Oliver didn’t know what they had given him, but it was fucking awful.
It had to be some sedative, or it wouldn’t be this impossible to keep his head up. A cold sweat covered his neck, making him shiver while his skin blazed hot at the same time. The Nationalist soldiers were hauling him forward without much priority toward attentiveness, so it wasn’t as though they cared.
They tossed him in the cell. Oliver heard the bars banging shut. He couldn’t pry his eyes open long enough to con1rm. He felt the rough Aoor beneath his 1ngers. Damp. The staccato drip-drip-drip of a pipe in the corner signaled the cause.
How long had they been traveling? He couldn’t keep track. Since they’d pricked that needle into his neck, he hadn’t been able to hold on to his thoughts for longer than a few seconds. For a moment in that dark vehicle, he had been half convinced that it wasn’t the Kuomintang who had him but his mother. Since when did the Nationalists go sedating their captured Communists? There was no need. StuP a gag in his mouth and hold him at gunpoint. It wasn’t as though he would cause any trouble when he was aware that it meant a bullet right into the forehead.
Yet they had continued injecting him every time the sedation started to wear oP. He had been prepared for their end destination to be his mother’s facility. His heart had hammered terribly when the vehicle slowed, which was all the more jarring when the rest of him could only go at a snail’s speed.
Then he heard the soldiers calling instructions to one another. He had pried his eyes open and managed the barest glimpse to con1rm that they were walking into a major Kuomintang base in Shanghai. It wasn’t his mother after all, yet he could still feel her presence everywhere.
“Shepherd sent instructions to tie him up.”
Shepherd? Oliver thought blearily. That was his sister’s friend. The triple agent. The loyal Nationalist. What governance did he have here? Intelligence agents could throw around decent weight along the chain of command, but rarely did that include overseeing enemy prisoners.
“Tie him up?” another soldier echoed. He sounded just as Aabbergasted. “How’s that going to get him to talk?”
“It’s not,” the 1rst one replied.
Oliver felt a harsh tug on his shoulders hauling him upright. They pushed him onto a metal table, a freezing-cold slab hitting his back.
“Keep him asleep. A doctor is coming soon.”
Before he could try to 1ght, the next needle was already sinking into his neck, into his bloodstream. He couldn’t succumb to it entirely. Who knew what they would do to him? Who knew whether he would survive long enough to emerge again from his slumber?
Something tightened over his wrists. His ankles. They were restraining him to the table, murmuring among themselves. Sweat Aashed up and down his spine, turned him freezing cold. For all Oliver knew, the room could have 1lled with ice, unmooring him entirely.
He thought of Celia. Then he thought of nothing at all.
She had done it. Somehow, she had actually done it.
Silas had been watching his rearview mirrors the entire time, and yet he had no clue how Phoebe had accomplished the distraction. One second the soldier had been driving behind them. The next his vehicle had entirely disappeared.
Fearful that it might be a temporary delay and not wanting to get any closer to the safe house unless he had con1rmation, Silas pulled to the side, watching the crest of the road.
Nothing. A minute passed. The soldier had truly been thrown oP their tail.
Silas Aashed his lights, signaling to Celia that they were continuing. This time he picked up speed. The rest of their route proceeded entirely without trouble,
and before the moon had slipped out from behind the thick clouds, he had pulled up in front of the nondescript address of their safe house.
He got out of his car. As did Rosalind and Celia, whispering between themselves when they pushed open their doors. Without any patience remaining, Silas took it upon himself to hurry toward the rear door of the other car and open it before Orion could.
There were plenty of soothing reassurances that he had rehearsed in his head. But when he saw his best friend inside, one hand hovering as if he had just been about to pull the handle, all Silas could do was stare, unable to believe their rescue ePort had 1nally come to some sort of fruition. Nothing about this had been easy, yet it certainly hadn’t required the grand sacri1ces he’d imagined, either. When Silas was so prone to catastrophizing, anything less always threw him oP.
“Hello,” Orion said slowly. He climbed out of the car. “I apologize that I don’t remember who you are, but as long as we weren’t lovers, I am sure I can make amends somehow.”
Silas choked on a laugh. “I am far too young for you.” He held his arms forward, grabbing Orion in a 1rm squeeze. Orion, despite not knowing anything about Silas at present, returned the gesture just as strongly. “We’re all very glad you are alive.”
“Me too,” Orion replied quietly.
A wave of motion shimmered on their left. Silas was slow to react, and though it might have been terrible if it had been a threat, suddenly there was another pair of arms wrapped around him and Orion, accompanied by a familiar scent.
“Gēge,” Phoebe sobbed dramatically. “I have missed you.”
Silas snorted a laugh. He stepped back, which left Phoebe to hang from her brother’s shoulders. If Silas had been parched and starving, this sight alone would have been enough to satiate him. Let him lose everything else in the world, and he wouldn’t mind. Let the world think of him as discardable or frail or cowardly, he wouldn’t care. All Silas needed was the people he cared about, whole and well in front of him.
“Oh.” Orion looked startled, but he was quick to adjust. “You must be Phoebe.”
