over the other questions, the people vying for my attention, and when I blink she’s just another face in the crowd.
That’s all she should’ve been to begin with.
I take one look at them, the briefest glance, before I say, “Piss off,” and slam the door in their faces.
PART FOUR
HERO
Her name is Amara Avanrose, and she is the princess of the Noxian Empire. She has lived through the Starless Wars, the coups to overthrow her father from his throne, the brief tète-à-tètes with Prince Carmindor. She has survived ship scrimmages, assassination plots, imploding stars.
But she isn’t sure she is going to survive this.
He wraps his arms around her legs and presses his face into her middle. “I must not lose you. I cannot. It will tear me asunder, ah’blena.”
“It will not,” she replies, cupping Ambrose’s face in her hands. He turns his gaze up to her, and she memorizes the cut of his cheekbones, the glow of his white-blond hair, the way he looks at her with those eyes, so sky-blue they make her want to fly.
“I have made so many mistakes,” he whispers, closing his eyes. “Oh, Sol curse me, conscript me, make me forget.”
“Then you’ll forget me, too.” She runs her thumb across his cheek. “Sometimes the universe deals us fates that make us happy, but sometimes it simply deals us fates that make us. I love you, Ambrose, but you need to love yourself first.”
Then she lets go of his face and steps out of his embrace, and even though she knows he wants to hold on, he lets her slide out of his arms, and then she turns away from him, and leaves him kneeling in the empty room of the Starless Throne.
I DIDN’T DO IT.
I keep mouthing those words as I stare up at the poster of General Sond on my bedroom ceiling. I didn’t do it. I didn’t. But it doesn’t matter, because he thinks I did leak the video. He thinks I’m that kind of person—the nerve of him! It’s almost enough for me to hate him. Him, and this stupid sleepy town, and Homecoming—I hate all of it. I don’t see why it even matters. Why any of it matters.
I don’t know what I’m hoping for—that Vance appears at my door? That he smiles at me with that kind of smile he keeps tucked away so no one can see, and tells me what the hell happened? That yesterday was just a terrible fever dream and that he knows I didn’t do it, that we’ll figure it out? Or did he close the door because it was the other way around—that now that someone shined a light on his little vacation here in nowhere, he wants nothing to do with me?
Was that all I was—just a vacation? That’s depressing. And sad. And it makes me feel so terribly small.
I roll over in bed when I hear my phone buzz, and I check it even though I know who it’s going to be. Today is the day of the Homecoming Dance, after all.
ANNIE (2:13 PM)
—hey, talk to us?
QUINN (2:15 PM)
—Please?
I don’t want to talk to anyone. I don’t want to admit that I was a fool, and that I screwed up. That when he looked at me in the sea of paparazzi, the Vance I had come to know—the one who kissed me in the library, who drove me home and let me read to him all my favorite passages and called me weird with that secret sort of smile—that Vance disappeared in the blink of an eye, and the one I had met at the beginning comes back, his lips set into a thin line, his blue eyes distant, his face impassive—like a curse returning.
He looked at me like he didn’t even know me.
And that hurt the most.
I know I’m fooling myself, but for a moment it felt like I was living some unimaginable story, some impossible fairy tale. It was kind of impossible, wasn’t it? A girl from the middle of nowhere meeting the guy she fell in love with at a comic-con, only to find out that he was a jerk of an actor, and yet…
And yet.
Forget it. It doesn’t matter. Though even as I tell myself that, it feels like a part of me has broken.
I can never sit on the barstool in the kitchen again as Elias cooks dinner. I can never walk into the library again. I can never run my fingers along the aged spines of