SUMMARY: Winter Rose Levey meets Crassus Snow in District 12 while he was a Sergeant climbing the ranks in the Peacekeepers seven years prior to the Dark Ages. At first, she is swept away by his wild yet still cold ways, meeting with him in private until one day, fate stepped in the wind carried her away from her home and ultimately, away from him.
LENGTH: 29 Chapters + An Epilogue
WARNINGS: forced marriage, the Snows, suggestive themes, politics, the Capitol, propriety, childbirth, death, The Dark Days, pregnancy, other themes will be addressed as they come up
No AI was used in writing this story.
Chapter 1 : Red Is the Ribbon
Chapter 2: Would That I
Chapter 3: How Soon the Dawn
Chapter 4: Hungry for Love
Chapter 5: Take Me To the Lakes
Chapter 6: Safe and Sound
Chapter 7: Soldier Boy
Chapter 8: First Light
Chapter 9: Nothing You Can Take From Me
Chapter 10: Winter's Come and Gone
Chapter 11: Dancing With Our Hands Tied
Chapter 12: History of Man
Chapter 13: Bloodlines
Chapter 14: Ignorance
Chapter 15: All Is Found
Chapter 16: Pure As the Driven Snow
Chapter 17: Almost (Sweet Music)
Chapter 18: Death by a Thousand Cuts
Chapter 19: Soldier, Poet, King
Chapter 20: Peace
The park was practicing being what the Capitol thought was civilized with their trim hedges, marble swans and a pond that never dared ripple without permission. Winter Rose chose her usual bench with the angle that let her see Coriolanus and the path and the nearest exit. Coryo, four going on forty, was narrating a battle between his wooden truck and an overconfident marble swan, full of gravitas and sound effects. The orange shawl was draped scandalously over his back like a cape.
When the breeze shifted, Winter Rose palmed the silver compact Crassus had given her. roses chased on the lid, the hinge a small bud. She clicked it open. The tiny mirror found her face, then the boy behind her, then the shawl. Along the rim, fine as thread, the engraving winked the very lines of a Covey song. Improper on purpose yet so full of life and love alike. She tapped the rose powder once and pressed it under her eyes. The mirror didn’t lie to her. It just made her look like a woman not asked for her whole story every time she appeared.
“Mrs. Snow.”
Casca Highbottom slid into the shade as if he’d been following her.
“Mr. Highbottom,” Winter Rose said, Capitol-pleasant, her compact still open. “Afternoon. Pleasure seeing you again.”
“I’m told that’s the correct answer,” he said, dry. His eyes found the shawl on Coriolanus’s back and stayed there a beat too long. “Unusual color for this park.”
“It behaves,” she said. “Mostly.”
“You’re from Twelve,” he said. “You don’t look like you’re someone from a coal mining district.”
“What do they say?” she asked, dusting one cheek, then the other, indifferent to Casca’s comments.
Casca didn’t answer her question.
“Cassian was always fascinated by people different from him.” Casca said. His mouth curled upwards slightly. “I’m curious who wrote you before he decided to claim you for his own.”
“Many hands,” Winter Rose said lightly. “Some with better handwriting than others. Some in pencil, some in ink.”
“And the marriage?” he asked. His tone wasn’t unkind. It seemed as if he was looking for a seam that would explain the shape. “I’m curious. Did you choose him?”
Winter Rose met his eyes in the mirror instead of on his actual face. “He asked for a door,” she said. “I believed him.”
Casca studied her for a moment. He didn’t look hungry, exactly. He looked like a man who knew the cost of hope and had receipts he’d rather misplace. “He was a good student,” he said finally. “Of all the wrong teachers.”
“He’s learning from new ones now,” Winter Rose said, mild as honey and just as stubborn as Casca Highbottom.
“And your son?” His gaze flicked toward Coriolanus, who was currently explaining political procedure to a stick. “What will he learn?”
“To count to four,” she said. “To breathe before he makes a bad decision. To keep time even when the room tries to steal his beat. To be kind in a place that teaches men how to be cruel to people they believe are beneath them.”
Casca let out a small, surprised breath that might have been respect. “You’re hopeful,” he said.
“I’m here. I’m alive. Having hope is stronger than anything else in this place,” Winter Rose assured Casca.
Footsteps thundered and Coryo, hair bright with golden sun, cheeks busy with wind, saw Casca speaking with his mother. He frowned and pressed himself against Winter Rose’s side. “Mama, I want to go,” he said, voice pitched lower than usual.
“We will,” she said, smoothing out his curls. “Be polite and say good afternoon to Mr. Highbottom.”
Coriolanus performed the shortest acceptable version of the courtesy a four year old could muster and then, unable to help himself, reached for the orange shawls on his back. He wound the fringe around his fingers and looked up at Casca like a small magistrate. “We’re leaving,” he said.
“So I see,” Casca said, oddly gentle. “Good day, Mr. Snow.”
“Coriolanus,” the boy corrected. “But I like Coryo better. Momma said I’ll grow into my name later.”
“Coryo it is,” Casca murmured. He dipped his head to Winter Rose, something between a bow and an apology. “Enjoy the color while you can,” he said, almost to himself. “This city has a way of repainting.”
Winter Rose took her child’s hand, almost protectively. “Then we’ll paint back,” she said, and left before he could offer her another warning she knew would come.
—
General Crassus Snow had a new office with too many lights. The house adjusted itself to be too polite and far too constraining. Nights grew longer. Sometimes Crassus would come home with his mouth set in that careful line, but would still kiss the top of Coryo’s head while he slept, and stand in the doorway listening to the lullaby Winter Rose would sing to him until he remembered how to relax. Sometimes he didn’t come home at all.
Those nights left a dent in both Winter Rose and Coriolanus.
Winter Rose made a ritual out of his absences. Supper at six for two. Baths with songs and stories alike. The orange shawl turned into a cape, a tent, a stage curtain, and sometimes an ocean. Coriolanus would solemnly arrange it over the back of a chair and announce, “performance,” and Winter Rose would clap once and he would recite the day’s victories.
I poured without spilling. I did not push first. I waited a breath and then I spoke.
These were not small things. They were practice for a life Winter Rose wanted for her son.
“Tell me the story of the orange,” he’d say, fingers tangling into the fringe of the orange shawl.
“Orange? Like the color?” she’d say. “This orange is a song you can see.”
“You can’t hear colors, Mama.”
Winter Rose would lower her voice and let the Covey leak through the vowels just enough that only she could catch it.
“This one, you can. It says, here I am. It says, I refuse to be a lesson on someone else’s tongue. It says, if you bury me, I will grow into a tall, beautiful tree.”
Coriolanuis would nod like he understood.
In bed, the paper birds made their slow, secret circles. Winter Rose would climb in beside him for the first verse of the lullaby. He’d tuck his toes against her shin to check that she was real. She always was.
“Sing it,” he’d whisper, already drowsy, already greedy for the part of the night that belonged to only them. “The song about the birds.”
She sang. Quiet and sure, just for her son.
Roses are red, love; violets are blue.Birds in the heavens know I love you.Know I love you, oh, know I love you,Birds in the heavens know I love you.
He’d mouth along, soundless, so proud of knowing where the line turned. At the end he always asked, “Do the birds really know?”
“They do,” she’d say. “They tell the trees. The trees tell the wind. So on and so forth until everyone knows.”
“And the wind tells Father?”
“If he listens,” she’d say, honestly. “He’s learning to.”
Some nights, after he fell under, she’d stay and watch his face do the small work of dreaming. He slept with one hand open, palm up, like he was still handing the world a chance. She’d kiss his hair and then she’d go to the window and hum a verse for her own tired heart, the compact warm in her pocket from her hand with the Capitol glittering like it wanted to be forgiven for what it was.
On the loneliest nights, when Crassus’s side of the bed held the shape of a uniform rather than a man, Coriolanus would wake and pad to the doorway, dragging the shawl behind him like a blanket. He never cried. He just stood there with the patient despair of a child being good.
“Can I sleep on the floor?” he’d ask.
“Blanket fort or nest?” Winter Rose would ask, somehow more awake despite hours of laying in bed alone.
“Nest,” he’d say gravely. “For birds.”
She’d make one out of the shawl and two pillows and her robe and he’d curl in it like a hatchling. Winter Rose would lie on the edge of the bed, hanging off of it slightly, and thread her fingers into his hair and sing the lullaby so softly even the walls had to lean in to catch it.
Sometimes, less often than they all needed, Crassus would come home before the last note finished. He’d stop at the threshold, hat in his hand. There was something human in his eyes again whenever he heard the song. He wouldn’t interrupt. He’d just listen.
When she was done, he’d step in, tuck the shawl around their son with a care that made even Winter Rose’s throat pinch. Then, he would press his mouth to Winter Rose’s temple like a man who knew he owed his wife too much and could never give it.
It was like that most nights until one kind evening where Winter Rose watched the lights from the Capitol flicker like stars outside her window.
He repeated the kiss on her temple, sharing news as if it was fragile as glass.
“Tomorrow I have to go back to District 12,” he whispered. “I promise I’ll be home in a week.”
Something like hope flickered in Winter Rose's eyes. Crassus was returning to her home. Perhaps he could bring her back something of home or some word about her chosen family back from a time that was starting to fade from her memories. Perhaps he could tell Aurora Hazel and Earl Gray that she was alive and well and her son was as perfect as a peach, regardless of where he was growing up.
So, she turned over and pressed a kiss to his lips, her forehead resting on his soon after.
“Then bring me something true,” she whispered back. “When you do come home to me.”
Warnings: targ!cest, major character death, sexual intercourse, MDI, sexual content, grieving, loss, death, reader has she/her pronouns, piv intercourse, explicit descriptions of sex and death.
The raven arrived at dusk. You watched from the window of your chambers as it circled the rookery tower, and something cold settled in your chest. Perhaps it was a premonition or simply the knowledge that no good news ever came on such dark wings anymore.
By the time you reached the council chamber, Jacaerys was already there, the parchment crumpled in his fist. The firelight cast sharp shadows across his face, making him look older than his years, and in that moment you saw not the boy you'd grown up with but the man he'd become. You saw the heir to the Iron Throne, with all its terrible burdens.
"Jace?" Your voice was soft and hesitant. “What is it?”
He turned to face you and the look in his eyes confirmed your fears. "The Triarchy has blockaded the Gullet and are closing in on your grandfather’s ships." His jaw clenched. "My mother means to lead the counterattack herself alongside our men."
The words hung in the air between you. You knew that look Jace had on his features. You had seen it before when duty called him away from your side.
This was different. This was war.
"When do we receive further word?" you asked, though you already knew the answer wouldn't satisfy you.
"We don't wait for further word." Jacaerys moved toward the window, his shoulders tense beneath his doublet. "I'm flying to the Gullet at first light. Vermax and I can make a difference." His voice cracked slightly. "I won't let my mother face this."
"No." The word escaped before you could stop it, both terrified and desperate. "Jace, no. Don’t you dare!"
He turned to face you fully and you saw the resolution already hardening in his features. "I have to."
"You don't." You crossed the distance between you, your hands reaching for his arms. Gently, you touched him, your eyes pleading with him. "You're needed here at Dragonstone. Your mother has commanders and an army and my grandfather has great fighters."
"And I have Vermax." His voice was gentle but firm. "I'm not a child anymore. I can't hide behind these walls while others fight for my throne."
"It's not hiding! It's..." You struggled to find the words that would reach him. "Jace, please. You don't know what you'll be flying into. The Triarchy has —"
"I know the risks."
"Do you?" Your voice rose, fear making her voice seem almost harsh. "Do you truly? Because from where I stand, it seems you're so eager to prove yourself that you're willing to throw your life away!"
"That's not fair."
"Isn't it?" You could feel tears burning behind your eyes but you refused to let them fall. "Your mother needs you alive, Jace. The realm needs its heir. I need…" Your voice broke. "I need you here. Please Jace. Just listen to me for once."
For a moment, something softened in his expression. He reached up, cupping your face with one hand, his thumb brushing across your cheekbone. "I will be safe. I'll have Vermax, and I know how to fight. I know how to fly."
"Your mother would want you to stay." You leaned into his touch despite yourself, desperate for any contact that might anchor him here. "She wouldn't want you risking yourself for her sake."
"Which is exactly why I must go." His voice was quiet but resolute. "She's spent my entire life protecting me. Let me protect her for once."
"And what about protecting yourself? What about—" You pulled away from him, pacing toward the hearth. The fire crackled and popped, indifferent to your anguish. "What about us? What about everything we've planned?"
"This doesn't change that."
"Doesn't it?" You whirled to face him. "Jace, if you fly into battle, if something happens—"
"Nothing will happen."
"You can't promise that!" The words tore from your throat, raw and desperate. "You can't promise you'll come back, you can't promise you won't be shot down or burned or drowned in those gods-forsaken waters—"
"Stop." He crossed to you in three long strides. "Stop imagining the worst."
"Someone has to!" Tears were streaming down your face now, unable to stop them. "Someone has to think about what happens if you don't return, because you're clearly not, Jace!"
"I am thinking about it." His hands gripped your shoulders, firm but not harsh. "I think about it every moment. I think about you, about our future, about the life we're supposed to have together. But I also think about my mother flying into danger, about my brothers, about the people who depend on us. I can't just sit here and do nothing!"
"Yes, you can!" You tried to pull away, but he held fast. "You can stay here, you can let the commanders handle it!"
"I can't." His voice was anguished now, matching your own desperation. "Don't you see? I can't hide while others die in my name. I can't let my mother risk herself while I cower behind these walls. I can't."
"You're not cowering by staying here. It’s being smart. You’re the crown prince, Jace!”
"I have to do this." His forehead pressed against yours, his breath warm on your face. "Please understand. I have to."
"I don't understand." Your hands fisted in his doublet, clinging to him. "I don't understand why you have to be the one to go. Why must you do this?"
"Because I'm her son." His voice was barely a whisper. "Because I'm a dragonrider. If I don't go, if I let her face this alone and something happens to her, I'll never forgive myself. Can’t you understand that?"
You wanted to scream that no, you couldn't understand, that nothing mattered more than keeping him safe, keeping him here, keeping him alive, but when you looked into his eyes; those dark eyes that had watched you grow from children into something more, you saw the truth there. He would go whether you understood or not. Whether you approved or not.
Whether you begged him to stay or not.
"Jace," you started, but he cut you off.
Suddenly, his mouth crashed against yours with a desperation that stole your breath. This wasn't like the chaste kisses you'd shared before, the careful touches of a courtship conducted under watchful eyes. This was raw and urgent and tasted of goodbye.
You tried to protest, tried to pull back and continue your argument, but his hands were in your hair and his body was pressed against yours and gods help you, you were kissing him back. Your fingers tangled into his dark curls, pulling him closer even as your mind screamed that this was wrong, that you should be talking him out of this madness, not surrendering to it.
But surrender you did.
His hands moved to your waist, then lower, pulling you flush against him. You could feel the evidence of his desire, hard and insistent, and it sent a bolt of heat straight through you. When he broke the kiss, you both gasped for air, but he didn't pull away. Instead, his lips found your neck, kissing and nipping at the sensitive skin there.
"Jace," you breathed, but it came out as a moan rather than a protest.
"Tell me to stop." His voice was rough, strained. "Tell me you don't want this and I'll stop."
You couldn't. Despite everything you wanted him. You had wanted him for longer than you cared to admit.
"Don't stop," you whispered. "Please don't stop."
Something broke in him then. He lifted you easily, your legs wrapping around his waist as he carried you toward the bed. The room spun, dizzy with desire and fear and the terrible knowledge that this might be all you'd ever have of him.
He laid you down on the furs with a gentleness that contrasted sharply with the urgency of his kisses. His hands worked at the laces of your gown, fumbling slightly in his haste, and you reached up to help him, desperate to feel his skin against yours.
"Are you certain?" he asked, pausing even as your gown fell open as he untied the laces of your bodice. "We don't have to."
"I'm certain." You pulled him down to you, claiming his mouth again. "I want this. I want you."
The words seemed to unleash something in him. He helped you shed your gown, his hands reverent as they traced the newly exposed skin. When you lay bare before him, he paused, his eyes taking every inch of you in.
"You're beautiful," he murmured. "So beautiful."
Heat flooded your cheeks, but you reached for him, tugging at his doublet. "You're wearing too many clothes."
He laughed and the sound was so unexpected, so perfectly him, that it made your heart ache. He obliged, stripping off his layers until he was as bare as you. You'd seen him shirtless before, during training sessions and hot summer days, but this was different. This was intimate in a way that made your breath catch.
He was beautiful too. All lean muscle and smooth skin, marked here and there with small scars from training, and his cock, hard and flushed, jutted proudly from a nest of dark curls.
When he settled over you, the weight of him was perfect, like he had always been meant to be there. His mouth found yours again as his hand slid down your body, over your breasts, your ribs, and your hips. When his fingers brushed between your thighs, you gasped into his mouth.
"Is this alright?" he asked, his fingers gentle as they explored your core.
"Yes," you breathed. "Gods yes."
He stroked you carefully, learning what made you gasp and moan. When he found that sensitive bundle of nerves, you arched into his touch, pleasure sparking through you. He circled it with his thumb while one finger pressed inside you and the sensation was overwhelming.
"You're so wet," he murmured against your neck. "So ready for me."
"I am," you agreed, your hips moving against his hand. "I want you, Jace. Please."
He added another finger, stretching you. The slight burn only added to the pleasure, and when he crooked his fingers inside you, you cried out.
"That's it," he encouraged. "Let me hear you."
Even as pleasure built inside you, tears leaked from the corners of your eyes. Because this was goodbye, wasn't it? This was him giving you something to remember him by, something to hold onto if or when…
No. You wouldn't think about that. Not now.
"Jace," you whispered. "I need you. Please."
He withdrew his fingers and you whimpered at the loss but then he was positioning himself between your thighs, the head of his cock pressing against your entrance.
"This might hurt," he warned. "Tell me if it's too much."
You nodded, your hands gripping his shoulders. "I trust you."
He pushed forward slowly and carefully. You felt yourself stretching around him. There was pain but underneath it was something else.
Fullness. Completion. Rightness.
Everything just felt right despite the war and all of the death and sorrow that circled around their family.
"Breathe," he murmured, holding still once he was fully seated inside you. "Just breathe."
You did, focusing on the sensation of him inside you, of your bodies joined so intimately. The pain began to fade. It was quickly replaced by a different kind of ache.
"Move," you urged. "Please, Jace."
He did, pulling back slowly before pushing in again. The drag of him inside you was exquisite, and you moaned, your head falling back against the pillows. He set a steady rhythm, each thrust deliberate and deep.
"Gods," he groaned. "You feel incredible. So tight, so perfect."
His words sent heat flooding through you, and you wrapped your legs around his waist, pulling him deeper. The new angle made you both gasp, and his thrusts became more urgent.
"Touch yourself," he commanded, his voice rough. "I want to feel you come around my cock."
The crude words should have shocked you, but instead they sent a bolt of arousal straight to your core. You slipped a hand between your bodies, finding that sensitive bundle of nerves and circling it in time with his thrusts.
The pleasure built quickly, spiraling higher and higher. Jace's mouth found yours, swallowing your moans as he drove into you harder, faster. The sound of skin slapping against skin filled the room, punctuated by your gasps and his groans.
"I'm close," you warned, your fingers moving faster. "Jace, I'm—"
"Come for me," he urged. "Let me feel it."
Pleasure crashed over you in waves, your inner walls clenching around him as you cried out his name. He groaned, his rhythm faltering, and then he was pulling out quickly, his hand wrapping around his cock as he stroked himself once, twice, before spilling across your stomach with a guttural moan.
For a long moment, neither of you moved, both panting and trembling in the aftermath. Then Jace reached for a cloth, gently cleaning you before collapsing beside you on the bed. He pulled you into his arms, and you went willingly, pressing your face against his chest.
His heart thundered beneath your ear, gradually slowing as you both caught your breath. His hand stroked up and down your spine, soothing and gentle.
"I love you," he murmured into your hair. "I should have said it before, but I love you. I've loved you for years."
The tears came then, hot and unstoppable. "I love you too," you sobbed. "Which is why I can't lose you. Jace, please. Please don't go."
"Shh." He held you tighter, his lips pressing against your temple. "I'm not going anywhere. Not really. I'll fly to the Gullet, I'll help end this battle, and I'll be back at Dragonstone before you even have time to miss me."
"I already miss you." You tilted your head back to look at him. "I'll miss you every moment you're gone."
His thumb brushed away your tears. "Then I'll have to come back quickly, won't I? Can't have my betrothed pining away in my absence."
"This isn't funny."
"I know." His expression sobered. "I know it's not but I need you to believe that I'll come back. I need you to have faith in me."
"I'm terrified," you admitted. "I've never been so frightened in my life."
"I know. I'm frightened too." The admission surprised you and he must have seen it in your face because he smiled sadly. "Did you think I wasn't? I'm going to be flying into battle tomorrow. Of course I'm afraid. However, I'm more afraid of what happens if I don't go. If I let my mother face this alone and something happens to her. If I prove myself a coward when my family needs me most."
You wanted to argue that staying wasn't cowardice, that there was nothing cowardly about strategy and caution but you were too tired, too wrung out from emotion and pleasure and fear. So instead, you just held him, memorizing the feel of his body against yours, the sound of his heartbeat, the warmth of his skin.
"Promise me something," you whispered.
"Anything."
"Promise me you'll be careful. That you won't take unnecessary risks. That you'll come back to me."
He was quiet for a long moment, and when he spoke, his voice was thick with emotion. "I promise. I swear on my life, on my dragon, on everything I hold dear, I will come back to you. I would never leave this life without you.”
You wanted to believe him. Gods, how you wanted to believe him. So you let yourself pretend, just for tonight, that promises could hold back fate.
You fell asleep in his arms and if your dreams were troubled, at least you had his warmth to anchor you.
Dawn came too quickly.
You woke to find Jace already dressing, pulling on his riding leathers with practiced efficiency. For a moment, you just watched him, committing every detail to memory. You watched as his curls fell across his forehead and the way his shoulders set and the careful yet confident way he buckled his sword belt.
"You're staring," he said without turning around. You could hear the smile in his voice.
"I’m not staring. I’m just…admiring," you corrected, sitting up as you pulled the furs around yourself. "There's a difference."
He turned then, crossing back to the bed. He leaned down to kiss you. It was softer than last night's desperate passion, but no less meaningful.
"Get dressed," he murmured against your lips. "Walk with me to the courtyard?"
