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I have to love everyone from a distance, and I’m so lonely.”
He didn’t let go. “Helena…” She stilled at her name. “I’m alone, too,” he said.
Like a star, he was glittering and ice-cold from afar, but when the space was bridged, the heat of him was endless.
“I should have known—the moment I looked into your eyes, I should have known I would never win against you.”
“I’ve always thought my eyes were my best feature.” “One of them,” he said quietly.
Her need to love people and her desperate longing for them to love her back—she had given that up, locked it away and buried it, giving its place to the coldness of logic, realism, and the necessary choices of war. This could only lead to ruin.
“I used to think that we were the reverse of each other. Now—” She looked at him and extended her hand. “—I can’t help feeling like we’re mostly the same.”
Their foreheads touched, and she closed her eyes. It was as though their souls were touching, too.
He straightened and patted Amaris just below a huge wing. The feathers were as long as Helena’s arms.
None of it matters. Sacrifice and pain, the universe does not care.”
“You’re wrong,” she said. He opened his mouth to argue, to offer an endless list of examples of how cold and uncaring the world was, but she didn’t need to be told.
“You’re wrong because I’m part of the universe,” she said. “A tiny piece, I admit, maybe never an important or mathematically significant one, but still a piece. You and I are not separate from it. No one is. It matters to me, everyone who’s died and everyone who will, and everyone who suffers. As long as I exist, I will always care. And that means that...
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Calculating, Cunning, Devoted, Determined, Ruthless, Unfailing, Unhesitating, and Unyielding. To avenge his mother. In penance for all the ways he believed he’d failed her.
The space between them was ice-cold, as though all their ghosts surrounded them. They were both drenched in the dead.
The war was an abyss that took everything and was never satisfied. There was always more required. Another life. An additional measure of blood. Be better. Smarter. More ruthless. Quicker. More cunning. Accept a second portion of pain. It was never enough.
Someday, she promised herself, someday I am going to love him in a moment that isn’t stolen.
Hold on. You promised you wouldn’t break.
She remembered it being like this before, slow and intimate. The burning reverence of his touch when he’d made love to her. That’s what it had been. Making love. It was what they’d had.
“We have to stop hurting ourselves for each other,” she finally said. “Both of us. We’re not going to last if this is the only way we know how to love.”
“Love isn’t as pretty or pure as people like to think. There’s a darkness in it sometimes.
Kaine and I go hand in hand. I made him who he is. I knew what that array meant when I saved him. If he’s a monster, then I’m his creator.”
