The best thing that came out of the attack was that three girls were so scared shitless by it that they voluntarily went home. Macie happened to be one of these two girls.
By the following day, Clara and the princes were all fine and healed. A few of the princesses had suggested that they have a redo on Alexander's birthday party, but he swiftly rejected that idea. I wasn't sure if it was because of what had happened or if it was because he just really hated all of the attention it brought on him; I suspected it was more the latter than the former, but he just smiled when I asked.
The attack had brought too much focus to me, most of the girls trying to sit with me during meals to find out what had happened, where I'd gotten a gun, and how I knew how to use a gun, because those were definitely illegal for anyone not in the military. They didn't seem to take my silence as a hint that I wouldn't be sharing anything and continued to question me. None of the royals asked anything; I think that they'd guessed already, but not even the king and the queen would say a word to me. Maybe it was because everyone had accepted that we'd be having a funeral if I hadn't somehow ended up with a gun. I thought it was better to not ask, especially because asking would lead to an interrogation, which would probably lead to my imprisonment. Or my execution. I had shuddered a little when I first came to that realization. Just because I'd accepted that I would die young didn't mean that I was quite so accepting of my death being made a spectacle for the whole country, especially when it wouldn't have been hard for them to hide my death in Kent to keep up the fear, but on live TV? There was no denying that.
Since there were guests at the palace, our lessons were cancelled. We didn't have many dates, either, since the princes were busy entertaining and catching up with their friends, so we spent most of our days in the Women's Room or in our own rooms. I didn't care much for the pestering of the other girls, so I generally kept in my room.
Friday afternoon, not two hours after I'd returned to my room from lunch, there were a series of quick, sharp knocks on my door. I stood from my chair on the balcony, setting aside the book I was reading, and hurried to the door, disliking the urgency of the knocker.
Clara was on the other side of the door, her face very pale. "I need you to come with me," she said. "Quickly. And you cannot tell anyone about this."
I didn't even grab shoes; I nodded and followed, shutting the door. The hall was empty.
Clara was something like a foot shorter than me, a few inches less than that in heels, yet I was having trouble keeping up with her quick pace. "What is it?" I asked.
She shook her head. "Not here," she said. "You'll see."
She led me straight upstairs to her family's private rooms. She stopped outside of a door that wasn't hers and knocked sharply, and it cracked open. One of Salvatore's dark eyes was visible through the crack. "Good, you brought her." He sounded relieved, and he opened the door to reveal what was, simply put, complete chaos.
The room was completely torn apart, the curtains torn to ribbons and the windows cracked. Papers were scattered everywhere and fluttering in the breeze from outside, books were torn to shreds, and all of the furniture was overturned and broken. Mason, Alexander, and Liev were in the process of repairing the bed, the frame of which had been cracked. Even the wallpaper was torn, like someone had dragged a knife over the walls.
I'd have been lying if I said that it wasn't a familiar scene.
Salvatore shut and locked the door quickly behind us, and Clara's expression was grim. "This is what happened," she said darkly. "We needed help."
"What kind of help?" I asked.
"A lot," Mason said, standing and brushing off his dress pants. The mens' jackets were nowhere to be found, all of them working with their shirtsleeves rolled up to their elbows. They looked less like princes when they were like this. "We need all of this fixed, and our parents can't know about it. Please tell me you know someone." He sounded hopeful.
"Plenty of people," I said, surveying the damage carefully. "Though you won't get any of the good ones in here without questions."
"Do you know anyone in the palace?" Liev asked, looking up from what he was doing only briefly.
I hesitated before nodding. "I do," I said slowly.
"And they're loyal?" Salvatore questioned.
Another nod. "They are."
"Get them." This came from Alexander.
"I need a phone."
He pointed towards an open door, which was cracked. This door led to what looked like a small office, but everything had been ripped out (the drawers were on the floor) and tipped over. I managed to find the phone and plug it into the wall, and I made a few quick calls. I heard Clara scolding Alexander in the other room, but I didn't worry about it until I finished making the calls. I returned to the room and saw why she was yelling at him.