You nodded, not trusting your voice. He helped you into your gown and laced it with steady fingers. Then he took your hand and together, you walked through the quiet halls of Dragonstone.
The courtyard was grey in the early morning light, the sky heavy with clouds that promised rain. Vermax waited there, the dragon rumbling low in his throat as Jace approached. You'd always loved Vermax, had flown alongside Jace with your own dragon more times than you could count.
Jace checked his saddle, his movements automatic. You stood to the side, your arms wrapped around yourself against the chill wind that blew in from the sea. Even as Jace prepared himself and Vermax, you could see his determination to help out and prove himself worthy of the crown.
"Well," he said finally, turning to face you. "I suppose this is it."
"I suppose it is." You stepped closer, reaching up to adjust his collar even though it didn't need adjusting. You just needed to touch him at least one last time. "Remember your promise."
"I remember." He caught your hands, bringing them to his lips. "I'll be back before you know it. Probably before supper tomorrow."
"You'd better be." You tried for a playful tone, though your voice shook. "Because if you're not, I'll fly out there myself and drag you back. Then I'll kill you for making me worry."
He laughed, the sound bright in the grey morning. "A fearsome threat indeed. I'd better survive just to avoid your wrath."
"See that you do." You pulled him down for one last kiss, pouring everything you couldn't say into it.
Your love, your fear, and your desperate hope that this wouldn't be the last time, all said in one last kiss.
When you finally pulled apart, his eyes were bright with unshed tears. "I love you," he said. "Remember that. No matter what happens, remember that I love you."
"I love you too." The words were barely a whisper. "Fly safe, Jace. Come home to me."
He nodded, then turned and mounted Vermax in one fluid motion. The dragon spread his wings and you stepped back to give them room. Jace looked down at you one last time, his hand raised in farewell.
Then Vermax launched himself into the sky. All you could do was watch until they were nothing more than a speck against the grey clouds, and then nothing at all.
The Gullet was chaos.
Jacaerys had flown into battle before, had trained for this his entire life, but nothing could have prepared him for the reality of it. Ships burned on the water below, their sails blazing like torches.
He was flying Vermax, commanding the beast to destroy the Triarchy’s ships until the dragon was hit. Jacaerys noted how Vermax couldn’t fly higher, no matter how many times he demanded him. He sunk lower and lower until finally, the dragon sunk into the water, anchored by the triarchy’s weapon.
Jacaerys was able to separate himself from Vermax as the dragon cried, silently mourning. Jace however didn’t mourn yet. There would be time for that later.
He found a plank and gripped onto it to catch his bearings. He breathed out, relief flooding his senses until the first arrow took him in the shoulder.
The pain was immediate and shocking, stealing his breath. He looked down in disbelief at the shaft protruding from his leather armor, blood already seeping around it.
The second arrow struck his side, punching through leather and flesh alike.
The third arrow hit him square in the chest.
The world tilted or perhaps that was him, sliding on the plank as his grip loosened.
The water was cold. So cold it drove the air from his lungs and he couldn't tell if the wetness on his face was seawater or tears or blood. He tried to swim, tried to reach for the surface, but his limbs felt too heavy.
His last thought, as the darkness closed in, was of you. Of your face in the candlelight, of your body beneath his, and of your voice making him promise to come home.
I’m sorry, my love, he thought. I’m so sorry.
Then the Gullet claimed him and Jacaerys Velaryon, the worthy heir to the Iron Throne, knew no more.
The raven came at sunset.
You were in the library pretending to read when Maester Gerardys found you. The look on his face told you everything before he even opened his mouth.
"No." The word was barely a whisper. "No, he promised. He promised he'd come back."
"My lady, I'm so sorry…"
But you were already running, your book falling forgotten to the floor. You ran through the halls, down to the courtyard to where your dragon waited. You didn't remember mounting or even giving the command to fly. You only knew that you had to get to him.
The flight to the Gullet passed in a blur. Your dragon flew faster than she ever had before, as if she sensed your desperation. The battle was over by the time you arrived. The waters littered with wreckage of ships and dead bodies.
"Find him," you commanded your dragon. "Please, find him."
She circled lower and you scanned the water with desperate eyes. Finally, you saw a flash of dark leather and of brown curls matted with blood and seawater.
"There! Down!"
Your dragon landed on a half-sunken ship, and you scrambled down, heedless of the danger. You waded into the water, gasping at the cold, and pulled his body toward you.
The arrows were still in him. Three of them, just as the reports had said. One in his shoulder, one in his side, and one in his chest. His eyes were closed and his were lips blue.
He was cold.
"No," you sobbed, pulling him into your arms. "No, no, no. Jace, please. Please wake up. You promised. You promised you'd come back."
He didn't wake.
You pressed your face against his chest, heedless of the blood and the water, and screamed. The sound tore from your throat, raw and animal-like, a grief too large for words. Your dragon cried in sympathy, the sound echoing across the water.
"You promised," you wept, your tears mixing with the seawater on his face. "You swore you'd come back. You said you'd never leave me. You lied. You lied and now you're gone, and I—I’m alone now.”
Your voice broke completely. You held him tighter, as if you could somehow press life back into his cold body through sheer force of will.
"I love you," you whispered against his hair. "I love you so much. I'll always love you. Please, Jace. Please don't be gone. Please."
The Gullet had no mercy and the dead did not return. Jacaerys Velaryon had made a promise he couldn't keep and now you were left with nothing but his cold body and the memory of one perfect night.
You stayed there in the water, holding him, until your dragon gently nudged you with her snout. Only then did you let them help you lift his body, let them carry you both back to Dragonstone.
A part of you stayed there in the Gullet, drowned alongside the boy you loved. The boy who had promised to come home.
They buried Cassian Snow the way the Capitol buries its myths and legends. He was buried under marble in the Snow colosseum accompanied with a speech that sounded more like the law than a eulogy.
The procession moved like a diagram. White uniforms all in a clean line, officials with faces rehearsed for the cameras. Ulpia became a statue carved from pearls and diamonds. The coffin was a glossy, obsidian that reflected the sunlight perfectly, the way Cassian would have wanted. A small band in the back played the kind of hymn that pretended grief was tidy rather than a tornado that wrecked everything and everyone if one allowed it. Winter Rose stood with Coriolanus’s hand in hers and watched the city admire itself for being solemn for a moment.
Coriolanus behaved better than four usually allows. He wore a little red coat that made him look like a promise someone had written too early. He stared at the white gloves carrying his grandfather’s coffin like they were carrying a room. “Is he sleeping?” he asked once, whispering rather than shouting his thoughts aloud, like he usually did.
“No,” Winter Rose whispered back, honest and gentle. “He’s gone.”
“Gone to where?” Coriolanus asked.
“Somewhere we can’t talk to him,” she said. “But we can talk anyway if we want to.”
Crassus stood at the front of it all with the new weight on his shoulders. General. The word had chosen him and he was letting it. He didn’t crack. He didn’t blink too much. He accepted condolences like people were handing him bricks for a wall he already knew he’d have to hold up alone. When the gun salute fractured the air, he didn’t flinch. He stood still.
Casca Highbottom drifted past, said, “General,” to Crassus with a nod that might’ve held regret, and “Mrs. Snow,” to Winter Rose with a tighter mouth. Ulpia kissed the air on either side of Winter Rose’s cheek and left a chill there that powder couldn’t correct. The cameras ate everyone in their proper order.
When it was over, Winter Rose stood in the shadow of a stone angel and watched Crassus touch the coffin once, very lightly, not like a son, more like a craftsman checking the fit. Then it was done in the way things in the Capitol were done.
Publicly, beautifully, and with no place for mess.
—
Home was quieter, but only because the house was deciding what to do with its new master.
Coriolanus fell asleep upright on the journey and Winter Rose carried him to the nursery herself, refusing her husband’s hands. She tucked him under the orange shawl and smoothed his curls into the order the day demanded. He slept with one fist around one of the fringes, as always.
Crassus stood in the doorway and watched, hat in his hands like he finally remembered it didn’t belong to him in this room. His face looked older by an inch and younger by a shadow. Winter Rose always noted that grief rearranges men without asking. She learned that when she performed at funerals. When she eased the door mostly shut, he didn’t move. They stood in the narrow hall with the soft lamp and the paper birds barely visible in the dark.
“Let’s steal the rest of the evening,” he said, voice husky and a little wrecked. “Like we used to.”
Something in her chest let go just enough to hurt. “Where do you have in mind? We’re short on lakes.”
“The kitchen will do,” he said. “Anywhere the house forgets itself.”
They went to the kitchen on the back stair because Ulpia wouldn’t catch them. He lit a small lamp. She started the kettle. They didn’t talk while it warmed. The quiet between them had shape and meaning again, not just empty silence.
“I miss it,” he said finally, staring at the bare table like it had a map only he could read. “The man I was with you. The man I said I was going to be. The way we could stand in the dark and not perform for anyone.”
“You think he’s gone,” she said.
“I think I haven’t given him room,” he answered. “Today I realized I’ve been mourning him longer than I’ve been mourning my father. I can’t be that man. I never could be.”
The kettle started to fuss, relieved to have a job even on terrible days. Winter Rose turned the flame off before it screamed and poured two mugs. She slid one to him and came around the table. He reached for her hand like someone who’d been told it was permitted again.
“We can still be those people,” she said, soft but not vague. “Not all day. Not in rooms with eyes. But somewhere every day. We owe us that. We owe our son that.”
“I miss you,” he said, simple and unadorned, the way a man says water when he’s thirsty. “I miss you so much.”
She came into his arms the way someone remembered a route they haven’t walked since the seasons changed. The first kiss was careful. The second had a memory in it. The third had the old, ridiculous relief. He slid a hand into her hair and she breathed out against his mouth. The table nudged her hip and she laughed into him, the sound low and private. “The Capitol would hate this,” she murmured.
“It can file a complaint,” he said and kissed the corner of her smile like it had always been his favorite place.
They didn’t rush. They just took the room back inch by inch. He rested his forehead against hers and said, “I’m sorry about earlier. The park. The way I snapped. It wasn’t you. It’s—” He swallowed. “—me trying not to become him by accident and failing in small places.”
“You get to fail,” she said. “As long as you don’t make a home there. As long as you correct it.”
He nodded like the truth and he had paid the cost of it. “I love you,” he said then, plain.
“I love you,” she answered, equally plain. “Even when you’re impossible.” She kissed him again, slow and sure. “Especially then.”
They stood like that until the kettle forgot itself and whined anyway. She turned to silence it and he caught her wrist lightly, thumb pressing the little ridge where the ribbon used to live. “Come upstairs,” he said, more request than command. “Before the house grows ears again.”
They stole back to their room, barefoot, grinning like teenagers committing a minor crime. In the doorway he stopped her with a hand at her waist and a look that undid four years and a funeral. They undressed each other like people who knew where everything went and took their time remembering why. No choreography, no Capitol polish. Hands and breath and the old, practiced way they found each other and returned once again.
He whispered her name like he was paying for it. She said his name like a vow. There was nothing fancy to it. Just warmth and mouths and the steady miracle of being chosen again on a day that had tried to make them into monuments.
After, they lay stacked together in the quiet that belongs to rooms that have seen both grief and joy. He traced a lazy line on her shoulder where the sun had kissed her and permanently left freckles in its wake.
“I can’t give you Twelve or any of the districts,” he said into her hair. “But I can give you this. Every night I can steal you back from the city.”
“That’s all I wanted,” she said. She tipped her face up, eyes wry. “And for you to keep saying the brave things even when it costs you.”
“I will,” he said. “I have to live with a boy who watches everything I do and decides what love looks like from it.”
She reached for the drawer, took the silver compact out of its place, and flipped it open. The mirror caught them both, catching them tired, flushed, and alive. Around the edge, the engraving winked in the low light.
Roses are red, violets are blue love.
He smiled at the mangled grammar like it was a private joke that had become a wedding ring. “We were ridiculous,” he said.
“We still are,” she corrected, more hopeful than anything. “We still can be.”
Winter Rose snapped the compact shut, set it on the nightstand, and turned back into Crassus. He pulled the sheet up. They fit. The house kept breathing. Outside, the city practiced mourning as theater. Inside, two people who had met by a lake and lied to themselves about how simple it would be told the truth again.
“I love you,” he said once more, already drowsy, as if the day needed the word stamped on it before it could be filed away.“I love you,” she answered, and this time she added, because she was allowed to when the door was closed, “Always. No matter what.”
Summary: After the fall of the Capitol, the last surviving Snow escapes and hides under a new identity in District 2. She hopes to stay under the radar and just survive but, it isn't enough for her when she meets the stern and war hardened Gale Hawthorne, now a commander in Panem's new army.
A/N: The fanfiction depicts political violence and has themes that are 18+. Reader discretion is advised. No AI was used in writing this fanfiction.
A/N: This chapter contains descriptions of political violence. Reader discretion is advised.
The parlor windows rattled with distant thunder that was not thunder at all.
Eurydice Snow stood near the eastern window of the family's drawing room, her fingers resting lightly on the velvet curtain as she watched smoke rise in dark columns against the twilight sky. She was nineteen years old, tall and slender, with the pale complexion that marked all Snows—skin like porcelain, hair the color of winter wheat, eyes a glacial blue that her grandfather had once told her could freeze a man's resolve at twenty paces. She wore a dress of pink silk, simple but exquisitely tailored, with pearl buttons running up the back. Her posture was perfect, her expression composed, her hands steady despite the tremor she felt deep in her chest.
She had been raised for this composure. Trained in it, the way other children were trained in mathematics or music. A Snow did not flinch. A Snow did not show fear. A Snow stood tall when the world crumbled, because the world had crumbled before and would crumble again, and the Snows would always remain.
That was what she had been taught.
That was what she believed, even as the explosions grew closer and the smoke thickened and the screaming—distant but unmistakable—began to filter through the mansion's thick walls.
"Eurydice, step away from the window."
Her mother's voice was tight, controlled, but Eurydice heard the hairline fracture running through it. She turned from the glass to observe the tableau of her family arranged throughout the parlor like figures in a painting—a painting titled *The Last Days of Empire*, perhaps, or *Twilight of the Snows*.
Her mother, Andromeda Snow, sat on the ivory settee near the fireplace, her back rigid, her hands folded in her lap with such precision that her knuckles had gone white. She was forty-two and beautiful in the way Capitol women were beautiful—surgically enhanced, genetically perfected, maintained like a priceless work of art. Her hair was arranged in an elaborate twist, her makeup flawless despite the hour, her gown a masterpiece of crimson silk that pooled around her feet like blood. She had dressed for dinner before the news came. They all had.
Eurydice's father, Marcus Snow, stood behind his wife with one hand resting on the back of the settee. He was a tall man, broad-shouldered, with the same pale hair and cold eyes that marked the Snow lineage. He had been handsome once, before the weight of being Coriolanus Snow's son had carved deep lines around his mouth and eyes. He wore a charcoal suit, perfectly pressed, and his expression was carefully neutral—the expression of a man who had spent his entire life in the shadow of greatness and had learned to show nothing, feel nothing, want nothing beyond what his father permitted.
Eurydice's grandmother, Livia Snow, occupied the high-backed chair near the window opposite Eurydice. She was seventy-eight years old and looked sixty, her face a testament to Capitol medical technology and her own iron will. She wore black, as she always did, with diamonds at her throat and wrists that caught the firelight and threw it back in cold sparks. Her hands rested on the arms of her chair like a queen on her throne, and her eyes—the same glacial blue as Eurydice's—watched the door with an expression that might have been anticipation or might have been contempt. It was difficult to tell with Volumnia. It had always been difficult to tell.
And then there were the children.
Eurydice's younger brother, Augustus, sat on the floor near the fireplace, his legs crossed, his hands fidgeting with the edge of the Persian rug. He was fourteen, gangly and awkward in the way of boys who hadn't yet grown into their height. His hair fell across his forehead, and he kept pushing it back with nervous fingers. He had been reading when the first explosion sounded—some history of the Dark Days that their grandfather had assigned him—and the book lay abandoned now beside him, its pages splayed open like broken wings.
Her sister, Octavia, perched on the ottoman beside their mother, her small hands clutching a porcelain doll that she was far too old to still be carrying. She was eleven, delicate and pretty, with their mother's features in miniature. Her eyes were wide, darting between the adults as if trying to read in their faces what was happening, what it meant, whether she should be afraid.
She should be afraid, Eurydice thought. They should all be afraid.
But fear was not something the Snows acknowledged, and so they sat in their elegant parlor with its silk wallpaper and crystal chandeliers and priceless artwork, and they pretended that the world was not ending just beyond their walls.
And in the center of it all, standing before the fireplace with his hands clasped behind his back, was President Coriolanus Snow.
Eurydice's grandfather.
The man who had ruled Panem for more than forty years.
He was eighty-three years old, and he looked it. He was the only member of the family who had refused the more extreme cosmetic interventions, who had allowed time to mark him. His hair was white, his face deeply lined, his frame thin beneath his impeccable suit. But his eyes were sharp, alert, missing nothing. He stood with the same perfect posture he had always maintained, his expression calm, almost serene, as if the distant explosions and screaming were nothing more than a minor inconvenience.
"They won't reach the mansion," he said, his voice soft and measured. "The Peacekeepers have established a perimeter. The loyalist forces are holding the government district. This is merely... noise. Chaos. It will be suppressed by morning."
No one responded. Eurydice watched her father's jaw tighten, watched her mother's fingers clench harder in her lap. Even Livia, who had lived through the Dark Days and the early years of the Hunger Games, who had seen rebellion crushed before, looked uncertain.
"Father," Marcus said carefully, "the reports from the outer districts—"
"Are exaggerated," Coriolanus interrupted, his tone allowing no argument. "Propaganda. The rebels want us to believe they're stronger than they are. They want us to panic, to flee, to show weakness. We will do none of those things."
Another explosion, closer this time. The chandeliers swayed, crystal pendants chiming softly against each other. Octavia whimpered and pressed closer to their mother.
Eurydice moved away from the window and crossed to where Augustus sat on the floor. She lowered herself beside him, her silk dress pooling around her, and placed a hand on his shoulder. He looked up at her with frightened eyes.
"It's going to be fine," she whispered, though she didn't believe it. "Grandfather knows what he's doing."
Augustus nodded, but his hands continued to fidget with the rug, pulling at the threads.
Eurydice had always been close to her younger siblings, closer than their parents had ever been to any of them. Andromeda and Marcus were too consumed with maintaining their position, with pleasing Coriolanus, with the endless political maneuvering that defined life at the top of Panem's hierarchy. They had raised their children the way they might raise show dogs—groomed, trained, displayed when necessary, otherwise kept at a comfortable distance.
So Eurydice had become the one Augustus and Octavia turned to. She had read to them when they were small, had helped Augustus with his studies, had braided Octavia's hair and told her stories. She had tried to give them some small measure of warmth in a family that prized ice.
Now she sat beside her brother and felt his fear trembling through him, and she wanted to tell him the truth—that their grandfather was wrong, that the rebels were coming, that everything they had known was about to end—but she couldn't. Because she was a Snow, and Snows did not show fear, did not acknowledge weakness, did not break.
Not even when the world was breaking around them.
"The Districts have always been restless," Livia said, her voice cutting through the tension like a blade. "They riot, they rebel, they make their little gestures of defiance. And then they remember what happens to those who defy the Capitol, and they submit. It has always been this way. It will always be this way."
"This is different," Andromeda said quietly, and everyone turned to look at her. She rarely contradicted the family elders, rarely spoke out of turn. "That girl from Twelve—the Mockingjay—she's united them in a way they've never been united before. The footage from the Districts, the attacks on the dams, the trains—"
"Enough." Coriolanus's voice was soft, but it carried absolute authority. "I will not have panic in this house. We are Snows. We do not cower. We do not flee. We stand, and we endure, and we prevail. That is what we have always done. That is what we will do now."
He turned to look at each of them in turn, his gaze lingering on Eurydice. She met his eyes and saw something there she had never seen before—not fear, exactly, but a kind of grim acknowledgment. He knew. He knew that this time was different, that the rebels were at the gates, that his reign was ending.
But he would never admit it. Not to them. Not to himself.
Pride, Eurydice thought. Pride would kill them all.
The thought had barely formed when the windows exploded inward.
Glass shattered in a glittering cascade, and Eurydice threw herself over Augustus as shards rained down around them. She felt something slice across her shoulder, hot and sharp, but she didn't move, didn't lift her head until the sound of falling glass had stopped.
When she looked up, the parlor had transformed into chaos.
The curtains were on fire, flames licking up the velvet and spreading across the wallpaper. Smoke poured through the broken windows, thick and acrid. Octavia was screaming, a high, piercing sound that seemed to go on forever. Their mother had fallen from the settee, her crimson dress torn, blood streaming from a cut on her forehead. Marcus was shouting something, but Eurydice couldn't hear him over the ringing in her ears.
And then the door burst open.
They came in fast, a flood of them, dressed in rebel gray and carrying weapons that looked crude compared to the sleek Peacekeeper rifles Eurydice had seen all her life. But crude or not, they were effective. The rebels spread through the room with military precision, their guns trained on the Snow family, their faces hard and cold and utterly without mercy.
"On your knees!" one of them shouted. "All of you, on your knees, hands behind your heads!"
Eurydice's father moved first, dropping to his knees with his hands raised. Her mother followed, pulling Octavia down with her. Livia remained seated in her chair, her expression one of absolute contempt, until a rebel pressed a gun to her temple and forced her down.
Coriolanus Snow did not move.
He stood before the fireplace, his hands still clasped behind his back, and looked at the rebels with the same calm expression he might have worn while reviewing a budget report.
"I am the President of Panem," he said quietly. "You will address me with the respect that position demands, or you will face the consequences."
One of the rebels—a woman with a scarred face and cold eyes—stepped forward and struck him across the face with the butt of her rifle.
Coriolanus staggered but did not fall. Blood ran from his split lip, but his expression didn't change.
"On your knees," the woman said. "Now."
For a long moment, Eurydice thought he would refuse. Thought he would stand there until they shot him, because that was what a Snow would do. That was what he had taught them all to do.
But then, slowly, he lowered himself to his knees.
Eurydice felt something break inside her chest at the sight of it. Her grandfather, the President, the man who had ruled Panem with absolute authority for longer than she had been alive, kneeling before rebels like a common criminal.
She was still on the floor beside Augustus, half-hidden behind an overturned chair, and in the chaos and smoke, the rebels hadn't noticed her yet. She should move. Should reveal herself. Should kneel with her family.
But she couldn't. Her body wouldn't obey. She could only watch, frozen, as the nightmare unfolded.
