My gaze dropped to the grass. I couldn’t look upon the soldiers who had taken Lucas’s spot, who had used his strategy. The men who were alive when he wasn’t.
The crowd spurred into a frenzy of applause, but I was captured by a single word.
“Sophia?”
His voice sliced through me like a scalpel, fine-edged and precise. My head whipped up, heart storming in my chest, and there he was, first in the line of soldiers…
Staring at me with incredulous eyes.
He pushed the cap from his head, and it plopped to the grass just beginning to wake for spring. Orderly raven waves fell over his scarred forehead, and that ocean blue, a color so bright I couldn’t understand how I’d already nearly forgotten it, gleamed in the sun.
A sob caught in my throat, and I took one step toward him. “Lucas?”
I had to be dreaming. Had I fainted? Was this a fantasy I’d manifested to avoid listening to any more of Williams’s speech?
“You’re alive?” I asked.
He started toward me. Williams made no move to stop us, so I lurched away from my place in her tidy line.
I crashed into him at the base of the stairs to the Rose Garden, wrapping my arms tight around his neck while he circled my waist, lifting me from the ground.
Our mouths collided with all the violence of a thunderstorm.
He smelled the same. Somehow, he still smelled the same. Peppermint and incense.
One heel slipped off my foot.
“How are you alive?” I asked at the same time he muttered, “How could they bring you here?”
Neither of us answered as we gave in to another devouring kiss.
In the background, the new president’s voice said something about us, but I barely registered anything until she said, “…like fire and powder, Which as they kiss consume…”
I hated her.
I hated her so much.
But I couldn’t think about that.
Lucas was in my arms, his heartbeat against mine, his breath in my lungs.
“I love you,” I said over and over again, smothering him in kisses.
After several agonizing heartbeats, I became aware of the camera clicks. They inundated us, so numerous that they sounded like a horde of invading insects. Still, I couldn’t release him.
“Please tell me you’re real,” I said when the kiss finally broke. “Tell me you’re here.”
He set me back on my feet, his forehead pressed to mine. “I’m here. God, you feel good.”
“I thought you died.”
“I almost did.”
My fingers scraped hungrily through his hair, but it was Williams’s voice that broke through my haze, spoken away from the mic so only those nearest her could hear.
“Enjoy your reward, you two. You fulfilled your end of the bargain.”
I turned to her, brow raised.
