbled into all of this. She was nothing and no one. She never had been. She valued her own life and the life she had created with her brothers, the one she had just started to create with Beckham, but she would never belong. Not like Penny. Not even like Becks.
Even though she saw Harrington’s trick, it still broke her heart.
She was about to look away and say enough was enough when something miraculous happened. Beckham tilted his head and looked directly at her.
It was impossible.
Beyond impossible.
His head turned. His eyes lifted. His body tensed. A muscle in his jaw twitched. He was staring up, straight into her eyes.
He couldn’t see her. He had no way of knowing she was there. Nothing about it made sense. And yet…it happened.