"President Coriolanus Snow," the scarred woman said, her voice carrying through the room. "You are under arrest for crimes against the people of Panem. You will be taken into custody and held for trial."
"Trial," Coriolanus repeated, and there was something like amusement in his voice. "How civilized of you."
The woman ignored him and turned to the other rebels. "Secure him. And the rest—"
"What about the rest?" Marcus demanded, his voice shaking. "We're his family, not his accomplices. We had no part in—"
"You had every part in it," another rebel said, stepping forward. He was young, barely older than Eurydice, with burn scars covering half his face. "You lived in luxury while the Districts starved. You wore silk while we wore rags. You feasted while we died."
"We didn't make those decisions," Andromeda said, her voice breaking. "Please, we have children—"
"So did we," the scarred woman said. "So did all of us."
She raised her rifle.
"No!" Eurydice's father lunged forward, trying to put himself between the gun and his wife, and the shot that rang out was deafening in the enclosed space.
Marcus Snow fell backward, a red flower blooming across his chest. He hit the floor and didn't move.
Andromeda screamed, a sound of pure animal anguish, and tried to crawl toward him. Another shot, and she collapsed across her husband's body, her crimson dress now darker with her own blood.
Octavia was shrieking, her small body shaking with terror, and Volumnia had wrapped her arms around the child, trying to shield her. But there was no shield against what came next.
The rebels fired in rapid succession, methodical and efficient. Volumnia jerked as the bullets struck her, her body folding over Octavia's, and then both of them were still.
Augustus tried to run. He scrambled to his feet and bolted for the door, his young legs carrying him faster than Eurydice had ever seen him move. But he made it only three steps before the bullets caught him in the back and he fell, his body sliding across the blood-slicked floor.
Eurydice watched it all from behind the overturned chair, her hand pressed to her mouth to stifle the scream building in her throat. She watched her family die, one by one, in the space of seconds. Watched the blood spread across the Persian rug, watched the light leave their eyes, watched everything she had ever known end in gunfire and smoke.
And through it all, Coriolanus Snow knelt before the fireplace, his face expressionless, his eyes fixed on some point in the middle distance. They had bound his hands behind his back, and two rebels held him by the arms, forcing him to watch as his family was slaughtered.
"This is mercy," the scarred woman said, standing over the bodies. "Quick deaths. More than you gave to the tributes. More than you gave to the Districts."
Coriolanus said nothing. His face was a mask, revealing nothing, and Eurydice realized with a cold shock that he had expected this. Had known it was coming. Had prepared himself for it in whatever way a man like him prepared for the end of everything.
"Take him," the woman ordered, and the rebels hauled Coriolanus to his feet and dragged him toward the door.
He didn't resist. Didn't look back at the bodies of his family. He walked out of the parlor with his head high, his posture perfect, every inch the President even in chains.
And then he was gone, and Eurydice was alone with the dead.
The rebels moved through the room, checking the bodies, making sure there were no survivors. Eurydice pressed herself flatter against the floor, wedging herself into the narrow space between the overturned chair and the wall, making herself as small as possible. Blood was spreading toward her, warm and sticky, and she could smell it—copper and salt and something else, something sweet and terrible that made her stomach heave.
Don't move, she thought. Don't breathe. Don't exist.
One of the rebels walked past her hiding place, so close she could have reached out and touched his boot. He paused, and Eurydice's heart stopped. But then he moved on, and she heard him say to another, "All dead. Let's move to the next floor."
They left, their boots heavy on the marble floor, and the door slammed behind them.
Silence fell over the parlor, broken only by the crackle of flames consuming the curtains and the distant sound of gunfire from elsewhere in the mansion.
Eurydice lay in her hiding place and stared at Augustus’s body, sprawled just a few feet away. His eyes were open, staring at nothing, and there was blood on his lips. His hand was outstretched, reaching for something he would never grasp.
She should go to him. Should close his eyes, should hold him, should do something.
But she couldn't move. Couldn't think. Couldn't process what had just happened.
Her family was dead. All of them. Mother, father, grandmother, brother, sister. All dead in the space of minutes, their lives snuffed out like candles.
And her grandfather—arrested, dragged away to face whatever justice the rebels had planned for him.
She was alone.
The thought penetrated the shock slowly, like water seeping through stone. She was alone in a mansion full of rebels who would kill her on sight if they found her. Alone in a Capitol that was falling, burning, tearing itself apart.
She had to move. Had to hide. Had to survive.
The word felt obscene in the face of what she had just witnessed, but it was the only word that mattered now.
Survive.
Eurydice pushed herself up slowly, her muscles screaming in protest. Her shoulder burned where the glass had cut her, and her dress was soaked with blood—some of it hers, most of it not. She looked down at herself and saw that she was covered in it, painted in the blood of her family.
She wanted to scream. Wanted to collapse. Wanted to die there among them.
But she didn't. Because she was a Snow, and Snows endured.
Even when there was nothing left to endure for.
She stepped over her mother's body, careful not to look at her face, and moved toward the door. The hallway beyond was empty, but she could hear voices, footsteps, the sounds of the mansion being ransacked. The rebels were everywhere, searching, destroying, claiming their victory.
She couldn't go up. Couldn't go out. There was only one direction left.
Down.
---
The mansion had been built on the bones of an older structure, one that dated back to before the Dark Days. The wine cellar was part of that original foundation, carved deep into the bedrock beneath the Capitol. Eurydice had been down there only a few times in her life—it was her grandfather's domain, his private collection, off-limits to everyone except the house staff who maintained it.
But she knew where it was. Knew how to get there.
She moved through the mansion like a ghost, keeping to the shadows, freezing whenever she heard voices or footsteps. The rebels were focused on the upper floors, on the grand rooms where the real treasures were kept. They weren't interested in the servants' passages, the narrow staircases, the forgotten corners.
Eurydice used every one of them.
Her mind felt strange, disconnected from her body. She watched herself move as if from a great distance, as if she were observing someone else flee through the burning mansion. The girl in the blood-soaked dress. The girl with the wild eyes and shaking hands. The girl who had watched her family die.
That girl wasn't her. Couldn't be her. Eurydice Snow was composed, controlled, perfect. Eurydice Snow didn't run. Didn't hide. Didn't survive while everyone else died.
But she was running. She was hiding. And she was surviving, at least for now.
She reached the servants' staircase that led down to the lower levels and descended into darkness. The lights were out down here, the power cut or destroyed, and she had to feel her way along the wall, her fingers trailing over cold stone. The air grew colder as she went deeper, and she could smell damp and earth and the faint, sweet scent of aging wine.
The cellar door was heavy oak, reinforced with iron, and it took all her strength to pull it open. It groaned on its hinges, the sound echoing in the stairwell, and she froze, listening for any sign that someone had heard.
Nothing. Only silence and the distant rumble of destruction from above.
She slipped through the door and pulled it shut behind her, then fumbled in the darkness for the bolt. Her fingers found it, and she slid it home with a solid thunk that seemed to seal her into a tomb.
The cellar was vast, stretching away into darkness that her eyes couldn't penetrate. She knew from memory that it was lined with racks of wine bottles, thousands of them, organized by region and vintage and type. There were also crates of preserved foods, barrels of water, supplies meant to sustain the household in case of emergency.
An emergency like this, she thought, and felt a hysterical laugh building in her throat. She swallowed it down.
She moved forward carefully, her hands outstretched, until she found one of the wine racks. She followed it deeper into the cellar, away from the door, until she reached the back wall. There was a space there, she remembered, between the last rack and the wall—a narrow gap where the house staff sometimes stored empty crates.
She wedged herself into that gap and sank down to the floor, her back against the cold stone wall, her knees drawn up to her chest.
And then, finally, she let herself feel it.
The grief hit her like a physical blow, driving the air from her lungs. She doubled over, her arms wrapped around her stomach, and the scream she had been holding back finally tore free. It echoed through the cellar, bouncing off the stone walls, and she pressed her hands over her mouth to muffle it, but it kept coming, wave after wave of anguish that she couldn't contain.
Her mother. Her father. Her grandmother. Augustus. Octavia.
Dead. All dead.
She saw it again, playing behind her closed eyelids like a film she couldn't stop. The guns. The blood. The way Augustus had fallen. The way Octavia had screamed.
She rocked back and forth, her body shaking with sobs that seemed to come from somewhere deep inside her, somewhere she hadn't known existed. She had never cried like this before. Had never been allowed to. Snows didn't cry. Snows didn't break.
But she was breaking now, shattering into pieces in the darkness, and there was no one to see it, no one to judge her for it.
She cried until she had no tears left, until her throat was raw and her eyes were swollen and her body was empty of everything except pain.
And then she sat in the darkness and listened to the sounds of the Capitol falling.
---
Time lost meaning in the cellar.
Eurydice couldn't tell if it had been hours or days. The darkness was absolute, unbroken by any light, and the cold seeped into her bones until she couldn't stop shivering. She had pulled bottles from the rack and arranged them around herself like a barricade, a pathetic attempt at protection, and she huddled behind them and tried not to think.
But thinking was all she could do.
She thought about her family, about the last words she had spoken to each of them. She thought about Augustus’s fear, about Octavia's doll, about her mother's desperate plea for mercy. She thought about her father trying to shield them, about her grandmother's contempt even in the face of death.
She thought about her grandfather, dragged away in chains, and wondered if he was dead yet. Wondered if they had given him a trial or simply executed him. Wondered if he had maintained his composure to the end, or if he had finally broken.
She thought about the rebels, about their scarred faces and hard eyes, about the way they had killed her family without hesitation, without mercy.
She thought about the Mockingjay, the girl from District Twelve who had started all of this, and she felt a hatred so pure and intense that it burned away everything else for a moment.
This was her fault. All of it. If she had just died in her Games like she was supposed to, if she had just accepted her fate, none of this would have happened. The Districts would still be under control. The Capitol would still stand. Eurydice's family would still be alive.
But even as she thought it, she knew it wasn't true. The rebellion had been building for years, simmering beneath the surface, waiting for a spark. The Mockingjay had been that spark, but the fuel had always been there.
Her grandfather had built an empire on suffering, and empires built on suffering always fell eventually.
She just hadn't expected to be there when it happened.
Footsteps overhead made her freeze. She heard voices, muffled by the stone and distance, and she pressed herself flatter against the wall, hardly daring to breathe.
"—cleared the upper floors. Nothing left but bodies and ashes."
"What about the wine cellar?"
"Locked from the inside. We'll get to it eventually. Not a priority."
"Fair enough. Let's move on."
The voices faded, and Eurydice released the breath she'd been holding. They knew she was down here. Or at least, they knew someone might be. But they weren't coming for her yet.
Yet.
She needed water. Her throat was parched, her lips cracked and bleeding. There were barrels of water somewhere in the cellar, she knew, but she couldn't see them in the darkness, and she was afraid to move, afraid to make noise.
Instead, she reached for one of the wine bottles in her barricade. Her fingers found the cork, and she worked it free with shaking hands. The wine was red, thick and sweet, and it burned going down her raw throat. But it was liquid, and her body craved it desperately.
She drank half the bottle before she realized what she was doing, before the alcohol hit her empty stomach and made her head spin. She set the bottle down carefully and leaned back against the wall, closing her eyes.
Sleep came in fits and starts, more like unconsciousness than rest. She would drift off for a few minutes, then jerk awake at some sound—real or imagined—her heart pounding, her hands clutching at the bottles around her.
In her dreams, she was back in the parlor, watching her family die over and over again. In her dreams, the bullets found her too, and she fell beside Cassius, and the darkness that claimed her was final and complete.
She woke from one of these dreams to find herself screaming, the sound echoing through the cellar, and she clamped her hands over her mouth and bit down on her palm until she tasted blood.
Silence. She had to be silent. Had to be invisible. Had to survive.
The word had become a mantra, the only thing keeping her tethered to reality.
Survive. Survive. Survive.
---
On what she thought might be the second day—though it could have been the first, or the third, time had become meaningless—she heard them again.
Footsteps overhead, but different this time. Slower. More deliberate. And voices, clearer than before.
"—confirmed dead. Executed this morning in the City Circle."
"About damn time. Should have done it the moment we took him."
"Coin wanted it to be witnessed. Wanted it to be official."
"And where did that get her? Dead, just like him."
Eurydice's breath caught. She pressed her ear against the stone floor, straining to hear more.
"Can't believe that Everdeen girl would do that? After everything, after we won, and she just—"
"Doesn't matter now. She's dead, Snow's dead, and we're left to pick up the pieces."
"What about the rest of the family? The son, the wife, the kids?"
"All dead. Killed during the initial assault on the mansion. No survivors."
"Good. Last thing we need is some Snow heir plotting revenge."
The voices moved away, and Eurydice lay on the cold stone floor and processed what she had heard.
Her grandfather was dead. Executed in the City Circle, probably in front of a crowd, probably as a spectacle. The thought should have devastated her, but she felt nothing. She had no grief left to give.
And Coin—President Coin, the leader of the rebellion—was dead too. Killed by Katniss, somehow. The rebels sounded confused about it. Uncertain, even.
The world was remaking itself above her, and she was buried beneath it, forgotten, presumed dead.
No survivors, they had said.
She was a ghost. A phantom. The last Snow, and no one knew she existed.
The thought should have terrified her, but instead, she felt a strange sense of relief. If they thought she was dead, they wouldn't look for her. Wouldn't hunt her. She could hide here until... until what?
Until she starved? Until she died of thirst? Until the darkness drove her mad?
She had no plan. No future. She was simply existing, moment to moment, breath to breath.
She found the water barrels eventually, driven by a thirst so intense it overrode her fear of making noise. She felt her way through the darkness, her hands trailing over wine racks and crates, until she found the barrels against the far wall. She pried the lid off one and plunged her hands into the water, bringing it to her mouth in desperate gulps.
It was stale, tasting of wood and minerals, but it was the most beautiful thing she had ever tasted. She drank until her stomach ached, then splashed water on her face, washing away the dried blood and tears.
She found food too—crates of preserved fruits, dried meats, hard bread that had gone stale but was still edible. She ate mechanically, without tasting, simply fueling her body because her body demanded it.
And then she returned to her corner and sat in the darkness and waited for something to happen.
She didn't know what. Didn't know if she was waiting for rescue or death or simply for time to pass.
She just waited.
---
By the third day—and she was certain now that it was the third day, because she had been counting her heartbeats, counting her breaths, counting anything to keep her mind from fracturing completely—Eurydice had begun to deteriorate.
The cut on her shoulder had become infected. She could feel the heat radiating from it, could smell the sickly-sweet scent of corruption. Her head throbbed with fever, and her thoughts had become sluggish, disconnected.
She had stopped eating. The food tasted like ash, and her stomach rejected it anyway. She drank water when she remembered to, but mostly she just lay on the floor and stared into the darkness and felt herself slipping away.
It would be easy, she thought, to just let go. To stop fighting. To join her family in whatever came after death.
She had no reason to survive. No one was coming for her. No one knew she was here. She would die in this cellar, and eventually, someone would find her body, and they would add her to the list of Snow casualties, and that would be the end of it.
The end of the Snow line. The end of an empire. The end of everything.
She closed her eyes and felt the darkness pulling at her, welcoming her, promising peace.
And then she heard the door open.
At first, she thought she was hallucinating. The fever had been giving her visions—her mother standing in the corner, Augustus calling her name, Octavia crying for her. She had learned to ignore them, to close her eyes and wait for them to fade.
But this was different. This was real. She heard the creak of hinges, heard footsteps on the stone floor, heard a voice calling out.
"Hello? Is anyone down here?"
A man's voice, cultured, with a Capitol accent. Not a rebel, then. Or at least, not one of the District rebels.
Eurydice tried to respond, but her throat was too dry, her voice too weak. She managed only a faint croak.
The footsteps came closer. She heard the click of a flashlight, saw light spilling across the ceiling of the cellar, pushing back the darkness.
"My God," the voice said, closer now. "Is someone—"
The light found her, and Eurydice raised a hand to shield her eyes, the brightness painful after so long in darkness.
"Eurydice? Eurydice Snow?"
She knew that voice. Knew it from somewhere in her past, from the life before, from the world that had ended three days ago.
The man knelt beside her, and she saw his face in the flashlight's glow. He was older, perhaps sixty, with silver hair and kind eyes. He wore a simple suit, gray and unremarkable, and there was a mockingjay armband on his sleeve.
"Lucius," she whispered, the name coming to her from memory. This man who had been at their house for dinner a hundred times, who had always brought gifts for the children, who had seemed like a friend, had been a rebel all along.
"Yes," he said gently. "Yes, it's me. Oh, Eurydice, what have they done to you?"
She looked down at herself and saw what he saw—a girl covered in dried blood and filth, her dress torn, her shoulder weeping infection, her body skeletal from three days without food. She looked like a corpse. Felt like one.
"They're dead," she said, her voice barely audible. "All of them. Mother, Father, Grandmother, Augustus, Octavia. All dead."
"I know," Lucius said, and there was genuine sorrow in his voice. "I know, child. I'm so sorry. It wasn’t supposed to be like that.”
"You're one of them," she said, the words coming slowly, her fever-addled mind struggling to process. "You're a rebel. You betrayed us."
"I did what I thought was right," he said quietly. "I know you can't understand that now. Maybe you never will. But I didn't want this. Didn't want them to die. I tried to—" He stopped, shook his head. "It doesn't matter now. What matters is getting you out of here."
"Why?" The question came out flat, emotionless. "Why save me? I'm a Snow. You should kill me. They'll kill me if they find me."
"They won't find you," Lucius said firmly. "I'm going to get you out of the Capitol, somewhere safe, somewhere you can—"
"There's nowhere safe," Eurydice interrupted. "Not for me. Not anymore."
"There is," he insisted. "I have contacts in District Two. An orphanage. They'll take you in, give you a new identity. You'll be just another war orphan. No one will know who you really are."
An orphanage. The word seemed absurd, impossible. She was Eurydice Snow, granddaughter of the President. She didn't belong in an orphanage.
But Eurydice Snow was dead. The rebels had said so. All the Snows were dead.
She was no one now. Nothing.
"Can you stand?" Lucius asked, slipping an arm under her shoulders.
She tried, but her legs wouldn't support her. She collapsed back against the wall, her vision swimming.
"It's all right," Lucius said. "I'll carry you. But we have to go now, before anyone realizes I'm here. Can you hold on?"
She nodded, though she wasn't sure she could. Wasn't sure she wanted to.
But when Lucius lifted her—and she was shocked by how light she felt, how insubstantial, as if she were made of paper and air—she wrapped her arms around his neck and held on.
He carried her through the cellar, the flashlight beam bouncing ahead of them, illuminating racks of wine and crates of supplies. He carried her up the stairs, through the servants' passages, through the ruins of the mansion she had called home.
She caught glimpses of destruction as they moved—burned walls, shattered windows, bloodstains on marble floors. The mansion was a corpse, gutted and hollow, and she was being carried through its remains like a ghost.
They emerged into daylight, and Eurydice gasped at the brightness, at the cold air on her face. Plutarch had wrapped her in a cloak, hiding her face, and he moved quickly through the streets, keeping to the shadows.
She saw the Capitol in ruins. Buildings burned, streets torn up, bodies still lying where they had fallen. The rebellion had been thorough, brutal, complete.
Her world had ended, and this was what remained.
Lucius carried her to a vehicle—a plain transport, unmarked—and laid her in the back. He covered her with blankets, and she felt the engine start, felt the vehicle begin to move.
"Sleep," Lucius said softly. "It's a long journey to District Two. Sleep, and when you wake, you'll be someone else. Someone new."
Eurydice closed her eyes and felt the darkness pulling at her again. But this time, it wasn't the darkness of death. It was the darkness of unconsciousness, of escape, of mercy.
She let it take her.
---
She woke in pieces, fragments of consciousness that didn't quite connect.
White walls. The smell of antiseptic. Pain in her shoulder, sharp and bright.
Voices, distant and muffled.
"—infection is severe. We almost lost her."
"Will she survive?"
"Physically, yes. Mentally... that's another question."
Darkness again.
When she woke the second time, she was more aware. She was in a bed, clean sheets beneath her, her shoulder bandaged. The room was small, sparse, with a single window that looked out on gray sky.
A woman sat beside the bed, middle-aged and stern-looking, with her hair pulled back in a severe bun. She wore a simple gray dress and a white apron.
"You're awake," the woman said. It wasn't a question.
Eurydice tried to speak, but her throat was too dry. The woman held a cup of water to her lips, and she drank gratefully.
"Where am I?" she managed.
"District Two," the woman said. "Lyme’s Home for War Orphans. I'm Matron Trembly. You were brought here three days ago, half-dead from infection and starvation. You're lucky to be alive."
Lucky. The word was a joke.
"What's your name?" Matron Trembley asked.
Eurydice opened her mouth to answer, then stopped. What was her name? Not Eurydice Snow. That girl was dead. That girl had died in the parlor with her family.
"I don't know," she whispered.
Matron Trembly’s expression softened slightly. "Many of the children who come here have lost their memories. The trauma of war does that. We'll give you a new name, then. Something simple. Something that won't draw attention."
She paused, considering. "How about Aurora? Aurora Ashford. That's a good District Two name. No one will question it."
Aurora Ashford. A girl from District Two. A war orphan. No family, no history, no future.
"Good," Matron Trembly said, standing. "Rest now. When you're stronger, we'll discuss your duties. Everyone here works for their keep. No exceptions."
She left, and Aurora lay in the narrow bed and stared at the ceiling.
She was alive. She had survived.
But as she lay there, feeling the ache in her shoulder and the emptiness in her chest where her heart used to be, she wondered if survival was really a mercy after all.
Outside the window, the gray sky pressed down like a weight, and somewhere in the distance, she could hear children crying.
She closed her eyes and tried to remember what it felt like to be Eurydice Snow, granddaughter of the President, a girl who had never known hunger or fear or loss.
But that girl was gone, buried in the wine cellar beneath a ruined mansion, and Aurora Ashford had taken her place.
A girl with no past. No family. No hope.
Just survival.
And in the new Panem, that would have to be enough.
Crassus reworked his route three times on paper before actually admitting what he was doing.
The first draft was regulation. All straight lines and predictable turns, the sort of patrol a manual would applaud. The second looped past the seamstress’s shop “by necessity,” as if bolts of calico posed a threat to the Capitol. The third was the most honest one. The market, the schoolhouse, the train yard, and finally the little side street where travelers rented rooms and sang warmth into cold houses.
He didn’t tell himself a story about it. He didn’t need to. He put the paper away, buttoned his coat, and walked the dishonest route like it had been carved into the ground years before he found it.
