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stasis. Helena remembered that detail. Remembered that she’d been placed there as a prisoner, kept preserved, but someday, someone would come for her.
her again with an increasingly sour expression. “We’ll
“You’re like a rose in a graveyard,” he said, and his lips twisted into a bitter smile. “I wonder what you could have turned into without the war.”
“Don’t die, Kaine,”
“I know. But that one you don’t come back from.” He gave a bitter laugh. “All right, then, but only because you asked.”
“You made me as expendable as I am now. And you didn’t even want me, either.”
“You are not replaceable,” he said, his hands trembling against her shoulders. “You are not required to make your death convenient. You are allowed to be important to people. The reason I’m here—the reason I’m doing any of this—is to keep you alive. To keep you safe. That was the deal.” He searched her face. “They didn’t tell you.” She shook her head, giving a broken sob and—before she let herself think—she kissed him.
When he kissed her, it felt like the beginning of something that could be eternal.
“I memorised yours, too,” he said after a moment, and then sighed, looking away. “I should have known—the moment I looked into your eyes, I should have known I would never win against you.”
“You’re mine. You swore yourself to me. Now and after the war. I’m going to take care
of you. I’m not going to let anyone hurt you. You don’t have to be lonely. Because you’re mine.”
“Being alive is not the same as living. I hope someday you’ll have a chance to realise the difference.”
His shoulders slumped. “If you die, Helena, I’m done. I won’t continue this. I’m tired.”
“You are so much more than what the war has done to you.”
“You are,” she said desperately. “Just—just like I am. There’s more to both of us—it’s just waiting to get out. Someday, we’ll leave all this behind. Go far away, and you’ll see. The two of us—I think we could.”
She could feel Kaine watching her and forced herself to speak. “I think your scars are prettier than mine,” she finally said. “I have a better healer.”
“You are. It doesn’t matter what happens to you, you will still be mine.”
She told him in the way she let go of herself and held on to him instead. With every beat of her heart. I love you. I will always love you. I will always take care of you.
“You didn’t save me,” he said when he was finally capable of speech. “You just put us in hell for two years.”
“You’re mine,” she said, heart pounding unsteadily against her ribs. “Did you really think I would still hate you once I remembered?” She shook her head. “Even before I did, you were the only thing that ever felt safe. I thought I was going mad, but a part of me always knew you. I left a note. Didn’t you get my note? I love you.”
She kept working; there simply could not be a future in which she left Kaine behind to die.
He looked back at her. “You’re not choosing. You promised me anything I wanted. I want you to stop breaking yourself trying to save me. Go. Live. Tell our daughter I saved you both. That—is what I want.”
“You need a willing soul for that, and you’re not going to find one, because the only person who’d die for me is you.”
He sighed, tilting his head back. “I’ve killed so many people,” he finally said. “I never thought I’d get stuck on an animal of all things.”
“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.”
and foreign-born alchemist Helena Marino. Marino left the city at the start of the Paladian Civil War to study healing. She survived the war but died during imprisonment prior to Liberation. She was a non-active member of the Order of the Eternal Flame and did not fight.
