Slowly, I cast my gaze across the dining hall to Jude. He sits at the head of the table beside Mattia, easy and unbothered.
Sensing my attention, he raises his eyes to mine, alight with a challenge I’ve come to recognize. I follow the glimmer of his ring to his chalice, which he raises in a mocking toast.
I raise mine back in answer and drink.
Jude wanted a chance to kill me in the arena, and he will have it.
Act III: Scene VII
When I burst into my dressing room, I do the one thing I swore I wouldn’t do again.
I call out to Cassia in the mirror, risk of being overheard be damned. There are a hundred pieces snapping together in my head. With each one, the picture grows grimmer.
Something isn’t adding up. Jude has Mimicked and spoken to me as someone else atleasttwice before I came to the Playhouse.
He made me believe he spotted me at the casting call. That he seized the opportunity to make a show of killing the Peacemaker’s daughter in the arena and reclaiming his name as Lead Player.
Now, though, I don’t think that’s true. Jude has been watching me for a long time.
But when I reach my mirror and press my palms to the glass, it’s not my aunt’s face I see.
It’s Mattia’s.
Sharp nails poised for my throat, she lunges through the glass and tackles me to the ground.
Her razor-like nails rake across the base of my marked throat, and I scream, pain exploding up my neck and sending dots across my vision. I throw her off me and into the small side table that collapses under her weight.
“You aren’t welcome here,” she growls, lifting herself from the rubble with inhuman speed. “And you are certainly no Lead Player.”
Mattia runs at me again, and I throw my arms up in time to stop the jagged edge of an ornate candelabra she’s grabbed from introducing itself to the side of my head. It drags a nasty cut down my forearm instead. She wants blood. But I can’t suspend my reality and survive her blows without sending my life into another Player. Something tells me Mattia is not about to be a willing participant.
Sheactuallymeans to kill me.
I go for the splintered table leg on the ground and wield it like a stake as she corners me, her sparrowlike eyes honing in on my movements.
“I remember your father, you know,” she says. “Pathetic and desperate. Always watching us from afar under claims ofreporting back to your council. But he envied us.” She extracts a blade from her belt. “I think you envy us, too.”
She lunges as my back meets the mantel, nowhere left to go. Her dagger misses my eye by the skin of my teeth.
Instead, the dagger plunges into Gene’s portrait behind me, driving into the painting inches from my face. Mattia sneers as I dive beneath her armed hand, silver slicing clean through the canvas as she frees her blade.
A torrent of paper floods through the open slit of Gene’s painting. The rustling of pages floating to the ground is peculiar enough to give us both pause, heaving breaths as a storm of sheets darkened with ink fills the space between us. There are hundreds, like the portrait’s been swollen with them, bursting forth like feathers from a torn pillow.
Mattia watches me, and I, Mattia.
We both dive for the pages.
“Diary entries. Must be. Gene was always too sentimental…” Mattia mutters until her voice cuts into silence, mouth agape.
They aren’t diary entries at all.
RIVEN:
Hello.
SIL:
You might as well come in. The show’s just about to start, you know.