Winter Rose spotted him first. She was sitting on the shop’s stoop in a patch of weak sun, braid falling apart, guitar in her lap. Aurora Hazel lounged against the doorframe, filing her nails with a sliver of slate like she was sharpening a blade she might actually use. Earl Gray sat cross-legged on the step, earnestly teaching a boy of seven how to cheat at cards and look innocent about it.
“Back so soon, Officer Snow?” Aurora Hazel called, not looking up. “Careful. You’ll wear a groove in our street and then our landlord will double the rent.”
“I’m on patrol,” he said, which sounded flimsy to his own ears.
Winter Rose stopped a string with her pinkie and let the note die. “You don’t have to explain yourself to us,” she said, not unkind. “Though it’s nice, seeing you when the day is being stubborn about being day.”
He glanced at the small sun-warmed empire around her. The guitar, the crooked step, the boy who kept losing on purpose so Earl Gray could feel useful all served their purposes. “You play out here often?”
“When the light is kind,” she said as she nudged the ribbon on her wrist with her thumb in thought. “And when Aurora Hazel lets me. She says there’s a right hour to be loved and a wrong hour to be noticed.”
“There is,” Aurora Hazel said, finally looking at him. “And there’s also a right hour to stop hovering around my best friend like a moth in a uniform.”
“Aurora Hazel,” Winter Rose warned.
“What? He’s handsome in a tragic statue way. I’m not blind. I’m just not eager to spend the night in a cell because you two think you invented danger.”
Earl Gray looked up, cheerful. “We did invent danger, actually. We patented it last winter. I have the papers if you care to see, Officier Snow.”
Crassus turned to Winter Rose before Aurora Hazel could stack more sandbags on the conversation. “Do you—” He stopped himself, annoyed with the clumsy weight of the word in his mouth. Orders, not questions. “I’d like to take you for a drink. Later. When you’re done here. If you want, of course.”
Winter Rose’s surprise flickered bright, then settled into something softer that made the skin below his collar suddenly too tight. “If I want,” she echoed, smiling like she’d found a coin in a loaf of bread. “Aurora Hazel’s not wrong. There are rules.”
“I’m aware,” he said. “I’m very good at rules. You may have noticed.”
“I noticed you keep breathing anyway,” she said. “Which is something.”
Aurora Hazel made a strangled noise. “He’s a Peacekeeper, Win. You know what happens to girls who end up as cautionary tales in districts like this? The cautionary tale keeps being told long after the girl is done being asked whether she wanted it or not.”
Winter Rose didn’t flinch. “Thank you for the sermon, Mother Superior. I’ll light a candle later and ask for forgiveness.” She tipped her head at Crassus. “I could get in trouble. So could you.”
“Yes,” he said. He didn’t dress it up. “I’m asking anyway.”
He expected her to make him wait for the yes. She didn’t. “Some things are worth the risk,” she said, voice low, almost a secret. “Even if Aurora Hazel drags me by the hair back to our room and locks me in the trunk after.”
“I will,” Aurora Hazel said. “With love.”
Winter Rose strummed a soft run of notes like punctuation. “Not the Hob,” she went on, thinking aloud. “Too loud. Not the square. Too public. There’s this place.” She glanced at Aurora Hazel, who was already shaking her head in protest.
“Win. Don’t.”
“It’s a lake,” Winter Rose said, her eyes back on Crassus. “Secluded. It’s not on any maps anyone cares about. We go there sometimes to remember what quiet sounds like and what peace looks like.”
He had a lifetime’s worth of objections ready. He could protest using jurisdiction or curfew or the fact that nothing good ever started with the sentence it’s secluded, but the word that came out was yes. It sounded like he’d been saving it for a long time.
“Dusk,” Winter Rose said, making the plan like she made a song. “Go north past the slag heap until the brambles give up. There’s a path. If you find a rusted gate, you’ve gone two steps too far. Turn left before the gate. The ground will dip and then you’ll smell water. If you don’t, you’re lost.”
Aurora Hazel groaned and put her face in her hands. “I don’t know either of you.”
“Thank you,” Winter Rose said to Crassus, ignoring Aurora’s theatrics. “For asking instead of just arranging.”
He nodded. He didn’t trust his mouth not to say too much.
“Bring nothing you can’t carry wet,” Earl Gray added. “Just in case.”
Crassus left before he could be accused of loitering, or worse, honesty. He walked the rest of his route like he was learning it for the first time. His body knew when dusk would arrive without needing a clock. He bathed, shaved, put on a clean shirt no one would notice in the near dark, and told the duty officer he was taking the northern sector. The man grunted. No one cared as long as the ledger balanced and the whistles blew on time.
He went alone. It felt wrong and then suddenly more right than anything had in weeks.
—
The path to the lake asked you to know it. That was the trick. If you looked for signs, you saw none. If you trusted the subtle, the way weeds bent or the particular looseness of the soil beneath your boots or the hush that wasn’t feared so much as expected, you found it. The trees parted suddenly, like a group inhaling all at once. The lake lay there with that flinty stillness water gets when it thinks it’s safe from eyes. At the far edge, a cluster of reeds drew a shadow-line. The sky’s reflection hadn’t learned to lie yet, so it wore its bruising purple honestly.
Winter Rose stood on the bank with her shoes in one hand, toes in the mud, guitar slung over her back. Her hair had worked itself out of its braid and was doing what it wanted. She turned when the brush crackled under his boot and smiled like she’d memorized the sound of him.
“You found it,” she said. “Good. If you’d gotten lost I’d have had to send for Aurora Hazel and she would’ve charged you a rescue fee and a lecture fee on top.”
“Consider me poor,” he said, stepping closer. The air off the water smelled like iron and old rain. “Is this where you count the things you love at the sky?”
“Sometimes.” She looked up at the thin strip of early stars. “Tonight I’m feeling greedy. I might make it to twenty.”
“Twenty,” he repeated. “Ambitious.”
“Don’t pretend you’re not ambitious,” she said, amused. “Your ambition just has better posture.”
He huffed a laugh. “You make fun of everything.”
“I make shape out of everything,” she corrected, voice softer. “It’s how I keep breathing.”
They walked to the bank without talking. The mud gave way to pebbles. Somewhere a frog threw its ridiculous voice across the water at them. Winter Rose slipped her shoes back on and sat, hugging her knees, chin propped on her forearm like a girl at a window. He stayed standing for a moment because that was all he ever knew. Then, he sat beside her, closer than would have been sensible for strangers, farther away than would have been satisfying for the word that had been hovering like a moth near his tongue all day.
“Why here?” he asked at last.
“Because it’s a quiet place that isn’t waiting to be broken.” She picked up a flat stone, sent it flying. It skipped four times, then disappeared. “And because it’s ours when we decide it is.”
He weighed that. “Ours,” he said, trying the plural on. It fit too well.
Winter Rose turned her head. The light caught the tiny sheen of sweat at her hairline and made her look lit from the inside. “You could make this very complicated,” she said. “You could tell me what you can’t say out there and all the good reasons for it, and I could let you, and we could both go home with the wrong kind of ache.”
“I could,” he said. “Or I could say it.”
“Say it, then.”
It wasn’t a baton passed. It was as much of a dare as it was a kindness.
He stared at the far bank like the right words might be written there. He thought of his father’s voice, the expectations attached. He thought of Casca’s silence at graduation and of Gaul’s satisfied, thin smile as he turned in the proposal. He thought of the way Winter Rose’s hand had felt when she’d dragged him onto a dance floor and how it felt like he was being pulled out of a burning house.
“I look for you,” he admitted. The truth of that was small enough to carry and large enough to change the weather between them. “I make excuses to be where you are. I’ve been calling it duty so I don’t have to put the word wanting in my mouth in daylight.”
Winter Rose was still. The wind held its breath with her.
“I don’t know what kind of man I am yet,” he went on, slower now because the ground had fallen away and he was walking on something truer than dirt. “I know what kind of man I’m good at being but when I stand near you, I—.” He stopped, a little angry that the next sentence required him to be honest with himself. “I feel something unmanageable. And I don’t like to be unmanageable. Except this. This… I can make an exception.”
He braced for Aurora Hazel’s voice from the trees, for a warning whistle from the barracks, opr for the world to do what it always did and remind him of the invoice. None came. Only Winter Rose, whose face didn’t soften because it had never been hard in the first place.
“That’s not a bad first draft,” she said. “I do have notes. Apologize less for having a heart. You need more of letting your mouth and your chest agree on the same sentence.” She shifted, drew her feet up under her and faced him properly. “Crassus Snow,” she said, like saying it right was important, “I want you, too. I want to see what happens when your spine and your desire shake hands and finally allow you to live.”
He swallowed. “Aurora Hazel will kill you.”
“Aurora Hazel will sigh and lecture and stand guard,” Winter Rose said. “Then she’ll tuck me into bed like my mother and put a chair under the doorknob. You’re not the first bad idea I’ve ever loved.” Her mouth twitched. “You may be the best dressed though.”
They sat in that, the lake starting to throw back a shiver of real night. He wanted to kiss her with the kind of ache he usually saved for failure. He also wanted to do it right. He didn’t move.
Winter Rose reached for her wrist. The ribbon. The one that was red and frayed at one end from a hundred performances, came loose. She looked at it, then at him. “Give me your hand,” she said.
He did. She turned his palm up like reading it, which felt indecent and good at the same time. Then she tied the ribbon around his wrist, snug and sure, the knot neat as if she’d practiced on sailors and stubborn boys.
“There,” she said. “Now some other part of you knows what you said out loud. Think of it as a reminder.”
He stared at the bright band against his pale skin, at the way it looked like a wound and a promise and a dare. “They’ll make me cut it off at inspection.”
“Then let them try,” she said, smiling small. “Wear it under your uniform. Call it superstition. Call it mine.”
“Yours,” he said, because lying felt like a waste of both their time.
Winter Rose leaned in and pressed her mouth to his cheek. It was quick and warm, leaving a mark that would fade too soon unless he protected it with all of his strength. She smelled like cedar again, mixed with honey and roses.
“Dusk doesn’t last,” she said, standing. “But we can keep finding it.”
“When?” The word slipped out before he could iron it.
“Soon,” she said. “Tomorrow if we’re stupid. The day after if we aren’t.” She backed away a step, then another, until the dark started to claim her outline. “Don’t follow me. Aurora Hazel’s got eyes on her knees.”
“I’ve noticed,” he said, not moving.
Winter Rose lifted her hand in a small salute, fingers fluttering like a bird reconsidering a branch. “Goodnight, Crassus.”
“Goodnight, Winter Rose.”
She vanished into the trees without bothering to ghost her steps. He stayed until the stars put on their colder faces and the frog decided he’d done enough for the evening. Then he stood, flexed his hand, felt the ribbon’s slight resistance, and smiled which was an expression that felt almost as unmanageable as everything else.
On the walk back, he practiced the lie for the inspection. He’d say it was a tourniquet demonstration or a good-luck charm confiscated from a miner or a piece of Panem’s flag that wasn’t disposed of properly. They were all dull and plausible. None of them felt like the truth. He slid the ribbon under his cuff and finished the route he’d rewritten for her.
At the barracks door, he paused, hearing the low rattle of men laughing at nothing, the scrape of a chair followed by a cup set down hard. He thought of Dr. Gaul, who’d said the field would sharpen him. He pictured a knife, honed on a stone, throwing sparks.
It turned out he didn’t mind sparks. He minded not having anything to set on fire.
He went inside carrying the small, bright thing he couldn’t and wouldn’t name yet, and for the first time since he’d put on the white uniform, he didn’t feel like he’d been emptied to make room for it. He felt full and yes, also unmanageable. He could live with that.
The Hob had already come to life when Crassus pushed through the door. Fiddle and guitar stitched the air together. Somebody laughed too hard. Somebody else pretended they weren’t listening. It was the kind of room his instructors called a “variable,” and Dr. Gaul would’ve called a “good petri dish.” He told himself that was why he was here.
Then, he saw Winter on the makeshift stage and every neat reason he’d packed for the trip shook loose like coins in a pocket.
She was different under the Hob’s lamps than in the square. She was even different from the last time he had seen her here. Someone had threaded small tin charms into the ribbon on her guitar, and they shined in the light when she shifted her wrist. Earl Gray sawed the fiddle beside her, head tipped back like he was laughing at some inside joke. Aurora Hazel sat on a stack of crates with her feet swinging, hands tapping out a counter-rhythm on her thighs, eyes skimming the crowd like she kept a ledger of where the trouble might spring from as she harmonized.
Winter Rose’s song wasn’t polite tonight. It had more bone. The refrain that had haunted him all week slid in sideways and unannounced.
Red is the ribbon that fate never breaks, woven through hearts, through the choices we make.
It got quieter near the bar without anyone asking. Even the card players paused long enough to lose their hands.
When the tune wound down, applause came like rain. It was uneven but sincere all at once. Winter lifted her chin to thank them and that’s when she saw him. Surprise flickered in her gaze, it then rearranged itself into something warmer, like she’d expected the night to give her a small gift and this was the shape it had chosen.
“You again,” Aurora muttered under her breath without turning her head, and Earl Gray, because he couldn’t let a silence settle, added, “Officer Snow can’t resist our dazzling charm. Or he enjoys counting drunk people. Either way we should take it as a compliment.”
Crassus didn’t move any closer. He stayed at the back and pretended he was part of the wall, which was a thing he excelled at. When the set ended, they hopped down. Earl Gray was first, then Aurora Hazel, then finally, Winter Rose. He expected them to beeline for tips but Winter Rose beelined for him.
“Thought you hated the Hob,” she said, not accusing. Her hair had frizzed at the temples from heat and movement and he had the sudden, ridiculous thought that he wanted to smooth it down with the side of his hand to perfect it.
“I don’t hate it,” he said. “I prefer rooms with exits I can defend. Perhaps cleaner rooms. Ones that don’t smell of alcohol and sweat.”
“Aw,” Aurora Hazel said, appearing on his other side like she’d conjured herself, “he came to see us and packed a tactical plan.”
“I came because there was a report of a knife fight last Saturday,” he said. It was true but also not remotely the point. He glanced at Winter Rose and caught the amusement blooming at the corner of her mouth. “You were not bad.”
Aurora Hazel’s eyebrows flew up. “I’ll add that to the broadsides. ‘Not bad,’ says the Capitol. We should use that for our introduction next week!”
Winter Rose laughed, the clean, easy kind of laugh that threatened to melt Crassus’ heart. “Thank you,” she said. “All of us or just me?”
He should’ve said “all of you.” He knew the answer that would get him out clean but if Crassus was anything, he was honest even when he shouldn’t be.
“You,” he said.
Earl Gray clutched his chest. “I’m wounded! I only bled my soul into that C-minor bridge.”
“We’ll send flowers,” Aurora Hazel told him. Then, she turned to Crassus: “You owe us a drink for that stingy compliment.”
“I don’t drink on duty,” he said.
“Then it’s lucky you’re off,” Winter Rose mused, as if she’d checked his schedule. “Come on. One drink. It won’t kill you.”
She was already steering him toward the bar before he agreed and he let himself be steered, which counted as an admission he’d pretend not to recognize later. He watched as Earl Gray and Aurora Hazel went off on their own which caused him more relief than he’d care to admit.
They both ended up with a chipped glass and some clear liquor that smelled like it could light the room on fire. Winter raised her glass toward Crassus. “To…um. To good songs and safe exits.”
Crassus considered saying “to order,” then decided he didn’t want to ruin the moment. “To the end of my shift,” he said instead and took a drink.
It hit like a small argument and left warmth in its wake. The second sip was easier. By the third, the edges of the Hob started to soften. Winter Rose leaned an elbow on the bar, studying him with that infuriating earnestness that had nothing to do with naivete and everything to do with intrigue. “So, Officer Snow. Do you ever do anything you don’t have to? Or are you always doing what you’re told to do?”
“Sometimes I breathe,” he said. “No one orders me to breathe.”
Winter Rose grinned. “I’ll take it.” Her voice slid down to something conspiratorial. “Do you dance?”
“No,” he said, automatic. “That’s not—”
“What? It’s not allowed?” Aurora interrupted. “What, your bones would combust?”
“It’s not advisable,” he corrected her, which was the kind of phrase that bored even him. It fell flat on the sticky floor and he wished he could have taken it back.
“Good news,” Winter Rose said, already hooking two fingers in the cuff of his sleeve. “We’re not asking what’s advisable. You can keep your hat on if it makes you feel better.”
It didn’t. He removed it anyway, surprising them both, and put it on the bar. Then he let her tug him toward the sliver of floor the Hob optimistically called a dance space.
The band picked up a reel that had opinions about how fast people should move. Winter Rose didn’t ask. She planted his palm at her waist and then threaded her free fingers through his as if they belonged there. Her skin was warm, he noted, and the ribbon brushed his knuckles.
“Left foot,” she instructed. “Then right. Two back. Don’t overthink it.”
“I don’t overthink,” he lied.
“That so? Then why do I hear you counting?” She didn’t give him time to fumble an answer. She swept him into the start of the song, easing her body in a way where it instructed where his should go.
It should’ve been a farce. Him, stiff as a fencepost and her, laughing with her whole mouth but after a minute something clicked. Her rhythm met his caution halfway and made them both look good. He kept catching flashes of his reflection in the bar mirror. Him in a clean white shirt and her in a bright orange dress. He took note of the ridiculous shock on his own face when his feet did what she asked without checking with his brain first.
“Look at you, Crassus” Aurora Hazel crowed from the crates, clapping along. “A waltz next and then we’ll have him eating out of our songbook.”
“Don’t gloat,” Winter Rose called back with her eyes never leaving Crassus. “Hey… Relax your shoulders. The soldier does know how to loosen up. You just need to prove it to yourself.”
He felt the smallest, stupidest flush work up his neck and hated that she could pull it out of him with a simple sentence. He tried to scowl and found he couldn’t hold it. The reel spun them into a tight turn and for a second the world slipped. That coal stink, the shouting, the glass breaking fell somewhere far away. It was just him and her and the way their hands fit like an answer somebody had been waiting to give him for a long time.
She laughed up at him, breathless. He laughed back, shocked by the sound of it in his own mouth.
When the song ended, he didn’t let go immediately. Neither did she. The band stalled, tuning into something slower, and the Hob shifted around them like it was a living thing settling on a new rhythm. Someone jostled past with a tray. Without thinking, he steadied Winter by the elbow, and she pressed closer to avoid the collision. It put her right under his chin, the top of her head grazing his jaw, the ribbon on her wrist whispering against his sleeve again.
“Careful,” she said, voice small now and private. “The room’s full of edges.”
“So am I,” he said and then wondered if that sounded like a threat. He meant it like a warning but it wasn’t for her.
She tipped her face up. The shape of her smile shifted. There was less mischief and more of something he refused to name even as it laid a hand over his ribs and squeezed. The slower tune finally began and they didn’t so much start dancing as sway into each other like a decision already made.
He wasn’t reckless about many things. He’d taught himself the clean pleasure of restraint and order but the shine on her mouth and the wash of heat from the drink and the fact that she said his name the way he wanted to be said combined into a physics problem with only one obvious answer. He leaned in. He could feel the words she might say lift in her throat before she didn’t say them. Her breath touched his, warm as a secret.
“Win,” Aurora Hazel’s voice exploded between them, halfway alarm and halfway delight. “Win, we’ve got a problem.”
Winter Rose blinked, turning, and Aurora Hazel was there. Her hand was already circling Winter Rose’s wrist like a ribbon. Crassus straightened so fast his spine found every military lecture it had ever attended.
“Earl Gray is about to trade our last jar of honey for something called ‘Dead Bee Lightning,’” Aurora Hazel said in a rush. “If he does, I’ll have to marry the honey lady and I’m not ready for that life.”
Winter Rose glanced at Crassus. It was a silent apology, both quick and honest, then she squeezed his hand. “I’ll be back.”
“She won’t,” Aurora Hazel told him cheerfully over her shoulder. “This is how the night ends. I rescue our idiot, Winter Rose rescues me, and you stand there looking like a broken saint. Come on, Win.”
They were gone into the crowd before he could say anything that would sound like something coherent. The band rolled on. The Hob’s heat pressed against him. Someone bumped his shoulder and muttered sorry. He reached for his hat, put it back on without watching his own hands do it, and remembered to breathe.
He could leave. He should leave. The plan he’d made for himself wasn’t so much a plan now as a superstition he’d outgrown in the last five minutes. He went to the bar instead and watched them. He watched the way Winter Rose laughed while scolding Earl Gray, the way Aurora Hazel shielded all of them with her small, fierce body like she was willing to take on the whole district if needed.
When Winter Rose looked up again and found him across the room, she didn’t mouth sorry or later. She just looked. The look said I see you. It said I didn’t forget. It said don’t be stupid.
He lifted two fingers off the bar in something that was not a salute and not a wave. He stayed until the end of the band’s set because leaving felt rude. Then, he cut through the crowd and caught the door on his forearm so it wouldn’t slam. Outside, the night was big and cold and opinionated.
He walked the long way back to the barracks. If he were the sort to admit poetry into his head, he’d have said the district breathed differently now. It breathed like the song had gotten under its ribs the way it had under his.
He cataloged what the night had taught him. Winter Rose liked honey over anything harsh. Aurora Hazel noticed everything two seconds before anyone else did. Earl Gray could and would sell his soul for a good punchline and a glass of whatever was within reach. The Hob had three exits, one of which stuck, one of which sang on its hinges, and one a slit between two boards you’d miss if you weren’t staring. Winter Rose could put her hand on his wrist and make the world narrow to a point the size of a ribbon knot.
He had fallen. The word arrived without his permission and sat down, comfortable. It wasn’t a tumble. The melodrama of that offended him. The fall was the quiet. It was a precise slip of a boot off a rung on a ladder. He was still on it and he would keep climbing. He would pretend not to feel the bruise of the fall.
Once in the barracks, he unlocked his footlocker and put his hat inside because it smelled like her now, like cedar and heat and roses. The letter to Casca sat where he’d left it. He didn’t touch it. He ran his thumb along the key instead, the iron warming under his skin.
A Snow’s first duty is to his name. His father’s voice echoed in his head again, never letting him forget his purpose in the world. Crassus thought of how Winter Rose had guided him through a crowd like she was born to move people without shoving and how she gave away warmth and kept none for herself. He thought of how she had looked up at him like he might be worth a rule broken.
He didn’t pray. He didn’t dare wish. He did the thing that had always kept him alive. He chose.
He would see her tomorrow. He’d call it a patrol. He’d call it keeping order. The truth could sit under those words like a ribbon hidden under a sleeve, bright against the secret of his skin.
