Page 197 of Because I Killed Him
Hollings flicks his gaze between us, looking torn, but when it’s Blue against Green, I know the outcome is inevitable. He drags a hand over his face and exhales. “Very well.”
I turn and push toward Edmund, barely feeling the drag of my leg brace. I reach for him, ready to yank him out of the room, prepared to do anything to keep him from finding out this way.
“Don’t watch, Edmund,” I say, firm enough to border on command. “I want to tell you the truth myself.Please.”
He steadies me with a hand on my arm. His expression is all edges, but his worry is unmistakably for me. “All right, Loredana. We’ll talk outside.”
“No, Duke,” Rosamund rushes in behind him. “If you let her tell you herself, she’ll twist it—she’s been manipulating you for months.” Edmund tries to walk away with me, but she snatches his arm, holding him fast. “Watch. And finally see what she’s done… who shereallyis.”
The holographic cube in the center of the lecture room powers on with a burst of light. I whirl back toward it, my eyes burning as the video loads.
No. Not like this. Not in front of everyone. It’s already horrible enough.
Around me, students lean in, their gazes fixed on the screen. The image flickers into view, and when the video starts—
It’s a lie.
There’s no locker room door creaking open as I stand half-dressed. No Charles charging in, his brown curls plastered to his skull, fury in every stomp of his boots. No fists slamming into my head or hands crushing the air from my lungs. That part is cut away, erased.
What the class sees begins with blood. My blood. It’s slick across the tile, streaking my thighs and soaking the shredded hem of my silk slip. I’m on my feet, saber already in hand, one leg twitching with a sharp, reflexive jerk I can’t control.
Across from me, Charles clutches his broken nose, blood pouring down his chin and onto the narrow wound in his arm where I’ve already slashed him. He holds a jagged locker door like a shield, angled defensively, while I stare at him, wild-eyed and panting through a knot of bloody hair. Mychest heaves as I pitch forward and lift my saber, braced to strike.
This isn’t the me I remember. This isn’t how it felt. But I know exactly how it looks. Charles has no saber, no real weapon. I look like the one who came for blood.
In the lecture room, several low-citizens spring to their feet. One mutters in shock, almost awe, before a chair tips and crashes to the floor. Above, on the fourth level, a dozen Blues surge to the railing, crowding it like beating-winged hawks. Beside me, Charlotte argues with a Pinkie, demanding the robot shut off the video. She’s the only one who knows the truth. When the Pinkie refuses, she turns back and reaches for me. But just before our hands meet, hers fall to her sides, trembling, as if she understands.
She can’t reach me here, even if she touches me.
I bite down hard on a scream.
The projection crackles, and Charles charges. He closes the gap like a bull, angling the jagged locker door to shield the wound I’ve already cut into his shoulder.
I wait, knees bent, ready. Then my arm snaps out, and I strike. The saber smashes into the locker door with a burst of sparks. It jolts from his grip and skids across the tile. Charles falters for only an instant, but it’s all I need. My next blow lands clean at the top of his exposed shoulder. A brutal, splintering crunch echoes through the room as the blade cleaves through skin, muscle, and bone.
Charles reels back, blood spraying in an arc that spatters across the lockers.
It should have ended there.
But it didn’t.
Panic claws at my throat. The noise in my head is deafening. All I hear is the pounding rush of blood, and all I feel is terror that I haven’t done enough and that he might rise again.
So I pivot, ground my weight, and haul the saber up one last time. My arm burns from the effort, but I swing anyway, with a full-bodied, final touch. The blade catches above Charles’s collarbone and glides through in a seamless stroke that severs clean through the neck.
His head lifts. Then drops.
All the way to the floor.
The body stays upright a beat too long, swaying like a flowerless stem before buckling and crashing to the tile in a spurt of blood and broken sound.
A scream rips through the lecture room, swallowed an instant later by a groundswell of screeching chairs. The crowd pours forward like a tide, students jolting to their feet in volleys of stark, recoiling horror.
On the screen, I’m still there, drenched and shaking. My nostrils flare, and my limbs twitch with a wild, electric current hissing through every vein. I don’t cry. I don’t drop the saber. I don’t fall.
I roar—a full-throated, feral sound that saws through my teeth. In that final, frozen frame, I don’t look like a girl who was nearly strangled moments earlier. I look like a Green who executed a Blue.
The video cuts.