“You must be Phoebe,” she mimicked. “As if I didn’t just put on the
performance of a lifetime to get that soldier oP your tail. Now carry me up. I’m bone-tired.”
The safe house was up on the third Aoor, the 1fth apartment of a long residential block. Only one window overlooked the alley at the back, which Rosalind had instantly been wary about if they needed to get out quickly, but Celia assured her there was another hidden passageway, proceeding straight down into the alley through a secret door in the study.
While Rosalind entered the study to examine the aforementioned secret door, everyone else was near collapse and blinking hard to stay alert. It would do no good to work themselves into exhaustion, so now the safe house was quiet for the night: Celia, Alisa, and Phoebe had piled onto the bed, Silas was dozing on the armchair in the living room, and Orion…
Last she saw, Orion had chosen the bathtub for a sleeping spot. He had mostly clambered in as a joke, but then Rosalind had scoPed and told him that it would be terribly uncomfortable to sleep in a bathtub.
To prove her wrong, of course, he had settled in nicely and closed his eyes.
Rosalind trailed her hand along the bookshelves. The one on the right would open for the secret door, as all the books were glued to the red shelf panels with hollowed insides. The one on the left held real books—a few store-bought Chinese novels and some foreign editions of European classics. It was hard to read the titles properly with only a candle Aickering on the table. She didn’t want to turn on a proper light because the safe house was small, and having a light Aare on would disturb the others. Just because she was incapable of sleeping didn’t mean she had to drag everyone down with her.
Rosalind plucked out what appeared to be a children’s fairy tale. It felt familiar in her hand as she Aipped through, a girl on a quest and the shining prince along the way. Il était une fois…
A Aoorboard in the study creaked. Rosalind whirled around with a gasp, slapping the book closed.
“Sorry, sorry, didn’t mean to scare you,” Orion whispered at the door. Rosalind blew out an exhale. “The bathtub wasn’t a good bed?”
“It was a beautiful bed. The best bed I’ve ever slept in.” “Wow. That’s high praise when you’ve slept in so many.”
Orion was struggling to keep a straight face. He crossed his arms. “I cannot tell if you have just insulted me.”
“I would never.” Rosalind perched on the edge of the desk, mimicking his stance by hugging the book close to her chest. “Is everything okay?”
“Of course,” Orion replied. He walked into the study properly, glancing brieAy at the secret door before coming to perch on the desk beside her. She almost wished he wouldn’t—not because she didn’t want him near, but because she had trouble concentrating when he was, an ever-constant hum of music coming from his presence that she needed to listen to instead.
As if he could read her mind, Orion suddenly adjusted so that he was sitting on the Aoor, leaning on the desk. But then it felt strange for Rosalind to be standing in contrast, so she joined him, settling comfortably on the carpet.
“I couldn’t sleep,” Orion admitted. “I keep getting Aashes of memories.” Rosalind turned to him quickly. “Isn’t that a good thing?”
Maybe the cure had only experienced a delay. Maybe the memories would slide smoothly into place with more time.
“I don’t know. It’s hard to tell whether they’re true memories or not. They all seem to be from early childhood. We have met before, right?”
“Us?” Rosalind echoed. Prior to when they were assigned to be married? She
had certainly thought that Orion Hong looked familiar, but she’d only assumed it was because he might have been a patron at the Scarlet clubs when she still worked as a dancer. “I don’t know. Maybe. If we did, then it must have been in passing. Elite circles in this city extend only so far.”
“No, not in Shanghai.” Orion reached over slowly. For the book in her lap, she realized when his 1nger touched down on the title cover. She watched him trace the gold lettering there, feeling the phantom sensation of each movement. “In Paris. I keep seeing the scene over and over again. I am trying so hard to
remember the events you have told me about, but I can’t grasp anything about Seagreen Press or your apartment or our screaming matches. All I see is you with your hair in two plaits, wearing a ruAed pink dress and your cheeks Aushed from the heat. You, standing outside the cinema, grumbling about your tutors who lived within walking distance down the road and oPering me a handful of popcorn.”
Rosalind felt her stomach dip. He couldn’t have known any of those details unless he was actually there. She didn’t think she had ever told him about Paris like this, because by the time he knew that she was not American-raised Janie Mead but rather former Scarlet Rosalind Lang, there was already so much unfolding in their mission that she had little time to tell him much about her true life. It couldn’t be his mind confusing details that she had let slip around him; she hadn’t let any of this slip around him.
“As I said,” Orion went on, sounding almost worried when Rosalind stayed quiet for too long, “they could be false memories. Maybe my mind is making things up to try to 1ll the void.”
“No,” Rosalind said quietly.
She remembered the cinema too, that hot summer day when she was eating popcorn outside because Celia and Kathleen wanted to see a 1lm she wasn’t interested in. Eleven years old, not yet jaded by the world. There had been that boy, slightly younger, his eyes bright and mischievous. Though she had looked around the next few times she went to the cinema, she had never seen him again.
“That was you?”
Orion’s sudden grin was something radiant. As if he had achieved something by remembering what she hadn’t, and for a moment—only a moment— Rosalind wondered if it would be so bad if he never got his memories back, if they simply chose to start again from the very beginning. When he was like this, he didn’t feel the hurt of his mother using him, didn’t wear that sad anger from 1ghting his brother at every turn.
