“A full pardon,” she said. “Exoneration is his.”
Theo’s voice floated back to me.
Williams needs to show them what our government will be.
Merciful…
Compassionate…
Loathing scalded every inch of my skin. She’d done this on purpose. She’d waited to reunite us until we could perform for a crowd of cameras.
She was still using us.
I gripped Lucas’s face, my starving gaze roving over every feature, snagging on the rainbow blue in his eyes. “Tell me you’ll stay.”
“I’ll stay,” he whispered. “Forever.”
Epilogue
You don’t fight because you think you’ll survive. You fight because someone you love might.
—SOPHIA SCOTT, TO HER BROTHER
Irefused to release Lucas for days. It was as if he’d risen from the dead, a miracle.
Between my unquenchable need for his body against mine and the necessary moments of rest, he explained the story. Theo had pulled us all from the burning building. He sent me and Adam with the medical evacuation teams, but Lucas had been transported to Max Aota’s headquarters further east for treatment. Barely healed, he was forced back into action far too soon on Nia Williams’s orders.
The strike team he’d trained for Haynes’s assassination had mostly survived, and Williams wanted the deed done on the coattails of the NAO’s destruction of our headquarters. She thought an attack when their guard was down would be most successful, and she was right. While I writhed in grief in ahospital in Canada, Lucas was sneaking Defiance soldiers right into Haynes’s circle.
He’d been the one to put a bullet in Richard Haynes’s head.
“I’m surprised you agreed to do it after everything they put you through,” I said, my cheek resting against his bare chest in our new bed. The jagged scar where Jack Miller’s knife had pierced his flesh was barely healed, and I trailed a soft touch over it.
His fingers threaded through my curls. “Williams made it clear your safety was dependent on my cooperation.”
My hand clenched. “One day, I’m going to dance on that woman’s grave.”
Thanks to Williams’s masterful manipulation of our entire lives, we couldn’t leave our temporary housing without being devoured by cameras, but it didn’t matter. I didn’t want to leave. I preferred to stay in bed with him and bask in how lucky we were to be alive and together and safe.
As the news and internet returned, my voice spilled our fake story everywhere. Over the next several months,Until I diebecame a viral phenomenon, chanted in cult-like fashion across the country. Tattooed on skin, spray painted on buildings, decoratively splashed over wedding photos and love letters, the words bombarded Lucas and me until we cringed with each new example.
The worst was the kiss.
Our kiss at the press conference had been immortalized like the V-J Day kiss photo from World War II. The Lovers of the Revolution, they called us, and Lucas rolled his eyes every time he heard it.
“Would you have kissed me like that if you’d known the whole world would see it?” I asked one night.
“I kissed you like thatbecausethe whole world would see it,” he said, caging me between his arms. “Now everyone knows exactly who you belong to.”
I hummed as his mouth dipped to my throat. “I don’t think it was ever in question.”
In the weeks following the reestablishment of democracy, we had visits or calls from everyone. Once she was cleared to leave Canada, Zara traveled to New York City to help the city recover, but promised to visit soon.
“I’m not sure how much longer we’ll be here,” I said over a late-night phone call.
“Oh?” she asked. “Where are you going?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But I can’t stay in this city where everyone knows my face.”
