I nodded, swallowing hard and forcing a smile. “Good afternoon, Agent Mayhew.”
I held my breath, anxious to see how Lucas was going to react to me. He knew I wasn’t Juliana. But then why had he been seeking me out? Was he going to expose me? Or did he just want me to know that he knew? Did he think I was just a look-alike, or was he aware of the tandem, and the fact that Juliana and I were analogs, that I was from another universe altogether? And, finally—how much did he know about Thomas’s involvement in my presence in Aurora? He didn’t seem to, from the way he’d been talking to Thomas earlier, but Lucas was a double agent—the god with two faces, Juliana had said, a reference I now understood—and there was no way for me to tell just at a glance what he was thinking or intending to do.
Lucas bowed his head and returned my polite smile. “I just wanted to congratulate you on your upcoming wedding to Prince Callum, Your Highness.”
Yeah, I’m sure you do, I thought. “Thank you,” I said. I lowered my voice in a way that implied I was confiding something in him. “Although I have to tell you, I’m looking forward to having it over and done with. You can’t imagine how many boring meetings I’ve had to sit through while the queen and Gloria argue about place settings and flower arrangements and who can’t sit next to who because of what political scandal.” I sensed Thomas relax at my side.
The two-faced god grinned. “But I thought women liked planning weddings.”
“Well,” I said with a wry laugh. “Most women get to choose their husbands.”
“Your Highness, we need to go,” Thomas said. “Gloria wanted you back in your suite at four o’clock sharp for your fitting.”
“Yes, of course. It was good to see you, Lucas,” I said, extending my hand for him to shake. He took it, squeezing just a bit too hard. He looked into my eyes, and I could read his meaning in them: I know who you are. Or, rather: I know who you aren’t. “Thank you for your congratulations.”
“The pleasure was all mine,” Lucas said. His eyes lingered on me a moment longer, then he turned, with a farewell nod to his brother, and walked away.
When the sound of his last footsteps had faded, I turned to Thomas, who was still staring after Lucas. I gave him a slight shake to get his attention.
“Sorry,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck. “Lucas doesn’t usually come to the Castle—support agents don’t have the clearance. He said he’d just gotten promoted, but I can’t think—”
“Forget that,” I commanded. He narrowed his eyes, sensing my urgency. “You and I need to talk, now. Somewhere private.”
“Library?” Thomas suggested. I nodded.
“How’s it going with the prince?” he asked as we made our way.
“Good,” I said, grateful for the momentary distraction from what I was about to tell him. “He’s really nice. I think he’s lonely. Did you know that his mother wouldn’t let him go to school? This is his first time leaving the city he grew up in.”
“Queen Marian gets a lot of criticism from the press hounds about that. They say she does it to make sure that they’re weak and entirely dependent on her.”
“I think Callum might despise his mother,” I said.
“I don’t blame him.” Thomas looked like he was about to say something else, but he refrained. “You brought Callum in with you to see the king this morning. How do you think that went?”
“Callum lost his father when he was little,” I said. “He seems to understand what I’m going through. I mean—well, you know what I mean.”
“And there weren’t any problems with the king?”
“No. He just kept saying the same old stuff over and over again. You know: ‘Mirror, mirror,’ ‘touch and go,’ and that string of numbers …”
“One, one, two, three, five, eight,” Thomas said. “It’s from—”
“The Fibonacci sequence,” I finished for him. “I know.” After about an hour of seating charts and arguments, I’d started to tune the queen out and for some reason the numbers floated up in my memory and snagged in my mind. They wouldn’t let go until I figured out what they were trying to tell me, which was that they weren’t random at all.
“You’re good,” Thomas said. “I had to look them up.”
“Granddad taught me to recite the sequence when I couldn’t get to sleep,” I told him. “That, and the exact value of pi. I can do that one to twenty-five decimal places.”
“Your granddad is quite the character,” Thomas said. I smiled. My upbringing had been eclectic to say the least, but I wouldn’t have traded it for anything—well, almost anything.
“What do you think it means?”
Thomas shrugged. “Not sure. Maybe nothing. Could be just a coincidence.”
“I don’t believe in coincidence,” I said.
“Neither do I,” Thomas agreed.
“The king keeps calling me ‘angel eyes,’ ” I continued. “Is that his pet name for Juliana?”
“No, it isn’t.” Thomas frowned. He locked eyes with me, and without even saying a word I knew we were thinking the same thing. Something was up. The Fibonacci sequence wasn’t a string of random numbers; it was an ordered progression that continued infinitely. Granddad called the Fibonacci sequence “magic numbers,” and they were. They occurred in nature all the time: in the spiraled scales of a pinecone, the arrangement of leaves on a stem, the curve of waves, and the ancestry of honeybees.
This was another lesson Granddad had taught me: The world is far less random than it appears. Once you started paying attention, patterns emerged where before you only saw chaos. So what was it that we were missing?
TWENTY-SIX
“What’s the matter?” Thomas asked, once he’d done a thorough sweep of the library for anyone who might be lurking in corners or behind bookshelves. “Did something happen with the queen?”
I shook my head, kneading my hands in my lap. I had no idea how to phrase what I was about to tell him. All I knew was that I couldn’t keep this secret from him anymore. Not telling Thomas that Juliana had arranged her own kidnapping with Libertas in order to preserve his good opinion of her was one thing, but I couldn’t hide his brother’s treachery from him. It made him too vulnerable, made it too easy for Lucas to manipulate him, and I couldn’t allow that. In spite of the fact that Thomas had brought me to Aurora, he had always tried to protect me, and I wanted to protect him, too.
“Then what?” Thomas reached out and took my hands in his, a tender gesture that made me light up inside. Why did everything have to be so difficult? Why did I have to like him so much after everything that he’d put me through? But for better or worse, I cared about him, and I knew that he cared about me. So informing him that the two people he was closest to in the entire universe had betrayed him would be the hardest thing I’d ever have to do.
The hardest thing apart from leaving him when all this was over.
“Thomas,” I said softly. “I know how Libertas managed to kidnap Juliana.”
“You do?”
I nodded. “It wasn’t a kidnapping. She wanted to escape, and Libertas helped her do it. They promised her a new life if she gave them a piece of information that they needed, something the king told her before he was shot. Lucas works for them. They planned the whole thing together.”
“No.” Thomas snatched his hands away. “You’re wrong. Juliana would never do that. Neither would Lucas.”
“She didn’t want to marry Callum. You told me that yourself,” I insisted. “And maybe she was afraid that what happened to her father would happen to her, too, if she stayed. I don’t know if Lucas approached her first, or if she somehow figured out what he was doing and struck a deal with him, but either way—”