“Don’t feel bad. It took me total amnesia to go back to it.”
Rosalind rolled her eyes, only the thought was truly haunting her now. Forget starting again from the beginning: she could leave Orion alone entirely—it wasn’t as though he needed to remember her. She could free him from his
conditioning, make sure he was out of his mother’s grasp, then let him turn over a new leaf. Why keep him bound to her? Their shared code name as High Tide had disintegrated. Their pretend matrimony was no longer in place. She was an immortal girl who was going to lose him sooner or later if she held on. Restoring their time together only meant he was dragged into the pain too.
Instead, she could exist in his memories merely as the girl who had shared her popcorn on a summer Parisian day. Wasn’t that so much nicer?
“What are you thinking about right now?” Orion asked, searching her face.
He drew his hand back to his side. “You’re wearing a mighty strange look.”
“You cannot possibly have learned to read my strange looks already,” Rosalind countered.
“It’s not so hard. You don’t hide them.”
The book was starting to slip oP her lap. When Rosalind made no move to stop it, the book landed on the carpet with a low thump.
“Don’t take it for granted,” she muttered. “It de1nitely didn’t start like this.” “How did it start?”
Rosalind lifted a brow. She had told him already. All the mechanisms that had been moved into place by the Nationalist covert branch and the conspiracy they’d needed to investigate….
“No, not the mission,” Orion clari1ed before she could say anything. “Us.”
Oh. Rosalind’s mouth twitched.
“You were trying to chase me from the beginning. The very moment we were formally introduced, in fact.”
“I don’t doubt that in the slightest.” He shifted, propping one ankle over the other. “What about you?”
“Me?”
“When did I 1nally win you over?”
Rosalind was looking very intently at a spot just over his shoulder. “Could we not just wait until you get your memories back?”
“I want to hear it from you.”
Orion waited. Patient as a gentle stream. If Rosalind were to elaborate, she needed to tell every part of it. Every part of her.
“I’ll explain it like this,” she said quietly. “Attraction is a foreign language to me. And I could hear you speaking complete gibberish for much of the mission, which annoyed me tremendously when I was only trying to do my job.”
Orion was trying to hold back his confusion. She could tell by the small twitch his brow made before he smoothed it down.
“But…,” Rosalind went on. “Once in a while, I pick up a few phrases. If you speak it slowly enough, patiently enough. If it’s around my ear for long enough that I’m endeared to it, I start to understand what you are saying.”
“I have to ask,” Orion interrupted. “We are not talking about an actual foreign language, are we? Because I’m still working out if I speak Italian or not.”
Rosalind snorted. “No, Orion. I’m trying to tell you that I kept you at a distance because I knew I wouldn’t respond to you like other people did, and I had no business playing with 1re. Then somewhere along the way, between our last petty argument and the 1fth time you decided to sleep on my shoulder, I fell in love with you, and once I’ve tumbled that deep, I’m trying to understand everything you say no matter which language it’s in.”
He made a shallow inhale. The candle Aickered on the desk. Then it went out entirely, as if an invisible breath had blown it to embers.
“I wish I could remember,” he said into the dark. “I wish I could remember the 1rst time you told me this.”
Rosalind’s heart ached. It was him but it wasn’t. There were two split Orions, one of the past, superimposed over the one in the present. If she loved one, did she love the other as well? Where was the line drawn?
“I have good news, then.” Her words were barely audible. “That was the 1rst time.”
Orion shifted forward. Uncrossed his ankles. “Then I still wish I could remember, because under diPerent circumstances, if you told me you loved me, I would have kissed you.”
Before Rosalind could cave and allow it anyway, let herself pretend that there was only one Orion instead of two versions, he leaned back and set his head on her shoulder. It was alike to every time he had done it in the past, and yet there was another layer to the gesture, physically placing himself elsewhere so there was no temptation to lean in.
“Is this all right?” he asked.
She nodded. He couldn’t see her, but he could feel the motion.
“You can sleep if you want,” she murmured. “I’ll be awake the whole night to keep watch.”
“Wake me when the sun rises?” “Okay.”
The study turned quiet. Rosalind thought that Orion had gone to sleep.
Then:
“Rosalind?” “Mm-hmm?”
A pause. He was thinking—or hesitating.
“Even if the memories never come back,” he said slowly, “I’m going to love you again. I have decided to warn you in advance.”
Her throat closed tight. Don’t say that, Rosalind thought. Don’t make this
harder than it has to be.
“You don’t even know me,” she managed.
“I know enough,” he countered. “From the moment you oPered me that piece of popcorn and told me you didn’t like watching tragedies, I knew enough.” Orion adjusted himself, leaning closer into her shoulder. “Good night.”
Rosalind let out a shaky breath. She thought about her past, about every dark night she had spent alone, believing herself at fault for what happened to her, believing herself to be lacking as a person and punished thusly. Regret would always clothe her in a heavy shroud, change the way she moved and the way she met the world.
But so too did love. And it was warmer, thicker. “Good night.”