A Winter's Storm Chapter 18: Death by a Thousand Cuts
Coriolanus learned the world in two languages before he learned his letters.
From Winter Rose, he learned rhythm first.
Count to four against your knees when the house gets too loud. Tap the table so softly the microphones do not wake. Name the shades the Capitol never bothers to catalogue: coal-sky, kettle-steam, orange-like-Aurora Hazel. Sleep beneath the shawl. Breathe under the slow turn of paper birds. Mouth the lullaby without sound when you are meant to be napping and your mother is pretending not to notice.
From Crassus, he learned rigidity and rules.
Chairs are for sitting, not climbing. Your spine is a part of your name. Hat on when we pass the portrait hall. Never let a man with a ledger see what you love unless you are prepared to lose it. And if you must bow, do it with enough dignity that the person watching feels the insult.
Ulpia Snow, the ever loving grandmother, supplied posture like it was medicine. Cassian supplied public performance. Tutors came as regularly as tea. Numbers at two, Latin at three, the proper inflection of *thank you* when one did not, in fact, feel grateful.
Winter Rose smuggled in the rest through the cracks. Clapping games that taught numbers. “Capitol nursery rhymes” that weren't really from the Capitol if anyone listened closely enough.
Coriolanus collected rules the way other children collected stones or leaves. He turned the rules over, testing their edges, and decided which fit his hand and which could be changed to his liking. When he laughed, he looked like his mother. When he frowned, he looked like his father.
At four, he liked three things best. He liked being right, being first, and his mother’s pockets, which always held a sweet.
He was not a soft child. He was an observant one.
They were at the park because even Capitol children deserved grass, though the Capitol only truly believed in children as long as they photographed well and carried on the family name.
“That tree’s name is Cassian,” Winter Rose said dryly as they passed a thick old elm that predated the city’s obsession with sleekness and propriety. “So we can practice making polite faces at things that don’t bend.”
Coriolanus giggled, then checked himself with the solemnity of a boy already aware that laughter was safest in private. Winter Rose bumped his shoulder.
“You can laugh, Coryo,” she murmured. “We’re not at home.”
The park was the usual performance. Nannies in proper navy blue aprons and mothers who never sweated all while children learned the hierarchy of the world under the guise of play. Winter Rose chose the bench that let her see the whole park. Coriolanus ran toward the low marble swans by the pond with his wooden truck clutched under one arm. The truck was battered and beloved, its paint worn thin by wars fought across carpets and chair rails.
The trouble that day came in the ordinary way trouble does. It was small at first but easy to underestimate.
Another boy, older by a year and bred with the polished entitlement of a child who had never been told no by anyone he considered real, decided Coriolanus’s truck ought to be his. He took it. He did not ask.
Coriolanus did not cry. He went quiet.
Winter Rose saw the shift the moment it happened. Coriolanus stepped close, put one hand on the older boy’s wrist, and took the truck back with an efficiency that made something in her stomach tighten unpleasantly. The older boy shoved him. Coriolanus shoved back.
Winter Rose was moving before anyone else had finished deciding whether it was their problem. She did not run but she crossed the grass fast, her voice already shaping the scene into something survivable yet proper.
“We do not push,” she scolded, dropping between them so that her dress pooled around her knees like an orange spill of sunlight. Both boys’ eyes went to it, then to her face. “We ask. We trade. We use our mouths. Not our bodies.”
“He took it,” Coriolanus yelled, outraged by both the theft and the unfairness of being expected to describe it calmly. “He took it from me! It’s mine!”
“You took it first,” the other boy muttered.
Winter Rose kept her voice smooth and Capitol-pleasant. She would not teach her son that winning looked like a mother doing his cruelty for him. “It is his truck,” she said to the older boy. “But that slide over there belongs to no one. I’ll time you both. First one down gets the first turn with the truck. Second down gets the first pick of the story after.”
The other boy blinked. Coriolanus looked personally offended by the notion of not receiving first place by birthright, then calculated his odds and agreed to reality because he was his father’s son after all.
They ran.
Winter Rose counted.
Coriolanus flew.
He won by half a shoulder and whooped in delight, loud enough to make three nannies stiffen and one woman hide a laugh behind her gloved hand.
The older boy took defeat with the rigid dignity of someone who had already learned to swallow his humiliation before anyone else could feed it back to him. Winter Rose crouched to him too.
“You were quick,” she said. “Would you like to pick the story?”
He nodded once, grudging but soothed by being offered a scrap of dignity to carry home.
Later, on the bench, Winter Rose wiped the grass from her son’s knee, humming under her breath.
“We do not push first,” she told him.
“He did not ask,” Coryo mumbled against her shoulder. “He just took it.”
“No,” she said. “And we are not him.”
He made that face he made whenever he understood and resented it simultaneously. “One breath,” he said, storing the rule.
“One breath,” she agreed. “That’s right.”
They walked home slowly, so that his legs would remember being a kid before the house reminded him what name he belonged to.
******
Crassus was late to dinner.
That had become a trend within the last year. The districts had begun to pulse with unrest in a way even the Capitol’s polished language could no longer fully disguise. Reports arrived at his desk with the ink still wet with implication. Coal strikes. Sabotage. “Disruptions” that every serious man in the War Department knew were rehearsals for larger sins.
He came into the dining room with that tension still clinging to him, a dampness of spirit that made the whole house smell faintly of pressure. He kissed the air near Winter Rose’s temple, the child’s hair for real, and went to wash his hands as if the work day had dirtied him.
Coriolanus had been rehearsing his report of the day since the front door clicked shut.
“I raced him and I won and Mama counted and then—”
“You fought,” Crassus said.
It was not a question. It was more of a verdict.
Winter Rose kept her spoon in her hand and her face neutral. “He pushed back after he was pushed. Then we traded. Then we played on the slide.”
Crassus folded his napkin once, too neatly. The gesture made Winter Rose’s skin tighten.
“He is a Snow.”
“He is four years old,” Winter Rose replied. “He’s a child, Crassus.”
“You take him into parks and let him behave like—” He stopped, searching for a word that would wound cleanly enough to pass for instruction instead of an insult. When he found it, she heard Cassian Snow in it before it even left his mouth. “—a district child. You Covey folk were always so rowdy.”
The insult sat between them with terrible comfort. It had been waiting there all along.
Winter Rose set her spoon down so gently the sound was more dangerous than a dropped plate. “I taught him to breathe, Crassus. Something you could learn to do someday.”
“You teach him softness,” he snapped. “Improvisation. Little provincial instincts dressed up as cleverness. Almost like your little songs.”
Coriolanus watched them the way children watch weather, already trying to decide if this was the sort of storm he should blame himself for. Winter Rose felt the old panic rise in her, that urgent terror that if they mishandled this, their son would learn that love meant silence and apology.
She turned to him instead, put a shape like a smile on her mouth, and said, “Tell your father the important thing.”
“I won,” Coriolanus said at once. “I beat him down the slide.”
Crassus’s mouth almost softened. Almost.
Then the cruelty in him found a home in discipline instead. “We do not brawl,” he said to Coriolanus. “We out think. We out wait. We let the other child shame himself for what he did without touching him.”
Coriolanus nodded solemnly, storing the rule as if it were a coin that might be spent well later.
Under the tablecloth, Winter Rose touched two fingers to Crassus’s knee. He flinched like she had found the bruise and pressed on it.
He opened his mouth to say something better but a knock came then. Three sharp raps that even WInter Rose could hear the rank in them.
Crassus called them in with a stiffness that even Winter Rose hadn’t seen yet.
A Peacekeeper captain entered carrying his hat in both hands and the wrong sort of face for good news. He looked at Crassus’s shoulder instead of his eyes.
“Sir,” he said. “I’m to inform you that General Snow was found in his office this afternoon. A heart attack. He is dead.”
Silence arrived at once as if it had been posted outside the room waiting for permission.
Coriolanus made a tiny sound and shifted in his seat. Winter Rose felt a shock move through her body so strange and shameful she nearly lost her hold on the chair. She felt relief. Not joy, never that, but relief dressed in grief’s clothing.
Crassus did nothing for one long, impossible second. The silence was so loud, Winter Rose almost felt deaf.
Then he stood so abruptly his chair went over backwards with a crack.. He did not ask how. He did not ask whether anyone had been with his father. Instead, he adjusted his cuffs and carried on with business.
“Arrangements,” he said. “Who was in the room when it happened?”
“Two colonels. Councilors. Doctor Viridis was called and pronounced him dead.”
The captain cleared his throat, because the wound was not yet finished.
“There’s more, sir.”
Winter Rose stood too, not touching Crassus. She kept her distance, as if she was fearful of the words that could come out of the captain’s mouth.
The captain’s eyes flicked to her and then quickly away. “By order of the Council, and in accordance with General Snow’s sealed testament and military papers, you are to assume his command effective immediately.” He swallowed. “Including his full oversight of District Thirteen’s munitions, armaments, and strategic stores.”
There it was.
Not just the office. Not just the name.
The ledger of the war itself.
District 13’s weapons. Its explosives. Its steel and powder and all the machinery by which men convince themselves they can own history if they own enough ammunition and have enough money.
Anyone in the room could have heard three lives rearranging around that sentence.
Coriolanus had taken hold of the orange shawl draped over the back of his chair and wound the fringe into his fist like a rope. Winter Rose lifted her chin and sucked in a breath because she knew the next few weeks were going to change everything between her and Crassus and of course, Crassus and his son.
Crassus’s face passed through several private countries in quick succession. Son. Soldier. Husband. Father. General. After a while, Crassus came back wearing a flag no one would survive untouched.
“Very well,” he said plainly. “Of course.”
The captain saluted and left.
No one moved for a while.
Then Crassus righted his chair and sat down. He reached for his water, missed the glass by an inch, found it, and then drank.
Winter Rose could tell he wished it was anything other than water. She knew that look more that she cared to admit.
“Do not say it,” he said, not looking up at Winter Rose. “The thing about freedom. About becoming him. I don't have a choice.”
Winter Rose stared at him for a moment, gathering all the courage she had left.
“No,” she said quietly. “You have always had a choice. You have simply preferred to confuse fear with duty and talk yourself into thinking you don’t have a choice. We all have the freedom of choice, Crassus. Even you.”
His head snapped up, his face bitter and angry.
“I am saying this,” she continued, “you have spent your whole life becoming him or resisting him. Tonight, you do not have to decide for all the years but do not choose for this hour with the voice he taught you for all of your life.”
He looked at her then. For a moment, he looked like the boy from the lake pressed thin beneath the man the Capitol had been trying to manufacture all along.
“I took my stress out on you,” he admitted. The admission was naked as a wound. “I know.”
“Yes,” Winter Rose said. “You did.”
A sound escaped him that might have been a laugh if it hadn’t been so exhausted it bordered on pain. He turned then to his son.
“Coriolanus.”
The boy looked up instantly, wary and eager in equal measure.
“You do not push first,” Crassus said. “You take one breath. Then another. And if something is taken from you in front of the world, you make the world watch you take it back with your hands clean.”
Coriolanus nodded, solemn as law.
Winter Rose watched him absorb it and saw the thrill of logic brighten him. She knew that one day, he would become someone who loved rules most when they had been written by the victor.
The old dread dropped through her again.
Crassus stood. He came to her side and in a room that would have preferred not to see it, touched her cheek.
“I do not have a choice this time,” he said. “You know that.”
Winter Rose almost laughed at the lie of it.
“Then bring me something true when you can if you cannot bring it to me now,” she whispered.
He nodded once then bent down and pressed his mouth to Coriolanus’s hair. “You will listen to your mother.”
“Yes, Father,” Coriolanus promised. “I will.”
Crassus put his hat back on with that familiar motion that always hurt her and left to become the thing the Capitol had spent years preparing him to be.
Winter Rose cleared the plates because defiance in this house had always worn the clothes of usefulness. She cut bread into smaller pieces than necessary. She told Coriolanus a story about a boy who learned to count by listening to birds instead of men. She left out how far such boys sometimes fall.
Later, she let him look into the compact for exactly one heartbeat. The silver flashed in the dull evening light. In the mirror, however, it showed his solemn little mouth, the orange shawl behind him, and his eyes that were already learning how to become a weapon.
She shut it before he could linger.
Then she carried him to the nursery where the paper birds kept their own time and tucked him beneath the shawl as though it still had power enough to hold off the world and it’s awful truths.
When he slept, she went to the window.
The city below was arranging its grief for Cassian Snow in orderly squares of public respect. It mourned him because it feared him. Somewhere inside all that machinery, her husband had just been crowned without a crown.
Winter Rose put her hand to the glass and hummed a song she was not supposed to sing but always did anyway because sometimes small acts of rebellion were the loudest.
She sang only for the child sleeping with an orange shawl tucked between his torso and his arm and for the boy she had once met at a lake before the Capitol had finished swallowing him whole.
“Roses are red, love; violets are blue…”
That night the song was not a lullaby.
It was a mourning song for the man she had just lost to a machine that had not yet bothered to kill him.
The white of the Peacekeeper uniform looked ridiculous against the coal dust of District 12. That was Crassus Snow’s first opinion of the place and he didn’t let himself have many more. Opinions got men court-martialed or sent home in pieces. Orders kept you upright. Orders were clean and to the point.
Coal dust wasn’t. It made a thin film on everything it touched. It clung to the pleats of his trousers when he crouched to check a loose grate and settled on his gloves like fine ash. By noon it was in his teeth, and by evening he could taste it when he swallowed which sometimes made him cough.
The posting was meant to be corrective and instructive. Those were the words Dr. Gaul had used, like he was a wire bent out of shape. “A year in the field will sharpen you,” she’d said and her little smile had meant that truly, it would bleed him of whatever humanity he had left.
Casca Highbottom had said nothing about Crassus joining the Peacekeepers and following in his father’s footsteps. Casca avoided him at graduation like he could catch treason if he breathed the same air. Turning the proposal over to Dr. Gaul had made Crassus a stranger to Casca in one single afternoon.
Crassus pulled his cap down against the October wind and continued his patrol toward the market square. Twelve was a narrow district, everything built low and mean. One good shove from the Capitol and the whole place would collapse neatly. That was his second opinion of the day, which meant he needed to stop thinking before he got carried away.
During his patrol, a sound drifted through the alley, light as breath over glass. It sounded like a guitar, one he would hear in the club with Casca when he was young and in the Capitol. It wasn’t the stiff military marches they piped into the mess hall or the reedy string bands the miners scraped together for harvest dances. This was nimble. Almost like quicksilver. It skittered over the marketplace like a bird on wet stone, then swung back into something warmer and welcoming. It shouldn’t have had weight in it, not with fingers moving that fast, but it did. However, the notes hung in the coal-thick air like ribbons.
Crassus stepped out from the tannery’s shadow. The square was busier than it had any right to be on a Tuesday. There were kids in patched coats, barrows with bruised apples, and a knot of Peacekeepers by the guard post pretending not to stare at a woman with hair the color of fire. She sat on an upturned crate, guitar resting on one knee, the other foot keeping time. A red ribbon was knotted around her wrist like a decoration and didn’t match the color of her dress. Another ribbon was tied around the headstock of her guitar, fraying at the edges.
Two other musicians flanked her: a girl with a dark waterfall of hair pulled into a messy knot with a mouth full of jokes that hadn’t been spoken yet and a lanky boy with a grin and the self-appointed job of charming anyone within earshot into handing over coins. They had the shiny, slightly feral look all traveling players wore. They wore bright clothes repaired too often with posture like cats on a warm wall. People looked at them like they were both entertainment and trouble. Sometimes those were the same thing.
Crassus, as much as he was enthralled by the sight, had to intervene.
“Permit,” Crassus commanded.
At the sound of his voice the song faltered for a single second and then didn’t. The young woman with the fiery hair only looked up at him and kept playing as if he didn’t exist.
“We’ve got one,” the lanky boy chirped before she could answer. “Somewhere in Aurora’s—”
“My pocket,” the brunette woman supplied, rolling her eyes. “Which is exactly where it should be because we’re responsible and law abiding citizens, Officer…?”
“Snow,” he said.
The guitarist smiled at that. It wasn’t unkind, which was unexpected. She had a summer-soft face even in the coal chill, eyes that caught light and threw it back gentle even as she strummed the guitar. “Winter Rose,” she said. “Winter Rose Levey. This is Aurora Hazel Emerson, and this is Earl Gray Baird.” Crassus noted how her voice carried, tuned by practice to rise above the clatter. “We’ll be out of your hair before curfew. I promise.”
Crassus kept his expression flat and stern. “Permit.”
Aurora Hazel dug around, making a show of the search, then produced a creased paper stamped with an official seal that had seen better days. He read it carefully anyway. It was valid. He hated that it always made him a little relieved when things were in order, like the world had agreed to be briefly legible even for a moment.
“Stay out of the Hob tonight,” he said, handing it back. “There was a fight last week.”
“There’s a fight every week,” Earl Gray said cheerfully. “That’s why we go. More coins when people think they’re bleeding for art.”
Aurora Hazel smacked him with the back of her hand. “We won’t be near the Hob,” she lied with the confidence of someone who had never once worried about being believed.
Winter Rose’s playing shifted. Crassus realized, with a slight start, that she had been scoring the whole exchange. If he had to describe the sound, he’d say it was the feel of the first warm day after a mean, early winter. If he had to describe the feeling of being watched by her while he tried to be the exact shape of his uniform, he’d say it was an inconvenient feeling he couldn’t completely describe which frustrated him.
“You’re new,” Winter Rose said.
“New to Twelve,” Crassus replied.
“New to listening,” she corrected and one corner of her mouth tipped up like they shared a joke he hadn’t agreed to. Her hand ran up the guitar’s neck and came back down, nimble as thought. “Don’t worry, Officer Snow. We know how to keep trouble a stranger.”
“That’s not how trouble works,” Crassus said and then hated that he’d let himself say something human to a District citizen. He straightened immediately to try to claim the power of the conversation back. “Pack up by six. Curfew is at eight.”
“We’ll be off the square by six, sir,” Aurora Hazel said, chin dipped now in the mock-respect of people who have learned the precise contours of authority and where it gives.
Winter Rose nodded, then she changed keys and started something different. It was slower and the melody slipped down a step like dusk sliding early over the roofs. People stopped in a way that made the market stall vendors swear under their breath and stop too. Crassus didn’t move. The song opened like a palm and it intrigued him, even when it shouldn’t have.
When the chorus came, the ribbon at her wrist trembled with the measure.
Red is the ribbon that fate never breaks,
Woven through hearts, through the choices we make.
Maybe we’re bound by the hands of the skies,
Maybe it’s luck, or maybe it’s lies.
She only hummed the rest of the song at first. It was a barely-there thread of sound that stayed with someone. It was a simple four-note shape that folded neatly back into itself like it had always existed and she’d just found it on the ground. Later, people would say that was the night she wrote it, in front of a square full of cold-bitten strangers, the refrain catching like burrs on a wool sleeve. Crassus, who disliked mythmaking on principle, felt something lodge under his sternum and knew the gossip could be right.
He told himself to move along. He stayed, hands behind his back, hat brim low, eye on the crowd while the song tied itself to the coal dust air.
—
“Do you like him?” Aurora Hazel asked later while balancing coins on an orange scarf to count them. “Our officer with the pocketbook in his spine.”
Winter Rose made a sound that could have meant anything. “He listens,” she said. “He thinks he doesn’t, but he does. He’ll never admit it.”
“That’s not an answer,” Aurora Hazel sang, sing-song, and Earl Gray added a harmony below her out of habit. They were always harmonizing which is why Winter Rose always thought they would end up married with kids someday.
Winter Rose plucked a string, the note bright as a birdcall. “It’s all I’ve got so it counts.”
They had a small rented room above a seamstress’s shop that smelled of starch and old thread. Winter Rose kept her things folded neat out of respect for the space. She didn’t have much. Just her few dresses, the cardigan with the mended elbows, and the paper-wrapped spare strings for the guitar. On the windowsill sat a chipped glass jar half-full of buttons they’d been paid with when coins were short. Aurora Hazel swore buttons would be currency again someday. Earl Gray swore they already were if your eyes were pretty enough.
Winter Rose wasn’t from District 12, but she knew this town like she’d known other towns she’d travel to for music and performance. She’d learned the recipes of each place without asking to own them. She carried a piece of every town she visited. That was the traveling way.
Carry what you can, borrow the rest, and return it cleaner than you found it.
On nights like this, when the sky was a bowl of cold tin and the stove below them ticked to sleep, she leaned out the window and watched the Peacekeepers walk their neat lines. Aurora Hazel watched with her, narrating the romances she invented for men they didn’t know. Earl Gray played cards with himself on the floor until he fell asleep in the middle of a game, face down on a queen of hearts. Winter tucked a blanket over him and wondered at the slender, impossible fact of a life that let you survive by singing.
“Don’t fall in love with anyone in white,” Aurora Hazel warned, not for the first time.
“I don’t fall,” Winter said lightly. “I can’t fall.”
“Yeah, you drift like a leaf and then pretend the stream decided everything,” Aurora Hazel said. “I’ve seen you. Your easy is just another word for brave or stupid.”
Winter Hazel didn’t argue. Instead, she set her guitar in the corner, the ribbon catching the lamplight, and hummed the little refrain again under her breath. Red is the ribbon… She didn’t have the rest yet. Some songs insisted on arriving all at once. Some made you beg or find more inspiration.
—
He saw her twice more that week without meaning to. Once on the edge of the train yard, where the ground turned to cinders and the rails hummed with the memory of freight. She and Earl Gray were teaching a pair of boys to clap a rhythm over their heads, laughing when the pattern slipped. Then again outside the school, where a teacher with chalky hands leaned out the door to ask if they would play something gentle for the little ones after lessons. It was just one song, nothing about leaving, nothing about hunger, and nothing about the sea. Winter obliged with something that wasn’t quite a lullaby and left the teacher looking like she’d been given something she’d forgotten to want.
Crassus told himself he was assessing crowd control. It almost passed as truth until he caught the tilt of Winter Rose’s head when she realized he was there. She didn’t make a show of noticing him at all, which he didn’t know if he appreciated or not. Afterward he found himself in the barracks bathroom scrubbing coal dust from his knuckles until the skin went red, like he could cauterize a feeling.
So, he wrote a letter he didn’t send because he didn’t know how to process that new, cauterized feeling.
Casca,
You were wrong about me or perhaps you were exactly right and I am only now catching up. The proposal was not a sin. It was a solution. Dr. Gaul recognizes a spine when she sees one. I will not apologize for providing mine and providing a hypothetical solution if the Districts stepped out of line again.
