“I imagined her to be evil. The way she takes from people... What she did to Lola... It’s a trick. It’s terrible.” Sophia squeezed her hand into a fist. “She should be gone. She shouldn’t be allowed to do that.”
“Then what’s the problem?” he asked.
“The problem is that I can’t stop thinking about the people we talked to,” she growled. “And I’m scared it’s going to kill me. Literally. Because I am the worst Torren at being a Torren, even if I’m the last one left standing.”
Harrison gave her the exact look Sophia had been dreading. The kind of look that saw through her red lipstick and thigh-high boots, past the exterior of being intimidating or charming or whatever other people wanted her to be. He saw the grief on her, the sickness. He knew she wasn’t taking care of herself, and her shame about it made her nauseous.
She hated this feeling. She hated asking for help even when she needed it.
Jac had felt different—she could see his sickness, too. But even then, he’d dragged her secrets out of her, and she’d loved him and resented him for how much it had hurt.
“I spent five months in an attic with Leah Torren,” Harrison murmured.
These were not the words Sophia was expecting. She’d braced herself for pity, for an obligated sense of comfort. Not for truth.
“Hostage situations have a way of making people get to know one another,” Harrison said, with the kind of humor reserved only for the things that ached. “‘The Torren curse,’ she’d called her talent. The curse of only seeing the world in right and wrong, black or white, heads or tails.”
Sophia didn’t know much about her cousin. Leah had been Sedric’s older sister, the heir to the Family, until she’d been poisoned. Sophia’s father hadn’t liked to talk about her. Sedric had barely known her. But Charles and Delia had. They’d never described her as anyone different from them, grown up with the conscience scorched out of them.
Maybe they’d been wrong.
“Your guilt makes you a good person,” Harrison told Sophia. “But the world isn’t black and white, and goodness can’t be quantified.”
“Iknowthat,” Sophia snapped. She didn’t mean to snap—Harrison didn’t deserve it—but it was reflexive. “Of course I tell myself that. It’s not about it making sense. It’s about the talent. It’s inherently broken and mucked up. Sometimes I wish the Bargainer had taken the Torren talent instead, and all my memories with it. I’d be happy then.”
“Then the Torren empire would still be alive, and Charles would be don,” Harrison pointed out.
Sophia couldn’t argue with his logic, as much as she hated it. She wished her mind could be so straightforward and rational.
“I think it’s incredible, what you did. I didn’t have the strength to do that when I was your age, when I ran away,” Harrison said.
“Jac was the one who did it,” Sophia said bitterly.
“Had you not been there, Jac would’ve given me Delia’s name, and I would’ve sponsored her as donna. Even though I held the same disdain for the Torrens as I did my family.” Harrison let out a long sigh. “I’m scared I’m a pawn in all this. I think the last thing this world needs is a return to the time of monarchs, but the foundation of this government is corrupt. It’s like a building infested with termites. It would take so little for it to collapse, and part of me thinks that it needs to.”
“Another revolution?” Sophia asked, shocked.
He put his face in his hands. “Muck, I hope not. I can remember the Revolution. It was...” He shook his head. “I’m scared that if I try to change the world, there won’t be any world left standing. I wasn’t meant for this kind of responsibility.”
Sophia never expected the man who held one of the highest offices in New Reynes—who’dkilledfor it—to call himself a pawn. To doubt. She didn’t imagine Vianca Augustine had raised such a weak son.
But it was his weakness that made him better than Vianca. Not good, but...better.
“Why did you ever use your talent?” Sophia asked quietly. “You said ‘trust issues,’ but I have trust issues, and I don’t try to control people.”
Harrison looked away, and in the flashing lights of Tropps Street out the window, she could see his sickness, too. She could even smell it beneath his Maxirello cologne—like something necrotic.
“I loved Leah, and my mother killed her for it,” Harrison told her. “I tried to stop her. Leah went into hiding for months, and I thought those months would cool my mother down. They only made her worse. Shehatedthe person I was when I came out of that attic. I’d gone in as a drunken, entitled university student, with my family’s empire waiting for me. I’d left...traumatized. Broken. But also good. Well, not good, but better.”
Sophia tried not to feel unnerved by how he’d echoed her own thoughts. “You didn’t answer my question,” she pressed. “After all of that, why would you want to be like her?”
“Because I wasn’t like you. I wasn’t the softhearted child born into a ruthless family. I was always ruthless,” he murmured. “Even though I swore I’d never use my talent, when I did, it was so easy to tell myself that I’m an Augustine. That some talents are inherently rotten. That this is who I am, and there’s no use fighting that.
“When we first met, I felt threatened, too. You talked about your family like they were your responsibility. And then when you willingly volunteered for the omerta, when I learned what you’d sacrificed to achieve what you did, I realized that Iama monster. No excuses. And I gave you the omerta anyway.”
Sophia’s sickness might be terrible, but it hurt no one but her. Harrison’s wasn’t like that. It made him fragile and brittle-boned, and people like that shouldn’t have power over others. But that wasn’t how the world worked.
“When I asked Harvey to kill Zula with his talent, I got a sick sort of pleasure in it,” Harrison continued. “That Harvey could be a Chainer but not use his talent. It felt so...conceited. So I punished him for it.”