Half of his face was covered with drying blood, which was still red and very angry-looking. It had run from his forehead, which had a pretty mean-looking cut on it, and had gone over his face and down his neck, his shirt collar soaking it up.
I rolled my eyes. "You princes are ridiculous," I grumbled. "I made the calls, they'll be up shortly to fix shit. There's no point in bothering with it all right now, people that know how to handle this shit are coming. Alexander, let's clean you up."
I was dragging him into the bathroom as the knock on the door came, and Salvatore answered it once more. The cabinets were the only thing broken in here, the doors ripped off of their hinges and a variety of things strewn across the floor, including a few orange bottles of pills. I simply kicked them aside and pulled the debris from the sink. Surprisingly, they'd left the little closet alone, and all of the towels and washcloths in it were untouched. Thankfully, he was smart enough to keep a first aid kit stored in here, so I grabbed that too. He leaned against the counter and watched me silently, arms folded over his chest.
"Sit." I pointed to the toilet. He did as told. "What happened?" I stopped up the sink's drain, tossed two washcloths in, and started running warm water over them.
He shrugged. "I don't remember." I started unbuttoning his shirt, and he pushed my hands away. "What are you doing?"
"Taking off this blood-soaked mess you call a shirt so that I can clean all of this up. Don't be stupid." I went back to what I was doing, and he let me. "What do you mean, you don't remember?"
He shrugged. "When whoever it was came in, they must've hit me in the head and knocked me out. I woke up to Clara knocking on my door about a half hour before you showed up. They left just this." He pulled from his pocket an envelope with the seal broken and a photograph, and I took it and set it aside on the counter, away from the sink. "You aren't going to look?"
"Not now, I've got a job to do. Care to tell me what it is to save time?"
"Just look at it."
I sighed and grabbed it. The picture was of me. It was the one that had taken for the competition when I'd applied, but rather than getting a good view of my face, there was an X in red marker over it. The back had nothing on it. I opened the envelope, and out fell a letter and another picture of me, cut from a magazine. It was the picture of me and Alexander, a red line drawn over my throat with the same marker. The letter was the standard handwritten threat, red pen like I was used to, nothing that I hadn't seen a dozen times. "So?" I set it aside and found that he'd discarded the bloody remains of his shirt.
"So? They're threatening to kill you, Cassiana!"
I laughed. "Their death threats and assassination attempts haven't worked yet, so forgive me for being underwhelmed by their threats. I'll give them points for creativity though, terrorizing you. That's real clever."
"You know who sent this?"
"Not exactly," I said. "I don't have names or anything, but these are the same ones I'd receive back in Kent. Same style, too. I've seen the whole destroyed room thing plenty of times. They're not very clever or creative." I shrugged and pulled a washcloth from the sink, wringing it out. I carefully started cleaning the blood from his chest and shoulder before working my way up his neck. "They're more irritating than anything. Like gnats."
He didn't seem to know how to respond to that. "What? You didn't tell me this before."
I rolled my eyes. "It's not that big of a deal, really. I'm a big girl. I can handle death threats." He began to protest, but I cut him off by saying, "Alexander, I have shot and killed too many assholes in my relatively short life for things worse than you could possibly imagine. It'd be a goddamn fairytale if I hadn't made a few enemies from it."
This stunned him enough that he shut his mouth and let me work without interruption. Once I'd cleaned off the blood, I checked the cut. It was nothing too bad, head wounds just bleed a whole hell of a lot. It was – thankfully – pretty small, and it didn't need stitches. I cleaned it up and put some antiseptic cream on it, and then I bandaged it. He also had a black eye, which I couldn't fix, but I took a clean washcloth and ran it under freezing water and forced him to hold it against his face.
Someone knocked on the bathroom door; I opened it, and a man was standing on the other side. "Anything damaged in there?" He asked.
I nodded. "Just the cabinet doors and the mirrors on them."
He bowed quickly to Alexander as he entered and then set about replacing the mirrors and reattaching the doors; I slipped out to grab Alexander a clean shirt and was back before he had finished, though he left after another minute or two. The whole thing took him less than ten minutes, and Alexander and I were alone once more in this small bathroom.