I am posted to Twelve. It is no worse than you said. You left out that it is also no better.
— C.X.S.
He folded it and put it in the inside pocket of his coat with the other things he kept near his ribs and close to his heart. Inside the pocket there was a photograph of his mother taken when she still smiled like she expected life to cooperate, a spare set of ration vouchers, and the thin iron key that opened his footlocker. When he buttoned his coat it was like sealing a vault.
On Saturday the Hob opened that vault like a cut.
“Stay out of the Hob,” he’d told them. Of course they ignored his instructions and went.
He felt the thrum of it before he saw the lights. The music pressed against bodies and bodies pressed against the need for freedom. The Hob smelled like tobacco and sweat and the sharp tang of a hundred small economies. For all that, Crassus liked it better than the square. It felt honest. The lies here were named and priced and usually covered with liquor.
Winter Rose’s guitar found him before she did. She wasn’t playing the sprightly market tune now, but a melody that sounded older than she was. It was a progression he associated with snowmelt or childhood summers cut short by an early autumn. Earl Gray accompanied on a battered fiddle, serious for once. Aurora Hazel sat on the bar, feet swinging, voice weaving in and out like weft through warp. They played toward the room like they were hand feeding it.
He stationed himself at the back near the door, far enough to be a rumor, close enough to be inevitable if anything went wrong. Something always did on Saturday nights. Tonight, it was a miner with whiskey breath and raw knuckles who took Winter Rose’s warmth as an invitation. He staggered forward, hand outstretched to touch the ribbon at her wrist like it was his to unspool.
Crassus moved automatically. He caught the man’s wrist and squeezed just enough to promise more later. “No,” he said and the word sounded powerful in his mouth.
The miner jerked back, scowled at the uniform, and did the calculations every person in the districts did when men in white appeared. His mouth worked like he had an answer that would make him somebody. Then he looked at the door, at his friends, at the guitar and the girl and the night that would be long if he spent it with blood on his face. “Wasn’t touching,” he muttered, which was almost certainly a lie.
Crassus let go. He didn’t look at Winter Rose. He didn't have to. He could feel her watching him the way you feel a lamp across a dark room. He felt the warmth before the light. She still strummed her guitar, not letting the disturbance stop the music.
During the break, she approached Crassus.
“Thank you,” she said. She was so close that he could smell her. She smelled like cedar shavings and something sweet he couldn’t place. Her hair wasn’t quite as calm as it had looked in the square. It was windblown and curly and looked like she had just been dancing. “You didn’t have to do that.”
“Actually,” he said, “I had to.”
“That sounds lonely,” she said without pity. “Like a job.”
“It sounds like order,” he corrected. “That is my job.”
“Is it?” She tipped her head. The ribbon on her wrist had been retied tighter. “Order’s a kind of song. Someone decides the melody then everyone else follows as if it is the right thing to do but every good song has a place for breath and improvisation.”
He wasn’t sure why that irritated him. Maybe because she was right. “Not following orders gets men killed.”
“And refusing to breathe makes you a professional at dying,” she said, not unkindly. “You don’t have to tell me about death, Officer Snow. We’ve played in districts where the only coin anyone had was the last thing their mother touched.”
He exhaled. It did feel like a kind of treason to do it. “Crassus,” he said before he could call the word back.
“Crassus,” she repeated, tasting it. “It fits you. Hard on the outside, softer if someone knows where to press.” She held out her hand. “Winter Rose but you already knew that.”
He took it. The touch was brief, a dry promise instead of an ask. “You should return to your lodgings now.”
She laughed, not mocking at all. “We will after one more set.”
“You’ve already done three,” Crassus retorted.
“Then we’re warmed up,” she said, and went back to the stage. “The show must go on!”
The last set was the kind of playing that made people stand closer without noticing they had moved. The refrain came back, the ribbon-song now with words she was testing under her breath. He couldn’t quite catch them. He wasn’t sure he wanted to. It felt like eavesdropping on a prayer he didn’t believe in.
When the set ended, he escorted them to the mouth of the alley because orders and instinct agreed on that one thing. Aurora Hazel chattered about a woman who’d promised to pay them in honey next week and how she could turn honey into anything good. Earl Gray flirted with a lamppost to demonstrate he could flirt with anything. Winter Rose let the others make noise and walked beside Crassus with a quiet that didn’t feel polite. It felt full, like a harmony in a finished song.
“Do you miss it?” Winter Rose asked as they turned onto the main road.
“The Capitol?”
“Being a boy who hasn’t been told what kind of man to be yet.”
He almost said that he was never a boy, but even he wasn’t arrogant enough to pretend he had escaped that. “No,” he said. “I don’t miss wanting things I can’t afford.”
“That’s one way to kill wanting,” she said. “I guess.”
“It’s the cleanest.”
They passed the train yard. The rails kept their old light, that living silver that made even broken men straighten when they crossed it. Winter Rose slowed. “Where I grew up,” she said, “we had a trick for the stars. When you can’t sleep, you name ten things you love and you say them to the sky. Someone taught me that. I don’t remember who. I forget the names in new places, but I never forget how to count.”
“I don’t count,” he said.
“You do,” she said. “I’ve seen you do it. You just don’t call it love.”
They stood a minute longer than made sense. Winter Rose’s breath made a thin cloud in the air. He had an absurd desire to reach out and draw a shape in it with his finger, like a child tracing a constellation on a windowpane. There was a silence that fell between them but Crassus disrupted it as easy as it fell.
“Goodnight, Crassus,” she said, and the way she said his name felt like a ribbon being tied, snug and clean.
“Goodnight, Miss Levey,” he answered, because he didn’t know how to say her name the way she said his.
—
Back in the barracks, he sat on the edge of his narrow bed and held his cap in his hands until the seam pressed a line into his palms. He could hear the other men laughing down the hall, the clink of cups and the scrape of chair legs. He wasn’t built for camaraderie. He had learned how to be at the edges of rooms and still control them. That skill kept him alive. It would make him notorious someday. Right now it just made him restless.
He thought of Casca’s thin mouth twisting around a warning and Dr. Gaul’s steady pen as she wrote his grade on the proposal. He thought of his father’s voice and how it was always so heavy with expectations and the kind of love that always came with an invoice saying, “A Snow’s first duty is to his name.”
He thought of Winter Rose counting loves to the sky as casually as someone counting out stitches. He tried to imagine himself doing the same and almost laughed. Almost.
Instead, he opened the inside pocket of his coat and slid his fingers over the letter he would not send, the key he would keep, and the photograph that knew the smell of his skin better than any person did. He pictured Winter Rose’s ribbon, red against night, and understood why soldiers sometimes wore tokens into battle. Not because they believed in magic but because their hands needed something to hold that wasn’t a weapon.
He lay down and closed his eyes. He did not pray. He did not make a wish. He made a plan. He would learn her routes. He would know which days she went to the school and which mornings she busked at the train yard and which nights she let herself be reckless at the Hob. He would make sure no one else placed a hand on her wrist without permission. He would call it crowd control. He would never admit the rest of it.
Outside, the wind caught in the alley and made a low, private sound. In the room above the seamstress’s shop, Winter Rose leaned her forehead against the cold window and saw her breath cloud and disappear. She sang the chorus once, only to herself.
Red is the ribbon that fate never breaks, woven through hearts, through the choices we make.
The rest would come. It always did. Some songs took their time.
Somewhere between order and breath, between a boy who had learned to weaponize wanting and a girl who could turn it into music, a knot slipped into place that neither of them would get loose without blood. It would look like a chance to anyone who needed it to. It would look like destiny to people who tell stories. To them, later, it would look like the only way either of them ever moved.
Forward, into the next verse, pretending not to know the chorus already or know how the story ended.
The Snows tried to make the morning after Coriolanus’s birth ceremonial.
Not with flowers or music. No, that would’ve been too provincial for the Snows. With white-coated physicians and friends of Cassian Snow lingering in the hall like punctuation marks waiting for someone important to finish a sentence. With the brass knocker downstairs polished to a shine no one would notice. With servants lining along the marble like they had been placed there by ruler and hand, each one quiet and useful.
But babies did not care for ceremony.
Coriolanus actually objected to it on principle.
He was swaddled in the orange shawl but furious at the draft. He let out a small cry as Winter Rose shifted in the bed. The physician at the foot of the bed stopped arranging his face into approval. The nurse looked down and smiled before remembering herself. Even Ulpia’s expression faltered, just briefly, at the indignity of life refusing to enter gracefully.
Crassus laughed.
Not politely. Not in the Capitol way. It escaped him helplessly, boyishly, as if some younger version of himself had cracked through the shell of the General’s son and looked around in astonishment.
Winter Rose loved that laugh. She always had. It felt like a rebellion that had not yet learned to hide.
“Home,” he said softly, though they had not gone anywhere, though the room around them was still warm from labor and song and blood and fear. He said it as if he were trying the word out in this house, unsure whether it was allowed to belong here. “He’s home.”
Winter Rose, propped up against pillows, looked around the nursery she had stolen back from taste one stubborn choice at a time. The cream walls. The turning paper birds. The crib with its carefully folded blankets and the orange shawl now wrapped around her son like a small, impossible flag.
Yes, she thought. If I say so, this is home.
Crassus stood beside the bed with his sleeves rolled and his hair disordered in a way the Capitol would have found offensive and she found nearly holy. He held their son in both arms with the deep concentration of a man handling something that might save him or ruin him or both. She watched the way his shoulders had softened around the child, the way the rigid geometry of his body gave way without his permission. It was never more obvious than moments like this that tenderness had to fight to survive in him and that it survived anyway.
“There are gifts,” he said after a while, glancing toward the little table against the wall where items had begun to collect in orderly, unwelcome little piles. “Apparently the city cannot breathe unless it gives things to people who didn’t ask.”
Winter Rose’s mouth twitched.
There was a silver rattle that sounded like loose coins. A blanket worked with the Snow crest so heavily that the baby could vanish beneath the embroidery. A pair of tiny leather shoes polished to a shine no child would ever truly appreciate.
Crassus looked at them all with polite dislike, then reached into the inside pocket of his coat and drew out a small parcel wrapped in soft cream paper.
“This,” he said, suddenly more awkward than he had been holding a brand-new child, “is from me.”
Winter Rose glanced up at him. “Another rebellion?”
“A private one.” He hesitated, then added, lower, “You deserve something that belongs only to you.”
He placed the parcel in her lap. Winter Rose carefully untied the ribbon and opened the parcel.
Inside was a compact.
It was small and heavy, silver chased with roses and winding vines, the hinge worked into the shape of a bud just beginning to open. It looked like something that had existed long before this room and would survive it too. Winter Rose pressed the little catch with her thumb and the lid sprang open with a satisfying, intimate click.
Inside, there was a mirror polished bright enough to catch not just her face, but the room behind her. The soft turn of the paper birds. The orange at the edge of the shawl. The shape of Crassus standing close. Beneath the mirror sat a shallow pan of rose-scented powder, delicate and faintly old-fashioned, like the memory of a garden pressed into dust.
And around the inside rim, engraved so finely she had to tilt it into the light to read it.
Roses are red, violets are blue love.
It looked wrong. Tenderly but deliberately wrong. The sort of object they had built together. Part Capitol polish, part Covey heart, but something wholly their own.
Winter Rose touched the inscription with one fingertip and felt her throat close around whatever response had first risen.
Crassus cleared his throat. Suddenly shy, after all they had survived to stand in this room at all.
“I thought,” he said, not looking at her directly now, “if they are going to insist you look like their version of civilized, then you ought to have a mirror that tells the truth first.”
Winter Rose angled it and saw herself.
Not as the Capitol wanted her. Not as Ulpia saw her. Not as a vessel, or an heir-maker, or some polished object on display in the house of Snow.
She looked tired. Fierce. Still a little wild around the eyes. Lit from somewhere no chandelier could touch.
She dusted a little of the powder beneath the shadows under her eyes and inhaled the scent. Roses, yes, but not only roses. There was something green beneath it. Something old. Something half-memory.
She pressed the compact briefly to her lips.
“Thank you,” she said into the silver.
Crassus looked down at his son, then back at her. His whole face went soft in a way no one else in this house was ever meant to see. “Of course, Winter. You gave me the best gift I could ever have.”
They did not get to stay unimportant for long.
Ulpia entered first, trailing authority and disapproval in equal measure. Behind her came the nurse, carrying fresh linens and clothes.
“No drafts,” Ulpia said at once, moving to the window and shutting it. “And where is the wet nurse? We do have standards in this house.”
Winter Rose shifted carefully against the pillows. Every part of her ached. There were places in her body that no longer felt like hers.
“I’m not using a wet nurse,” she said. “I’ll feed him myself.”
Ulpia turned slowly, disbelief arranged on her face like jewelry. “No. It is provincial. It ruins the lines of the dress. Formula is cleaner. Discreeter. And we can afford it.”
Winter Rose laughed.
“Not to worry,” she said. “I intend to ruin a great many lines.”
“Winter,” Ulpia said, sweet as broken glass, “be sensible. Women like you—” She paused, tasted the old insult, decided against it only because witnesses were present. “Women newly introduced to this life often benefit from help.”
“Help,” Winter Rose said, “is tea. Or a bath. Or a nap. Or silence.” She held out her hands toward Crassus. “We are talking about food for my son.”
Crassus brought the baby to her.
She drew the orange shawl aside, loosened her robe, and guided Coriolanus to her breast. He latched immediately, with the fierce and earnest concentration of a child who had been taking notes from the inside all along. The tiny sound he made seemed to alter the room at once.
Ulpia did not look away. She watched as if sitting in judgment over something indecent.
“Well,” she said at last. “Do try to be discreet. There are windows.”
“Windows are for light,” Winter Rose replied.
She lifted her chin and kept feeding her son.
For one brief moment, the room had to choose between shame and understanding. It chose silence.
Cassian then entered without knocking. He never knocked where he believed the title of General excused him.
He took in the scene—the wife in bed, the child at her breast, the orange shawl, the husband standing too close for Capitol comfort—and smiled with thin, practiced displeasure.
“Efficient,” he said. “Now that the heir is delivered, we should discuss utility.”
Crassus remained standing. Winter Rose did not stop what she was doing. If they wanted a lecture hall, they could have it with reality laid out before them.
Cassian crossed to the crib and flicked the mobile once with one gloved finger, setting the paper birds in motion. They swung slowly, accusingly, around and around.
“A girl like this,” he said, as though Winter Rose were a draft under revision, “is useful during gestation. Symbolically useful. Afterward, the noise can be disposed of.”
The word dropped into the room like vermin.
Winter Rose did not look up but her jaw tensed.
Crassus took one breath so measured it could have cut glass. “No,” he said.
Cassian raised an eyebrow, almost amused. “No?”
“She is my wife,” Crassus said, voice clean and controlled with effort. “She is the child’s mother. She is a good mother.” He did not look at Winter Rose. He did not look at his mother. He looked only at his father and that alone said more than the words did. “She will raise our son well. He needs her. She will be a good Capitol citizen.”
That last sentence cost him.
Cassian smiled the way men smile at an argument they are willing to postpone because they already expect to win later. “Of course she will,” he said. “As long as she remembers what that means.”
Winter Rose shifted Coriolanus against her shoulder and met Cassian’s eyes for the first time since he had entered. “I’ll write it down in my mirror.”
His gaze flicked to the compact on the bedside table. Then to Crassus. Then away.
When Coriolanus had finished, Winter Rose swaddled him again with hands that were still a little shaky and handed him back to his father. He blinked up at Crassus with a tiny, severe expression so completely unsuitable for a newborn that Winter Rose nearly laughed.
“Welcome,” Crassus murmured to him, low enough that only Winter could hear it, “to the worst theater in the world.”
Ulpia, left uneasily standing in a room she no longer controlled, tried once more to reclaim a little ground.
“If you must insist on your lullabies,” she said, brittle now, “at least learn the proper Capitol ones.”
Winter Rose settled back against the pillows and smiled without softness. “I know songs older than this house,” she said. “I’ll sing those.”
Ulpia chose not to hear it. She adjusted a wrinkle that did not exist and swept out of the room with her silence held high like a banner.
At last it was only the three of them.
Everything shrank into something livable. Smaller. Truer. Winter Rose learned, within an hour, the exact sound Coriolanus made just before indignation. The sound he made when hunger disguised itself as boredom. Crassus changed one diaper so badly even the paper birds seemed to avert their gaze, then redid it with the concentration of a man refusing defeat by a creature the size of a loaf of bread.
They took turns dozing and watching him breathe.
Evening came, as it always did here, gilded and false in its gentleness. The lamps softened the edges of everything they touched. Crassus stood by the window in shirtsleeves, looking like a man who had asked to be forgiven by the wrong god. Winter Rose tucked the baby into the crib, the orange shawl bright against the cream and waited for a moment.
At last he spoke.
“He has your mouth.”
Winter Rose glanced down at the tiny face, keeping her gaze on her son. “I hope he has my spine too. Stubborn. Rebellious. Unafraid to speak.”
Crassus’s expression shifted. “You want him to be safe.”
“I want him to be whole,” she said. “Safety is a trick in this city.”
He turned then and Winter Rose saw it before he spoke. She could see the old fear returning, finding its key, and walking back into the room as if it had always belonged there right in the reach of her husband.
“I need you to promise me something.”
She went very still. “What thing?”
His voice dropped. “That you’ll erase the rest of it. The Covey. The songs. The habits that make you... you.” His eyes flicked toward the crib, then back to her. “For him. So they cannot use it against you. Or him. Or—”
He did not say *me*. He did not need to. That was all implied.
Winter Rose picked up the compact and closed it with her thumb, pressing the cool silver so hard into her palm the edges dug into her flesh.
“Erase,” she repeated.
“Yes,” he said quietly. “He has a name to live up to. Even the shawl is too much, Winter.”
She looked at him for a long time, not knowing what to say.
She looked at the boy who had met her by a lake and asked for honesty as though it would save him. She looked at the man who had walked through his father’s hand and into the room where their son was born. She looked at the father of her son whose face had broken open at the first kick, the first cry, the first impossible hello.
And finally, she looked at the man standing here now, asking her to make herself smaller so their child might someday be allowed to take up all the space she had surrendered so he could thrive.
“All right,” she said at last. “But know that it is cowardly to ask.”
He flinched.
“Maybe Casca was right about you,” Winter Rose murmured, looking back down at Coriolanus sleeping in his crib. “Maybe I should’ve listened.”
The words landed and settled into Crassus’s chest.
Still, when he reached for her hand, she gave it to him. Loving someone, she had learned, often meant helping them carry their cowardice until they were strong enough to set it down.
“I swear, Winter,” he said, rough and low, “we’ll build a life where you do not have to erase yourself to be here.”
“Then stop asking me to stop being who I am,” she whispered. Her voice nearly broke and she hated that it nearly did. “And do not forget the rooms you promised to build me.”
He nodded. Then, he bent and kissed their sleeping son’s forehead without another word.
The house clicked and sighed around them. The paper birds turned. The orange shawl burned in the dim room like a flag from a country the maps had forgotten how to draw.
Later, when the nursery was dark and the house had finally agreed to mind its own business, Winter Rose took the compact from the table and propped it open so the mirror caught the lamplight and threw it in little flashes across the birds overhead.
She lifted Coriolanus when he fussed and held him close, his warmth small and complete in her arms.
“In public,” she whispered, to him and to the part of herself that did not forgive easily. “Fine.”
She pressed her mouth to the soft down of his hair.
“But in here,” she murmured, “I will sing.”
And she did. Very quietly. So quietly no one but him could hear.
“Roses are red, love; violets are blue.Birds in the heavens know I love you.Know I love you, oh, know I love you,Birds in the heavens know I love you.”
She would not be erased.
Not really.
Not while she was etched in silver.
Not while she was woven into orange.
Not while her son learned her language first in the bones, before he ever understood it in words.
Outside, the Capitol practiced its version of lullaby. They had boots on marble, hushed orders, and the careful violence of a city tucking itself in.
Inside, a mother taught her son the beat of breathing.
In another room, his father stood at the window and tried to remember what promises felt like when they were still whole.
The paper birds kept time for all three of them until, at last, even the night gave up and let the room belong to itself.
A Winter's Storm Chapter 16: Pure as the Driven Snow
A/N: This chapter includes childbirth. Reader discretion is advised. Also, the song was written by the genius that is Suzanne Collins.
They had started scheduling her body the way people schedule parades.
Invitations arrived in neat ivory stacks, edges crisp as if paper itself knew how to sneer. Luncheons. Private teas. Garden appearances. Evenings where wives with lacquered smiles and husbands with bored, appraising eyes came to the townhouse not to see Winter Rose, but to witness the fact of her. The continuation of the Snow line. The boy she carried had become public property long before he had entered the world.
Cassian liked to parade her through it.
He would drift through the atrium with one hand hovering near her elbow, never quite touching, as though he were a gracious steward rather than a man supervising stock. “Our heir,” he would say, pausing at just the right moment under the painted ceilings or beside the nursery door so every eye would go where he wanted it. “A Snow boy. The first in a generation.”
Then the guests would turn toward her with the same careful hunger.
Winter Rose learned the shape of their questions before they asked them.
How far along now?
Have the doctors said he is healthy?
Do you think he will have your coloring?
Questions they had no right to, asked in tones meant to sound warm, curious, and intimate. Winter Rose answered them all the same way with a smile practiced just enough to be called charming and not enough to become surrender.
She had long since decided where her rebellion lived.
Not in these rooms. Not in front of their polite witnesses.
It lived in the nursery.
In the orange shawl draped over the crib rail like a captured sunset.
In the paper birds she had cut and hung from the ceiling herself.
In the lullaby only she understood the cost of.
In the way she would raise this child not like a trophy on a shelf but like a door left unlocked.
Crassus, meanwhile, was unraveling and knotting himself back together in social and work loops so tight she wondered when they would finally cut into him.
He came to her at night after long hours with his father and longer hours at the War Department, carrying tiny contraband offerings from the city as if they were proof he still remembered how to choose things with love instead of strategy. A pinch of cardamom wrapped in paper. A smooth gray pebble from the Ministry courtyard. A ridiculous story someone had told at a meeting that Earl Gray would have made vulgar and funny in one breath. He would sit on the nursery floor with his back against the wall, hat forgotten beside him, and tell her about the little rebellions he’d managed to let slip through the cracks of his day.
“I said the District curfews were a leash,” he told her one evening, voice low, eyes bright with a panic that looked a little too much like hope. “Half the room pretended not to hear it.”
