Kai tried to follow Selene. He ran, and he lost her. She had disappeared into the night and the hushed wildness of the gardens, branches reaching out to pet Kai as he paced, fretfully, back and forth through the gardens. He found a slipper, rejected on the gravel. Selene's slipper. Kai held it and stared at it for a very long time.

What had he done? Kai tried to wrap his mind around everything that just happened. He tried to think of what Selene had just said, and found he couldn't find a word. His spine was stiff with shock and his brain was frying with sparks -- he had to sit down. Kai collapsed onto a stone bench and stroked the slipper with his thumb, stunned.

So Selene really was the bad guy. She really was just like all of Luna's leaders before her, all of the monarchs whose deeds of horrible extent reached all the way to Earth. Letumosis was Luna's fault. They'd withheld an antidote all those years. Selene withheld an antidote. Until what? She could marry Kai's father, have Earth in her grasp? Kai couldn't tell if he'd just foiled a plan of Selene's by falling in love with her, or if she'd just never experienced love before.

She killed her mother. That's what she'd said, and then she'd ran.

Kai's head fell, his eyes still on the ornate beads of Selene's shoe. She'd killed her. Kai's eyes lined themselves with salty tears.

He didn't feel right, feeling betrayed. He didn't feel like he should be. Selene wasn't his. Luna was not his friend, and it never was. But he had invested something in Selene, against his will and against his better judgement. He had found in her someone she was not, and he had fought against every grain of sense in his body to hold onto that. To find someone who understood him in the girl he couldn't have even known.

Kai thought back to that time in the kitchens, when Selene had that look in her eyes as he cried over his father. A look that made him think she understood what he was feeling, and he had remembered that Selene's mother had been killed when she was just eight years old. Kai was eighteen, and he had known in that moment that he could never understand the kind of pain Selene had felt in her life. Her life was a monsoon of knives and bullets, and she'd avoided every single one. But Kai wondered now if that Selene ever truly was the person he'd thought. The her he thought he'd had figured out, the Selene that he thought felt what he felt, felt the pain he did. He couldn't help but wonder if every little look and every little smile and every tear he'd ever seen her shed was a lie. If it was all a manipulation.

Not all of it. Because then she would have known that Kai would fall in love with her, and she wouldn't have done it. She would have kept her distance. He wouldn't have been stupid, and she would still be winning at her game.

Kai wanted to sleep. He wanted to cry. He knew that if he could do everything over, he would have done it all the same, just to see Selene like that again. Vulnerable and rueful, the Selene he'd fallen in love with, and Kai hated that he didn't hate her. He should hate her, he should despise her. She was Luna, and Luna was her, and they were synonymous and evil. They were going to marry him for the Eastern Commonwealth and then there would be no peace, there would be only Luna, all over Earth, she would be empress and she wouldn't care for him. She would not be Selene. Who was Selene?

Kai started to cry.