Splintered

Chapter Seventy: Every Thorn Has His Rose

"You...you...what?"

That couldn't be. 

He couldn't want that.

The memory of them in District Two seared through her psyche. His lips just inches from hers, his hands on her skin, and the way his eyes had drank her in like she was more satisfying than any oddly colored wine.

Her intuition lashed her for being so blind. Her obtuseness slapped her in the face.

"Are you truly that surprised?" Snow asked, siding with the sentiments of her inner thoughts.

She shouldn't be. The signs had all been there. The ones that practically screamed the charade was collapsing.

Open your eyes.

Moments between them raced through her mind like a television program playing with the fast-forward clamped down. All the conversations, the arguments, the roses, the touches, and the expressions that could intimidate her in an instant.

She stumbled backward, as the twinkling lights above them smiled happily, blissfully unaware.

Snow glanced up at them as he twirled the rose.

"I'm no longer satisfied with fake."

Despite her crumbling defenses, she couldn't resist the last-ditch urge to cocoon herself in the comfortable denial she'd become so accustomed to. But it was as if she were trying to wrap herself in a blanket that was on fire.

"You've lost your mind. Maybe it's that stupid perfume or that blue wine. I'm starting to think they are interchangeable and that can't be healthy."

His eyes flashed at her answer.

"If I have been driven to delusion, it's not the fault of my vices," he said with a careful smile, eyes sweeping from her toes to her irises.

Hazel wished she had an actual blanket to shield herself. Her tongue was heavy as she gestured between them with an unsteady hand.

"This would never work."

"That's a theory," he countered.

"It's ridiculous."

"Another hypothesis." He dismissed. "And as any decent scientist or Gamemaker knows. Theories must be tested." Probing her eyes with his own, he asked, "Do you consider all of Panem to be ridiculous? How many already believe there is something between us?"

"They've bought into a story. One you wrote. One you asked me to sell."

"Sell it, you truly have."

Letting out a long, icy breath of her own, she surged to the opposite side of the pond, re-establishing a healthy distance. "It's mass delusion."

"If anyone is suffering from delusion." Snow harmonized his strides with hers as his voice softened. "Or denial. It is not the entire country, my dear."

Words failed her.

"You said there's more to me than you first thought. I am not alone in that. You told me I inspired curiosity. I'll admit, you've done the same." He paused, eyes not lifting from the ice-covered pond.

"My perspective of you was much different at the start. Just another unfortunate District girl. One, perhaps, unluckier than most. One in the wrong place, in the wrong family at the wrong time. One unfortunate enough to be caught up in Augustus's gambles. I figured you'd be just another tribute. Another name on another Reaping list. But I couldn't have been more wrong."

Hazel's pulse responded to his words like she'd chugged three cups of coffee.

Snow's gloved fingers ghosted over his own forearm, "You're like a thorn, a splinter, buried too deep."