Winter Rose sat in the rocking chair, one hand over the broad swell of her belly as the baby rolled beneath her skin. She carded her fingers through Crassus’s hair and could see how tired he really was.
“It will cost you later,” she said.
He tipped his face into her hand and laughed once, dry and a little wrecked. “I know. I just thought it would cost more immediately.”
“Say it anyway.”
He closed his eyes. “You always make rebellion sound so domestic.”
“It is,” she murmured. “That’s why they’re so scared of it.”
Ulpia was relentless during the last few weeks of the pregnancy.
“Stand straighter.”
“Don’t rest your hand there all the time. It looks common.”
“Smile less. You look pleased with yourself.”
“Smile more. You look unhappy.”
Winter Rose took each correction and filed it away.. She learned how to turn her silence into insult. How to let a blink say what speech could not. How to hum just softly enough while arranging blankets in the nursery that Ulpia, passing by, would pause in the doorway and know indecency was occurring somewhere beyond her control.
Still, the orange shawl remained where Winter Rose had placed it.
Still, Ulpia had to pass it every time she entered the room.
And still, Winter Rose did not move it.
A week before the doctor said the boy might arrive, Ulpia arranged a family dinner with the precision of a hanging.
The dining room gleamed in crystal and silver. The long polished table with its impossible centerpieces with roses that had no business blooming in a house like the Snow’s and fruit waxed to a shine so intense it looked artificial. Cassian sat at the head as though he’d been carved there. Ulpia wore pale silk and judgment. Crassus looked tired enough to bleed through the starch of his uniform. Caius, Crassus’s brother, and his wife and daughter even showed up for this dinner.
Winter Rose wore blue.
Not because it pleased anyone, but because it reminded her of the sky when she traveled from District to District.
Conversation moved exactly as the house liked it to move. It was smooth and pointless and lined in both poison and propriety. Legacy. Resources. Military discipline. The proper education of heirs. Cassian recounted some story about a minor official whose own joke had turned on him, and everyone laughed exactly as much as was safe.
Winter Rose drank water and counted the beats between each performance.
It was Ulpia who set the trap.
She waited until the fruit course, until the servants had mostly withdrawn and the room was soft enough to sound intimate. Then she sliced a pear into neat, obedient crescents and said lightly, “I am glad the child will be Snow through and through.”
Crassus looked up. Cassian smiled without warmth.
“That is how this city works, after all,” Ulpia went on. “Names. Bloodlines. In the end, no one remembers the mother.”
Crassus flinched almost imperceptibly.
Winter Rose lifted her glass, bought herself two seconds with the cold against her mouth, and then set it down with a small clean click.
“Then you’ve all been doing it wrong,” she said pleasantly.
Ulpia’s knife paused in the pear.
Winter Rose smiled. “People remember women who teach them how to live.”
Cassian laughed, all teeth and amusement sharpened for display. “And what exactly have you taught us, Mrs. Snow?”
Winter Rose folded her napkin once, placed it beside her plate, and looked directly at him.
“How to hear a song without an instrument,” she said.
Then she turned to Ulpia with exquisite courtesy and added, “And how to behave when you don’t own the room.”
The silence that followed was so complete she could hear the chandelier settle.
Ulpia’s face became very smooth. Very expensive. Cassian took a sip of wine and, for once, chose not to strike. Crassus looked down at his plate so abruptly Winter Rose knew he was either furious or trying very hard not to smile.
Cassian changed the subject to a portraitist with a weak chin and political utility, and the room rushed to accept the reprieve. The relief irritated Winter Rose so much she wanted to knock over a chair just to make some honest noise.
Later, in the nursery, the baby kicked hard enough to make her gasp and swear affectionately under her breath.
“Terrible manners,” she told her belly, palm pressed to the moving curve. “You get that from your father.”
Crassus had come in after the dinner and simply laid down on the floor beside the crib as if his bones had given up the argument. One arm hooked over the rail, hand loose, fingers nearly brushing the orange shawl. Winter Rose looked down at him and felt something old and tender move painfully in her chest.
“He’ll learn to bow,” she said into the dim. “Fine. Let him. But he’ll also learn how to climb out of windows.”
Crassus smiled without opening his eyes. “You’ll teach him both.”
“I’ll have to.”
“You’re better at ladders than I am,” he murmured.
By the time she tucked the orange shawl over his shoulder, he was asleep.
The house hummed around them. Somewhere deep in the pipes, water moved like gossip. The paper birds turned slowly above the crib, their shadows trembling over the walls. Winter Rose sat for a long while and watched her husband breathe and let herself imagine a world where that alone counted as peace.
Her water broke just before dawn.
The hour was a soft blue, the brief strange time when even the Capitol looked like it might apologize for itself. Winter Rose was crossing the room when warmth rushed down her thighs and she stopped dead, one hand flying to the wall to steady her, the other to her belly.
For one long second, there was nothing. Then the world split open into purpose.
The house came awake like a machine built by men who had never trusted women to do anything unobserved. Bells rang. Doors opened. Servants crossed hallways at a near-run while still somehow looking trained. Voices lowered into authority.
Cassian appeared in the doorway fully dressed.
“Doctor,” he said to someone already moving behind him. “Nurse. No one else enters that room unless they are being paid.”
Crassus reached Winter Rose first, hands hovering because he wanted to hold her but didn’t know if holding her would hurt. She clutched his sleeve through the first real contraction and saw his face go white beneath the composure.
Then the doctor swept in and looked from Winter Rose to Crassus and said, “Men wait outside.”
Crassus opened his mouth to argue but Cassian’s hand landed on his shoulder. “We are not District animals,” he said quietly.
The sentence landed on Winter Rose like a slap.
Winter Rose, however, did not have time to answer it. Pain took her whole body and folded it inward.
They put her in bed as if she were being installed. The doctor spoke in calm clipped terms about dilation and progression and pressure as if Winter Rose was a report she intended to keep from embarrassing the household. The nurse was another thing entirely. Her hands were warm. Human.
Real.
“Breathe, darling,” she whispered as she arranged pillows behind Winter Rose’s back. “Your job is to breathe.”
Winter Rose almost loved her for it.
“Do not sing,” the doctor added without looking up from her notes. “It wastes air.”
Winter Rose barked out a laugh that turned halfway into a groan. “Then you can leave,” she managed. “I have enough air for this.”
At the foot of the bed, Ulpia stood with folded hands and a face like a chapel painting. She looked beautiful and devout but entirely unhelpful.
“Do remember yourself,” she said. “There are people in the house.”
“And there’s one,” Winter Rose said through clenched teeth, “in me.”
The contractions came harder. The doctor told her what to do. The nurse repeated it in a human voice. Ulpia watched as if endurance might become ladylike if stared at long enough.
Between one wave and the next, Winter Rose reached for the nurse’s wrist.
“The shawl,” she whispered. “The orange one. By the crib.”
The nurse hesitated, flicked one quick glance at Ulpia, and then nodded. “I’ll get it.”
When she laid the orange shawl across Winter Rose’s knees, the room changed.
Winter Rose closed her eyes and she thought of District 12. Of the lake at dusk. Of Earl Gray’s fiddle. Of Aurora’s laugh. Of the first time Crassus had looked at her like he wanted to be forgiven for having a heart.
When the next contraction rose, she let herself go to it with a sound that had never once been taught in Capitol finishing lessons.
And then, because pain stripped her down to what was truest, she sang because that was the only thing she truly knew how to do.
“Roses are red, love; violets are blue—”
“Mrs. Snow,” the doctor snapped. “No.”
“Birds in the heavens know I love you.”
“Stop.”
“Know I love you, oh, know I love you—”
“Enough.”
“Birds in the heavens know I love you.”
Her voice was rough and raw with labor, but the melody knew the road better than she did. It became a rope. A metronome. A thing her body could hold while everything else shook loose.
The nurse’s expression softened so visibly it bordered on mutiny. Even Ulpia closed her eyes as if the notes offended her and moved her both.
Out in the hall, Crassus heard every word.
He stood with his forehead to the wall and his hands opening and closing because he had promised himself long ago that he would not spend his life closed. He heard her and knew, all at once, that obedience had finally become the meaner sin.
He went for the door.
Cassian caught his arm. “Do not make a scene.”
Crassus turned.
For the first time, he looked at his father not as a son or officer, but as a man looking at a locked door he had decided to go through.
“Then don’t make me,” he said as he shoved father’s hand away.
He opened the door.
The house did not collapse. The walls did not split. The city did not strike him dead.
The doctor turned sharply. “Out.”
The nurse said, “In,” at exactly the same moment.
Winter Rose looked up through pain and found him there. Her whole face changed.
He crossed the room in three steps and took her hand. She squeezed so hard it bordered on injury. He did not pull away.
“I’m here,” he said.
“Sing with me,” she whispered.
He almost said he couldn’t. That he didn’t know how. That men like him weren’t built for this.
He didn’t sing. He listened, secretly hoping that would be enough.
“Roses are red, love; violets are blue.Birds in the heavens know I love you…”
The contraction broke over her. She cried out. The nurse said, “Good.” Ulpia stayed silent. Cassian said nothing at all from the doorway where he remained like a dark stain the room had not chosen.
The lullaby became a labor song.
Covey turned weapon. Tenderness turned tether. Winter Rose would not let anyone else choose the rhythm now. She pushed when her body demanded it. She cursed when quiet became impossible. She laughed once at the doctor’s horrified face and then bore down again with all the force of a woman refusing to die unnamed.
“Now,” the nurse said sharply. “Winter, now.”
Winter Rose went under. Through. Into the necessary dark.
And then a cry filled the room. Thin, outraged, and furious at the air itself.
The sound tore the carefulness out of the room.
For a second, everything dissolved into movement. Hands. Cloth. Blood. The doctor’s voice snapping into approval now that there was something undeniable to approve.
Then the baby was on Winter Rose’s chest.
Warm. Slippery. Real.
Winter Rose made a sound that was half laugh, half sob. “Hi,” she breathed, as if they had merely missed each other at the market and not crossed a sea. The boy quieted, stunned by skin and heartbeat and the immediate authority of love.
Crassus made a noise then Winter Rose had never heard from him or any man in this house. Something broke open at that moment.. Something unbearably young. He bent and kissed Winter Rose’s damp hair, then the furious soft crown of his son’s head.
“Hello,” he whispered, wrecked with wonder. “Hello, hello.”
Ulpia stood perfectly still, like a portrait trying to decide whether to be scandalized or converted. Cassian, from the threshold, said only one thing.
“Coriolanus.”
Like a decree. Like a signature.
Winter looked down at the tiny, red-faced bird on her chest and thought of shawls and lakes and songs and the way birds always know how to find home even when people don’t. She kissed his forehead and murmured, “Coriolanus, yes, but you belong to yourself first.”
Then, because she was still herself and entitled to spite in sacred moments, she pulled the orange shawl up around his back so the first softness he knew would be something no one in this city had bought or approved, swaddling him within the one possession she had that reminded her of her family.
He rooted instinctively. The nurse helped. Winter Rose closed her eyes and sang the refrain one last time, not for the room, not for the doctor, not for the city.
Only for him.
Roses are red, love; violets are blue.Birds in the heavens know I love you.Know I love you, oh, know I love you,Birds in the heavens know I love you.
Crassus leaned his forehead against hers and breathed.
The house resumed its quiet hum. The city continued, relentless and indifferent to it all.
But the first thing the boy heard before the weight of his name or before the shape of expectation and the future reached for him, was a song.
They gave her a room with sunshine and called it the nursery. Winter Rose decided to accept it and attempt to make it hers.
The walls were a soft, serious cream Ulpia’s decorator swore by. Winter Rose ignored the swatch book and smuggled in small, undeniable pieces of color the way she smuggled everything into the Capitol. Paper birds cut from old sheet music fluttered on a thread from the ceiling. A chipped wooden truck from a market stall sat proudly on the shelf between two tasteful porcelain lions. On the crib, folded neat over the rail like a banner, she laid the orange shawl.
Aurora Hazel’s orange shawl. A color that had never once asked permission to be alive.
Crassus leaned in the doorway and watched her fuss with the fold until the fringe lined up exactly. He had a little smile on for once. “That’s going to make my mother’s eye twitch,” he said.
“That’s how I know it’s in the right place,” Winter Rose mused, not looking away from the crib. She smoothed the shawl with her palm like she was ironing a memory into it. “He should have something that looks like the woman who taught me how to be brave.”
Crassus came in and took the tiny mobile she’d made out of bent wire, old music, and buttons off the shelf. He held it up and the paper birds began to spin slowly in the breeze from the open window. “You cut like a thief,” he said. “No fingerprints.”
“Compliment accepted.” She reached over and nudged a lopsided bird with a poke of her finger. “Help me hang it? I can’t do it without tipping the whole world over.”
He dragged a chair under the crib’s corner like a man committing a small crime and climbed up, careful of the fresh paint. From up there, he looked less like a Snow and more like the boy from the lake. He tied the mobile’s loop to a hook let it settle.
“It was easier to breathe in Twelve,” he said, almost surprised to have said it out loud. “Even with the coal. Especially with coal. You could feel your lungs doing something honest, unlike here.”
Winter Rose glanced up at him, at the soft in his voice he always tried to keep under glass here. “It can be like that,” she said. “We just have to be greedy about it. Shut the door. Make new rules. Breathe a little deeper. Sing a little louder.”
He jumped down, landing neatly. The smile he had earlier didn’t survive. “Not here,” he said. “Not in the way you mean. Not as long as these walls listen and my father owns half the air we breathe.”
She made a face. “Then we’ll be difficult renters. Picky. Loud at odd hours.”
He grinned despite himself. “You. Loud? Not a chance, Winter,” he teased.
“Capitol-loud,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Smiles like knives.”
He reached for her, thumb stroking the vein at her wrist. “You always look like you’re about to get away with something,” he said.
“That’s because I am.”
The door clicked and the room remembered itself. Ulpia floated in, all pearls and powder, a maid trailing behind her with a notepad and a pencil. She surveyed the room the way a general surveyed a map someone else drew poorly.
“Oh,” she said, the syllable landing like frost. “Orange.”
Winter Rose smiled. “Yes.”
“It’s provincial,” Ulpia decided. “And filthy. Shawls catch dust. He’ll sneeze and the nurse will write to me that you insist on draping him in old cloth and he’ll catch a cold.”
Winter Rose’s hand stayed on the rail. “I washed it.”
“Mm.” Ulpia’s gaze slid to Winter Rose’s belly, then crisply back to the crib. “And those birds,” she gestured at the sheet-music birds, “will over-stimulate him. Babies require discipline before delight. We’ll store the trinkets away and bring them out when he’s the appropriate age.”
Crassus didn’t move. Winter Rose felt his silence like a draft. She took a breath and chose the cut of her answer.
“Respectfully,” she said, “no.”
One of Ulpia’s eyebrows traveled upward. “No?”
“The shawl stays,” Winter Rose said firmly. There was no heat in her voice. That made it worse. “He gets to have something true in here. The birds stay, too. I want him to know a melody before he learns rules.”
Ulpia’s smile went thin. “You’ll find our house runs on rules, dear.”
“He’s my son,” Winter Rose said, still polite. “He’ll be raised on my rules.”
Ulpia’s eyes cooled another degree, a cold, mean smile pulling at her lips. “You’re quite sure pregnancy becomes you? I’m told some women go sentimental in the head. It’s not flattering, Winter.” Her gaze flicked to Winter’s hips while the maid’s pencil scratched at the notepad like a little saw. “Perhaps avoid the dessert tonight.”
Winter Rose’s mouth opened before she could stop it. “Perhaps avoid diagnosing me.” It came out clean, not loud. Cassian himself would’ve admired the aim.
Ulpia’s chin tilted. “What did you say?”
“I said,” Winter Rose repeated, a touch warmer now, “that I’ll handle the shawls and desserts. You can handle the portraits and the east-facing windows and we’ll both pretend the other is doing each other a favor.”
Crassus let out the smallest breath. Ulpia heard it and cataloged it for later.
“Your husband doesn’t speak for you?” Ulpia asked, sweet as poison.
“He speaks when he chooses,” Winter Rose said. She didn’t look at him. She looked at the mobile. “So do I.”
Silence did its small, electric dance. The maid discovered an intense interest in the notepad’s margins. Ulpia pulled her gloves off and set them on the dresser very precisely.
“General Snow expects his grandson to be reared in a manner becoming a Snow,” she said finally.
“Then he’ll get his grandson,” Winter Rose said. “But he will also be a child and will be allowed to be one before the world swallows any drop of innocence a Snow could have.”
Ulpia gathered her gloves with a smirk. “We’ll see.”
When she was gone, the quiet felt like a person exhaling. Crassus stayed where he was, hands in his pockets. Winter Rose didn’t make it easy for him by filling the space.
“I should’ve—” he started.
“You didn’t,” she said. ”Again.”
“I didn’t,” he agreed, more angry with himself than anything. “I’m sorry.”
“I know,” she said. “However, sorry doesn’t move the mountains.”
He nodded once. He stepped close enough that his sleeve brushed hers and looked at the orange shawl. “It’s good,” he said. “It looks like a sunset.”
“Perfect,” she said.
He touched the fringe with one finger then kissed her temple in the most Capitol-acceptable way and left before Winter Rose could say anything else.
When she was alone, the room relaxed into the shape she’d insisted on. Winter Rose leaned on the railing of the crib and pressed her palm to the place Coriolanus pushed out like he wanted to see the birds up close before it was his time to. She let a breath in. Then, she let it out.
Then she sang, quiet and certain, the way she used to when the Hob hummed back and the lake held her secrets.
“Roses are red, love, violets are blue. Birds in the heavens know I love you. Know I love you, oh, know I love you, Birds in the heavens know I love you.”
The paper birds turned in the breeze. The orange shawl glowed like a small, stubborn sun. Somewhere in the house, the pipes clicked the way old throats do when they’ve been asked to carry too much.
She wasn’t stupid. The Capitol wasn’t going to give them freedom but it could not stop a nursery from remembering who it belonged to and it could not stop a child from learning, first, that his mother’s voice was the room he lived in before his name did any of the work.
The first thing Winter Rose noticed about a Capitol party was the noise, not the obscene amount of food scattered across the tables. The noise of a Capitol party was like a hundred conversations singing the same polite key. Nothing like the Hob on a Saturday night. It was crystal clear mixed with polite laughter and soft gossip.
Winter Rose had been coached within a centimeter of her vowels. She could now walk like the floor is grateful and smile like she agreed with the politician trying to pass their new bill into law. She could now say hello as if she was doing someone a favor. She did all of it in a dress that moved like water and a spine that refused to move at all. Crassus stood tall next to her with a hand at her back.
“Mrs. Snow.” People tested her name like a new knife. “When are you due?” “Isn’t General Snow radiant?”
She answered all the questions as trained. Soon. Radiant as the sun.
Casca Highbottom slipped into her path without warning. She had heard his name a few times in passing when listening to Crassus talk to his father. She knew about the falling out a few years back but she never asked anything of it. Friends stopped being friends all the time, after all, and maybe that was ignorance to believe just that.
He was thinner than the gossip made him, hollows under his eyes like he’d misplaced sleep years ago and never bothered to look. He smelled faintly of old books and something medicinal.
“Mrs. Snow,” he said, voice dry as paper. “Or Winter Rose? I never know which name people mean when they say ‘congratulations.’ However, I must say, how fitting it is that your name is Winter Rose. It’s like fate.”
“Whichever one offends you least,” Winter Rose said, Capitol-pleasant as always. “They both fit, depending on the hour or who I’m around.”
He huffed and it might have been a laugh. “Clever. That will help. Clever keeps you fed here.” His gaze flicked to Crassus across the room, currently being congratulated on something he hadn’t finished yet by men who’d never do it themselves. “And dangerous.”
Winter Rose followed the look and then didn’t, looking down at her rounded abdomen. “You knew him at university,” she said.
“I knew the mold he poured himself into,” Casca admitted. “I also know who designed the mold.”
“That would be his father,” she answered, smooth.
Casca studied her face for a moment, assessing her. “You’re not what the papers hoped for.”
“Sorry to disappoint,” she said lightly. “I’m not sure what they hoped for.”
“Don’t be fooled. I’m not disappointed,” he admitted. “I’m mortally curious.” He took a breath that sounded like he’d had to practice it. “You should know. Your husband is not what he seems.”
Winter Rose’s fingers tightened around her glass. She kept her smile polite because people were watching her and she was tired of watching them enjoy it when she broke. “Very few people are.”
“He’s not only the boy who blushes when a plan works,” Casca said softly. “He’s the man who handed a proposal to a woman who eats bones for breakfast and called it civic duty.” Winter Rose noticed that the room’s lighting turned his eyes into two flat coins when he spoke. “Whatever he’s promised you, remember he’s fluent in a language that translates love into order, no matter how he presents himself.”
“I know his languages,” Winter Rose said, just as soft. “I’ve heard the one he uses when no one else is in the room.”
Casca’s mouth tilted upward. “Just don’t forget the one he used before you arrived.” He lifted his glass like a shrug. “I don’t say this to wound you. I say it so your expectations don’t.”
“Casca Highbottom,” she said, “do you warn every young wife at her first party or just the ones who remind you of the day you stopped believing people could be better?”
Color rose and fell in his face like a bad tide. For a second, she saw the boy under the bones, then the man who’d dulled himself to survive here. He bowed, shallow and sincere in a way the room didn’t understand but she did. “Then good luck, Mrs. Snow,” he said. “You’ll need a quarrel with fate and steady hands.”
He stepped aside without waiting for Winter Rose’s reply. The crowd swallowed him back up as if he was never there, the way the Capitol eats anyone who isn’t entertaining it at any given moment.
Crassus found her before the next conversation could pin her down. “Dance?” he asked, formal around the edges but somehow real in the middle.
“Please,” she said and she let him rescue them both.
The orchestra played the kind of gracious nothing that keeps the room tranquilized. They moved through the music like two people who’d learned to be beautiful and graceful together in a hurry.
His hand at her waist. Her palm in his.
“I’m sorry,” Crassus said, barely moving his mouth. “About my mother. I can tell it’s still bothering you.”
Winter Rose’s laugh was quick and mean. “Which part? The part where she called me a harlot or the part where she named our son like she was reupholstering a chair?”
“All of it,” he admitted. “I don’t believe any of it. Not the word. Not the premise. Not the future where you’re decorative and quiet and grateful.”
“She thinks I seduced you,” Winter Rose mused, keeping her face smooth for the watchers. “As if you didn’t walk yourself to a lake and ask me to meet you there.”