I awkwardly helped him pull on the shirt and buttoned it up for him. I even tried to roll up the sleeves for him, failed miserably at it, and then held the washcloth against his eye for him while he did it. He moved a little stiffly, favoring his left arm.
"Does it hurt?" I asked, pushing myself up onto the counter to sit.
He nodded. "A little."
"What are you going to tell everyone?"
"That Liev and I were sparring and he caught me in the eye." He shrugged, made an odd face, and then quickly cut it off. "It happens often enough that no one will doubt or question it."
"And your head?"
"That I fell while we were sparring and hit it."
I tried not to smile. "Does that happen often as well?"
He lifted his left shoulder in a half-shrug that somehow wasn't awkward. "Not so much anymore, but Liev can get enough power behind a kick that it wouldn't be so surprising to anyone."
We fell silent again. "Are you okay?" I asked.
He smiled. "Worried about me?"
"Of course," I said. "Don't be stupid. I care about you, you know."
The smile flattened into a more serious expression. "I know." He looked at the ground. "You haven't been threatened since you came here, have you?"
I shook my head. "Not that I'm aware of. I'd almost forgotten what it was like to constantly wonder if I'd wake up the next morning." The joke fell flat. Of course it did. That kind of thing was never funny when someone cared about you, especially not when they cared about you the way that Alexander clearly cared for me. Romance wasn't cute for lives like mine; it just made shit messier.
"I wish there was something I could do." He said it slowly, like he was testing the words. He disliked not having control, disliked being helpless. Stubborn Alexander admitting that he lacked control was new, and I found myself understanding how he felt; how many times had I had to hesitantly admit it while standing before a group of people, knowing what would come in the subsequent hours? I could almost feel the scratch of unfinished wood under my fingers as I gripped a table tightly, knuckles white as I gritted out a premature I'm sorry like that would shield them from the bite of a bullet. "If I can't trust the guards to keep someone from doing this, how can I trust them to keep you safe?"
"You can't," I answered simply. "You can't trust anyone, and neither can I, and that's just the way it is. There's no point in beating yourself up over it."
He smiled crookedly, a certain wryness in it that I'd seen out on the streets. "Welcome to your life, I suppose?"
"No. My life is worse."
"Fair point. I'm sure it is. Has it at least improved by being here?"
My lips curled upwards. "Marginally."
He laughed, and the sound was a sweet surprise. You know that feeling when the sun comes out after it's been pitch-black and storming? That was the feeling. Like the world had stopped ending. "Well, I suppose it's something."
"It's improved a lot," I said, more seriously. "I mean, for starters...I have you." The last part was said in a quiet, sheepish tone that he wouldn't have heard if the bathroom's silence wasn't so deafening.
"Am I really so great an addition to your life?" He asked. "I find myself quite mediocre at best."
"Well," I said, "even if you're just mediocre, you're better than any of my other options."
"And those are?"
"No one," I said. "Just you. It's only ever been you." Nonchalant, or as close as I could be; I even shrugged a little, just for extra effect. "There hasn't been anyone else ever."
(That excluded Honey, of course, but she'd been shot dead before I turned fifteen, so I didn't really count her. Hard to be in love with someone you'd known for like, four months before finding her dead in the street.)
"Oh." I had expected him to look at the floor, but he met my eyes instead. "I didn't expect that."
"Because I'm an Eight?"
"Because you're so goddamn perfect, and I don't understand how anyone could know you without falling in love with you."
Oh. Well, that was unexpected. "I'm an Eight," I reminded him quietly. "Love is a luxury we can't afford. You...you're like, untouchable for me." We were silent for a minute. "Are you really in love with me?" I asked, my voice still quiet.
"I've been in love with you since that first night we met," he answered honestly. "I've been stupidly denying it for weeks."
I didn't know what to say to that. "Me too," I settled for. Lame. I need to try better. "I guess I thought if I acted like it wasn't true then I wouldn't feel it at all."
He reached out and tentatively took my hand, and we didn't speak for a while after that. We didn't really need to. We just sat in the bathroom's deafening silence, holding hands, our ears ringing from the quiet. And it felt like things weren't trying to crumble down on us for a little while.