it is our choices that define us.” His hands were warm and steady on hers. “Make the right choice, Ramson.”
Something wet fell on her cheek, and Ramson’s expression shifted to wonder. Ana felt another touch of coldness and wetness, and another, and another. And as the first snowflakes gently landed on Ramson’s hair, she realized that it was snowing.
They angled their faces to the sky, at the silver flecks that twirled silently in the air and came to rest on their shoulders, on their clothes, on their faces and lips and necks. If there was a single moment she wanted to imprint in a sketch, this was it; this was a scene she wanted to remember.
Ramson let go of her hands. Through the softly falling flakes that caught in his hair and on his lashes and cheeks, he looked younger and more vulnerable than she had ever seen, hunching into his suit to ward out the cold. Something flickered in his expression, and then his eyes shuttered. “Good-bye, Ana.”
Wait, she wanted to say. Tell me your real name. Tell me who you are. Something, anything, to get him to stay.
But she could only breathe, “Good-bye, Ramson,” as she watched his retreating back disappear into a night of silently falling snow.
She turned to the balustrade, composing herself for a moment, trying to tease out the tangled, gnarled strands of her emotions. The snow was coming thickly now, whirling in a blur.
Below, on the veranda leading out to the gardens, a figure stepped into the dark, clad in robes of white. And as Ana’s gaze fell to him, her heart pounded and her blood roared in her ears.
The man tilted his face to the sky, and it was like looking at a ghost.
Tetsyev was here.
Ramson had worn many masks in his life, donning them and shedding them like second skins. He’d always played whatever role he needed to get the job done. Tonight, as he looked at his reflection in the mirror—clean-shaven in his black tuxedo and slicked hair—he felt as though he were simply wearing another mask and preparing for another show.
Except…
Standing there under the softly falling snow with Ana, he’d felt unmasked and raw. Something about this girl lured out the whisper of the boy he’d once been. Something about this girl made him want to be that boy. And his chest was heavy with the possibility of what that might have been were he a better man who made better choices.
Come with me. You could be good.
Ana had been that choice. And in some ways, Ramson had seen it through. He’d made a detour prior to arriving at Kerlan’s tonight. He’d gone to a courier’s cottage in the city and sent out a snowhawk, its feathers pure as freshly fallen snow.
Tonight, at the Kerlan Estate, by the First Snow.
He’d slipped a lock of black hair into the snowhawk’s beak. The animals had an impossibly keen sense of smell, capable of tracking the scent of their prey for miles in the cold, barren mountains of Cyrilia. Once trained, they made for the best type of courier birds.
The note was out, and his plans were in motion. And Ana—she would get as far away from this estate, this city, and his world of crime and darkness as possible. She was born for good. She was meant to fight for the light. And she would carry that faint possibility—the ghost of the man he might have been—on with her.
For Ramson, it was too late for that. The man he’d become believed that there was no good or bad; there were only various shades of gray.
Tonight, he would remember that—when he murdered Alaric Kerlan.
Ramson closed his eyes. When he opened them again, the world was sharper with clear-cut calculation, and he felt a wicked calmness settle into his chest. He was Ramson Quicktongue, future Head of the Order of the Lily. The ballroom lay beneath him, a theater of people in gaudy ball gowns and glittering jewels.
Ramson slipped his mask back on. The world was his stage; tonight was just another show.
The biggest show of his life.
The large clock suspended in the middle of the banquet hall showed seventeen minutes past nine. He had precisely forty-three minutes to find Kerlan, and to persuade him to reinstate Ramson as Deputy. He needed the words penned into the Order’s official mandate.
And then, as soon as Kerlan lifted his pen from the page, Ramson would kill him.
The hilt of his small dagger pressed into his sleeve,