“I did,” he said. “I’d do it again. I’d do it tomorrow. I’ll do it when I’m old and boring.”
“You’re not boring,” she said.
“I am in this room,” he said. “That’s the trick to survive it.”
They turned and he dipped his head, his breath warm against her ear. “Casca spoke to you.”
“He warned me you aren’t what you seem.”
“And?”
“And I told him I know.” She slid her hand higher on his shoulder, the way someone did when they had to hold on to something that’s moving fast. “Which you is this, Crassus?”
“The one trying,” he said simply. “Poorly, sometimes. Loudly, soon.”
“Soon,” she echoed, unconvinced but wanting to be all the same. “Right, of course.”
They fell quiet because the music asked for it. He guided her through a turn that put them at the far edge of the floor, near an arrangement of lilies. No one was listening there.
“Look at me,” he demanded. “Winter, please.”
She did. The room disappeared the way it had once in the Hob, five hundred lifetimes ago. He kissed her. It was quick enough to be respectable but sure enough to be a choice in that room. It wasn’t the frantic kind of kiss born of doors closing nor the desperate kind born of doors opening too fast.
A small, decisive thump answered between them as Crassus’ had rested on her swollen stomach.
Winter Rose huffed out a laugh. Crassus pulled back, startled, eyes wide in a way she’d never seen in this city.
“Was that…?”
“Do it again,” she whispered to the boy. “I know you can.”
The baby obliged, a firmer tap this time. Winter Rose’s face cracked into something that would have embarrassed Ulpia and delighted Aurora Hazel. Her joy was so bright it forgot to be beautiful.
Crassus’s hand stayed on the curve of her belly as if it had the right to now. He just laid his palm there and let his expression betray every inch of him. He looked like the man at the lake again. He looked wrong and right and entirely hers.
“Hello,” he said, ridiculous and reverent.
“He says hello back,” Winter Rose said, grinning like a fool.
The music kept playing because the world doesn’t care about private miracles. Winter Rose put her hand over his and let the room take the picture it wanted. The handsome young officer and his luminous wife and the future sending little telegrams through her silk dress. She didn’t care. She could let them have this image if they insisted on having it. She knew the truth inside it.
She felt it.
“Forgive me,” he said, eyes still on the place where their son had announced himself. “For not answering my mother with the volume you deserved. For waiting to be safe before being right.”
“I’ll forgive you when you stop asking for it and start doing the right thing,” she said softer than it looked. “Tonight you did one right thing.”
“What’s that?”
“You put your hand where it counts and listened,” she said. “You heard him.”
He looked up then and whatever the party saw on his face made it look away. It was too vulnerable for Capitol lights.
He kissed her again, just the corner of her mouth this time. “Soon,” he said and for the first time in a long time, the word didn’t sound distant. It sounded like a plan.
“Soon,” she said back.
The song ended and they stepped back into their places, correct and glowing. Across the room, Casca watched them with a look that wasn’t quite a warning anymore. It might have been hope, or the memory of it.
Winter Rose reached for a glass of water from a passing tray. She sipped, lips curved, spine scandalously alive. The boy kicked once more under Crassus’s hand, impatient with the world for not speeding up.
“Me too,” Winter Rose murmured to her son. “Me too.”
There were days where she just sat in the meadow, watching the strands of grass wave in the light breeze of midsummer. Days like these usually caused the eldest Mellark child to think about what the meadow meant. It was first off, the place she spent the majority of her childhood, playing and dancing and singing in the flowers and under the sun beams as her parents watched and smiled.
They were happy there – her parents. They were happy and she was too, even when her younger brother pulled her braids and called her absurd names.
Secondly, the meadow was a graveyard. As a young girl, she didn’t know it was. It wasn’t until she was 14 when she put everything together. The war. The Games. The nightmares. The bombs. Everything. It’s when she learned why her parents sometimes woke up in the middle of the night, screaming – running out of their room to check on her and her brother even though they had just hugged them goodnight. It was then when she learned that the past was darker than she could ever imagine it could be. Even despite that, somehow, there were still dandelions and primroses growing in the midst of summer where rubble had once stood its ground.
There was still light. Despite it all.
Lastly, the meadow was symbolic. It was a symbol of hope, happiness, and most of all, love – that one day, despite all the pain, all of the losses, sacrifices and heartache, the meadow was still there waiting for them.
It was days like these where she thought about it all. The solitude and the peace of the meadow allowed her the grace of time. It was more than a place to play and to grow. The meadow was a place to hold close to the heart, a place where her parents found happiness in each other.
It was a place where they decided they could live again.
It was a special place, one she would share with anyone she loved because of all that it meant.
A/N: I really love how this chapter ends and I hope you do too!
By the time the snow began to line marble steps, Winter Rose had learned the Capitol’s choreography.
She could cross a room without touching a single edge. She could say “Capitol” the way they wanted her to. She had a schedule as ruthless as any curfew. The doctor would see her on Mondays. Speech on Wednesdays. Etiquette whenever Mavanne decided her spine required “consultation.” The city had learned her shape too, a young Snow wife with a belly showing and a very good tailor. She walked with one palm curved at the small swell because the boy liked to announce himself at inconvenient times and because touching him steadied her.
A boy. The scan had made rulers out of men who didn’t understand music. Cassian’s smile at the word “son” lit like a firework. Crassus’s joy was smaller and wilder, the kind that looked like it could break him if he didn’t handle it with both hands. He was incandescent in private. In public he was perfect.
After hearing the news, Ulpia Snow, Crassus' mother, requested dinner to celebrate.
They went to the other Snow penthouse down the hall with the painted ceilings and stained glass windows. The table was a long accusation underneath a crystal chandelier that had opinions about posture. Servants moved like punctuation. Cassian took the head. Ulpia sat at his right with the serenity of a woman who had never once been told “no” without also being told “please forgive me.”
Winter Rose wore the blue that made her look less tired. She had tucked Aurora’s orange scarf into the drawer before leaving, only after holding it for so long, her hand cramped.
“Mother,” Crassus said with the exact amount of warmth. Ulpia let him kiss her cheek. Cassian didn’t bother to stand.
“So,” Ulpia said, looking at Winter Rose like a jeweler at a flawed stone. “This is the girl.”
“My wife,” Crassus corrected, soft and immediate. “Winter.”
“Mm.” Ulpia’s smile didn’t move. “Wife is what we’re calling it now?”
The soup course arrived. It was something pale and silken and careful. Winter Rose reached for her water. Her stomach fluttered under her other hand. She drank and the cold anchored her.
“You’ve caused a great deal of expense, my dear,” Ulpia observed, lifting her spoon. “Dresses. Staff. Doctors who know when to be discreet. One expects this from entertainers. Not from wives.”
Cassian’s shoulders performed indulgence. “Ulpia. Perhaps we should talk about the affairs in District 13? Or how Tigris is excelling in meeting her milestones."
“What?” She dabbed delicately at nothing with her napkin. “We’re family. We should be honest. I had hoped for a girl with lineage. You brought me a novelty, Crassus. A singer. The sort who wanders. Of course he would find that charming.” She flicked her eyes to Crassus. “You always were taken with the cheap theater of sentiment, unlike your brother. He married that Rasmussen girl and now they have their perfect little Tigris.”
Crassus’s jaw clenched. Winter Rose sipped again because the etiquette book endorsed water for pregnant women and because her mouth was a furnace that wanted to scream.
“Still,” Ulpia went on, “carrying a boy covers a multitude of errors. Very efficient of you, Winter.” She smiled now, open and bright and false. “You know what the household requires of you. Quiet. Reliability. Milk for the child. Nothing showy. I trust you wouldn’t inflict your little songs on a child.”
Winter Rose kept her face the way Mavanne had taught her. She was pleasant, letting Ulpia’s hatred slide down her back like summer rain. She placed her free hand in her lap and tapped four counts into her skirt where the tablecloth hid it.
She tried not to think about what Aurora Hazel would've said if she was here.
“We’ve engaged tutors, already for the boy,” Cassian said, bored of the sport now that he had scored the first point. “Latin at three years old. Philosophy at eight. Political science at ten."
Winter Rose drank. Crassus’s hand found her knee under the table. She didn’t look at him. She pressed her knee back for one heartbeat and pulled her leg away because the room was too glassy to hold softness.
“What are we calling him?” Ulpia asked, as if deciding the color of a ribbon. “We can’t have a child introduced as… what was it? Winter Rose? Awful.” She smiled, pleased with herself. “Coriolanus suits. Classical. A line that reminds people we have one.”
Cassian didn’t even pretend to consider alternatives. “Coriolanus,” he agreed. “Of course.”
Crassus glanced at Winter Rose as an apology. Winter Rose raised her water, held his eyes for exactly one beat over the rim, and drank.
“See?” Ulpia murmured to the table at large. “She can be taught.”
Winter Rose thought for a moment. Coriolanus. Like the play. The very same author where Winter Rose had gotten part of her name from if she remembered what her mother had told her.
Still, Covey followed her.
She just didn’t admit it. Coriolanus Snow. It could pass as Covey. No one was going to take that away from her.
They discussed the nanny. They discussed which friends’ children would be acceptable companions for a boy who would someday be preceded by the title “General’s grandson.” They discussed whether music in the house would encourage softness and whether the child’s rooms should face east and which portrait painters were politically useful to owe favors to.
No one asked Winter Rose what the baby liked to hear at night. No one asked if she wanted him to know the sound of running water or if she planned to sew little bells into his blanket the way Covey mothers did so children would learn rhythm with the kick of their legs. They did not ask if the boy had already kicked when Cassian’s voice filled a room. She let the water sit cold behind her teeth and held the answers there until the ice cracked.
At the fish course, Ulpia lowered her voice to that intimate register people use when they mean to humiliate without causing a scene. “I suppose you’re proud,” she said, to Winter Rose. “Catching a Snow. Pregnant before the ink’s dry. Clever little harlot.”
Crassus’s hand tightened on his fork. The tine bent with a squeal that startled the servant. Cassian looked amused, which was the same as unforgivable.
Winter Rose set her glass down with politeness so precise it felt like violence. She folded her napkin and unfolded it and folded it again, hands steady because she demanded it of them. She did not lift her head. She did not defend herself, because she wasn’t going to let Ulpia harvest a single expression she could trade later.
“Mother,” Crassus said, almost a warning.
“It’s not a moral word. I know,” Ulpia said lightly, almost with a laugh. “It’s a historic one. Ask your father how men are made.”
“By women who are inconvenient to the records,” Cassian said, cutting his meat with a little sound of contentment. “Finish your water, Miss Levey. You look splotchy.”
“Mrs. Snow,” Crassus said, steel slipping past the cloth. “Her name is Winter. She is my wife.”
Ulpia smiled at him fondly, the way you smile at a boy who has insisted on putting on his father’s boots. “For now,” she said.
Winter Rose brought the glass to her mouth and drank again.
Winter Rose’s fingers drifted toward the swell of her stomach as the boy moved inside her and then stopped because Ulpia’s eyebrow said she was watching for proof of sentiment. Winter Rose took another drink instead. The crystal clicked against her teeth, a small bright sound that only she heard.
They moved on to dessert. The sugar tasted like surrender. Cassian told a story about a senator whose mistress had been discovered in a fruit hamper. Ulpia laughed with a hand over her pearls. Crassus’s face went carving-knife still.
Winter Rose finished her water as they conversed.
When it was over, handshakes were given out like contracts. Crassus walked Winter Rose to the door with a soldier’s escort that pretended to be husbandly. In the vestibule, where the marble threw every sound back with interest, he reached for her hand and she let him have it. His fingers shook now that the room wasn’t looking.
“I should’ve...” he started.
“You didn’t,” she said, interrupting him.
“I didn’t,” he agreed, bleak. “I will.”
Winter Rose almost believed him.
She looked up at him, exhausted and blazing in that terrible combination she was getting too good at and almost said the words she had swallowed at the table. She didn’t. She squeezed his hand instead.
Back in the suite, she put her palm on the drawer where the scarf slept and felt the hum of the city through wood. She untied her gloves. She stood in front of the window and let the baby push against her skin. She counted, because counting still worked.
Ten things to love, right now, in this place that wanted her to be hollow.
The boy’s stubborn heel. A jar of stolen honey tucked behind the tea tin. The way Crassus had bent a fork at dinner and pretended he hadn’t. The orange shawl she couldn’t wear but still owned. The water in her throat at dinner. The nurse she hadn’t met yet who would help her smuggle a lullaby in with the blanket if Winter Rose gave her the look. The songs that were still hers in her heart. The way the diamonds around her neck glittered like District Four stars. The way marble dust littered the air in the Capitol like District 12's coal dust.
And stubbornly, Crassus Snow.
The city glittered in the moonlight. Winter Rose pressed the glass of water to her lips again and didn’t sip. She just let the cold sit there until she decided what to do with it. The boy kicked once more and she smiled.
“Coriolanus Snow,” she said to the window, testing the weight of the name they’d handed her son, deciding what she would build inside it. “It’s Covey enough and that’ll be our secret.”
They parked Winter Rose in a velvet cage and called it her room in the Snow penthouse.
Top floor, west facing, a view that made the city look like a promise instead of a prison. The sheets were so silky they almost felt wet. The carpet swallowed sound. Someone had already hung dresses her size in the closet.
By noon, the Capitol had started their work on her.
First came the doctor. Her white coat was so crisp and clean it made her eyes hurt. She rolled Winter Rose’s sleeve up for bloodwork and asked questions without looking up at her.
“How far along?”
“Seven or so weeks I think,” Winter Rose said, grimacing as the needle went into her arm. “Maybe a smidge more or less. I’m not too sure.”
The doctor collected Winter Rose’s blood into tubes and filed them away before removing the needle and moving on.
“Hm.” The doctor pressed her fingers into Winter Rose’s belly with clinical touch. “Any vomiting?”
“Sometimes,” Winter admitted. “Usually after I eat.”
“We’ll keep you hydrated,” the doctor instructed, already writing. “We have a lot to catch up on since you came from the Districts. Vitamins in the morning. Vitamins at night. No raw meat, no unfiltered water, no running.” She peered into Winter Rose’s face. “No singing.”
“I wasn’t planning to give a concert,” Winter Rose said. Her voice came out thinner than she liked.
The doctor slid a neat stack of vitamins across the table and turned to Crassus the way people turn to men when they want the real adult in the room. “We’ll schedule sonography in two weeks,” she told him. “And I’ll refer her to the obstetrician your father prefers. We’ll want to know the sex, naturally.”
Crassus nodded once, all Snow, and none of the man Winter Rose had come to know and love. “Naturally.”
When the doctor left, two women came to replace her, chirping about “vocal health.” A coach and a chaperone in one body, the kind that believes posture is a moral issue. The coach tapped Winter Rose’s diaphragm with a manicured nail, as if testing a melon at market.
“Capitol Standard,” she trilled. “We’ll get you there. Repeat after me: ah—eh—ee—oh—oo.”
Winter Rose did it, because some battles weren’t worth fighting. The coach beamed.
“Good. Again. Open the jaw, darling, not the heart. We aren’t singing. We’re speaking correctly. What separates the Capitol and the Districts is our voices, after all.” She put a hand under Winter Rose’s chin and lifted, gentle as a leash. “No more dropped consonants. You’re a Snow now.”
Winter Rose’s mouth said the vowels. Her hands, hidden in her lap, kept four slow beats on her knee. Count, keep, remember.
Then etiquette, the most dangerous lesson of all because it was dressed like kindness while it was actually cruelty. A thin woman named Mavanne arrived with a book for Winter Rose’s head and a yardstick for the rest of her.
“Turn. No. Quiet the hips. Again. Walk as if the floor is grateful. You are not to sit unless the chair deserves you.” She plucked the orange scarf Winter Rose had draped over the vanity and held it like a dead bird as if it was a comfort. “This isn’t… We must get rid of this. It’s too…bold.”
“It was my best friend’s,” Winter Rose said and realized too late she’d used past tense.
Mavanne’s mouth flattened. “Then honor her by not parading your past around like a beggar’s bowl.” She handed it back with two fingers. “Put it away.”
Winter Rose did. Not because Mavanne told her to but the scarf had already done its work. It kept her warm when the train turned her inside out, soaked up tears she hadn’t had time for, and reminded her of a woman with a knife for a tongue and a heart she guarded like it was half the district. Winter Rose folded the scarf, the orange so loud against all of the untasteful pale colors it made her chest ache and slid it into a hatbox at the back of the closet. Then she undid her work and buried it beneath everything already placed in the drawer.
When the room finally exhaled and let her be alone for ten minutes, she sat on the edge of the bed and pressed her palms to her eyes until stars bloomed.
Crassus came in a few moments later with the face he wears when he’s trying to be two men at once and failing at both. The dutiful son standing at attention in his father’s city and the boy from the lake who’d promised her a door like it was the easiest thing in the world to build, both fighting to be present.
“Doctor says two weeks for the scan,” he reported, formal because he was being listened to. “Vitamins.”
“I was there,” Winter Rose said. “I heard her. You don’t need to repeat it.”
A corner of his mouth flicked before he caught it. He closed the door behind him and the room got smaller in a way she liked better. It was finally the size of two people who know each other. The latch clicked and just like that his shoulders dropped a half-inch.
He reached for her hand. She let him take it. He ran his thumb over the grooves of her knuckles, allowing the silence to swallow them for a few seconds.
“I haven’t found it yet, Winter” he said without preamble.
“The guitar,” she said. “My guitar.”
“I will,” he said. “He moved it out of impound and into the Capitol. There’s a new ledger. From what it looks like, he sold it to a family friend named Pluribus Bell. He owns a club here in the Capitol. I can work on buying it back somehow. I used to go to that club a lot during University.”
“I put away the scarf,” she said, as if that were the same conversation. “Aurora Hazel’s orange one.”
He looked up sharply, searching her face for retreat and found only strategy. “You hid it?”
“In a drawer Captain Manners will never touch,” Winter Rose said. “They can have the top of me. They don’t get what’s underneath.”
He nodded once and sat beside her, carefully, because she was carrying something both of them wanted more than they’d let the room know. She leaned her head briefly on his shoulder, then toed off her shoes like she was shedding obedience.
“What did the doctor really say?” she asked. “When you left.”
“That you’re healthy. That we should be boring. That the ‘Snow requirements’ will be discussed.” His mouth went hard on that last phrase. “She said ‘heir’ twice like it was a brand.”
“Of course she did,” Winter Rose said, tired. “Everyone and everything here is a tool. Even babies.”
“Not ours,” he said, quick. “Ours will never be a tool. Our child will be ours and ours alone, Winter Rose.”
“Tell me something ridiculous,” she said. “Something that doesn’t live on a ledger or something I can actually believe.”
He thought for a moment. “I hate every chair in this suite.”
“Really?”
“I want a crooked one,” he said. “A kitchen chair that wobbles unless you tuck a folded napkin under the leg. I want you to threaten to throw it out every week and never do it. Like the one in the Hob at the bar. The one you always sat on when you drank white liquor after performing.”
She closed her eyes and laid back on the bed, letting herself relax for the first time. The picture arrived like a gift her body understood how to unwrap. “I want to name the kettle,” she said. “Something dignified. Lady Gray or something. Since Earl Gray was always bothering with the kettle.”
“We’ll call it that when no one is listening,” he said gravely.
“No one is ever not listening here.”
He smiled for real this time. Then it slid away because there was always a shadow looming over everyone in the Capitol.
“They sent an etiquette instructor,” he said.
“You’re behind. I met her too,” Winter Rose said. She straightened her spine and lowered her lashes and became a perfect statue of herself. “I’m not allowed to sit unless the chair deserves me. Whatever that means.”
He snorted. “You deserve the chairs.”
“I know. Don’t tell Mavanne. She’ll have a stroke.”
He reached into his pocket and brought out a packet wrapped in brown paper. “Contraband,” he said.
“What is it?” she asked, tugging the twine free.
“Honey,” he said. “From Twelve. I snuck it onto the train. Early Gray gave me a jar the night before our wedding as a gift. He said you liked sweet things.”
It was a small jar with a crooked lid. No label. A smear of amber caught the light like a little trapped sunset. Winter Rose’s throat tightened so fast it hurt. She cracked it and the smell punched her with the kindest fist she’d felt all day.
“In case the city tries to make you taste only cane sugar,” Crassus said. “This is real sweetness and comes from things that sting. Like you.”
She dipped a fingertip and pressed it to his lower lip. He didn’t move. She leaned forward and kissed it away, not caring if the room recorded it. “Like us,” she said. “Mean and sweet.”
The knock came at once before the door opened two inches as if it reminded everyone the house was still in charge. “Mrs. Snow,” the chaperone chimed, all bells and custody. “Your evening lesson.”
Winter Rose looked at Crassus. He didn’t flinch. He stood and put his hat back on like he was putting armor away until morning. “I’ll come back after,” he said in a whisper.
After he left, they sent in the vocal coach for round two. “We’ll cure those habits,” the woman promised, as if her accent was an illness. “Say ‘Capitol’.”
“Capitol,” Winter Rose said, obedient enough to keep her tongue and defiant enough to keep her voice.
“Again. Less musical.”
Winter Rose nodded. She did the work. She moved her mouth the way the woman wanted. She learned their vowels, because she’d already decided to steal anything useful and make it hers.
When the door finally shut on the last appointment and her room pretended to be quiet, Winter Rose went to the vanity and lifted the drawer. The orange scarf glowed up at her like a sunset surviving under water. She touched it with two fingers and then let the drawer fall back into place but then changed her mind and draped it around her shoulders.
“You’re not gone,” she told it. “You’re still you.”
She stood in front of the mirror in the ridiculous traveling suit and practiced the Capitol smile she was taught. Then, she dropped the mask and looked at her own eyes, raw and stubborn, and whispered the smallest scrap of a Covey melody, no sound, just the shape of it.
Tongues can be cut. Ribbons and shawls could be hidden. Scales could be drilled out of you and re-drilled in a prettier order. But breath? Breath doesn’t ask permission. Breath doesn’t change.
She set a book on her head, walked the length of the room with perfect posture, and tapped out a rhythm with her bare feet against the carpet. When she laid down, she did it diagonally so the sheets couldn’t tell her what shape to be.
The city spread out past the window, all glitter and rules. Winter Rose slid a hand onto her stomach, letting it rest there before she decided it was time to get ready for bed, knowing the day ahead of her would be just as exhausting as the day behind her was.
Tomorrow they could scold her vowels and adjust her knife angle and try to shampoo the Covey out of her hair.
Tonight, she would wrap herself around the one thing that had brought her all this way and kept her intact anyway.
