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“Sorry about my father.” Inej pulled him into the hug and whispered, “We are not our fathers.”
“I would come for you,” he said, and when he saw the wary look she shot him, he said it again. “I would come for you. And if I couldn’t walk, I’d crawl to you, and no matter how broken we were, we’d fight our way out together—knives drawn, pistols blazing. Because that’s what we do. We never stop fighting.”
“But I am grateful every day for that disaster. I needed a cataclysm to shake me from the life I knew. You were an earthquake, a landslide.”
“You aren’t a flower, you’re every blossom in the wood blooming at once. You are a tidal wave. You’re a stampede. You are overwhelming.”
Matthias was running through the streets of a foreign city, into dangers he did not know, but for the first time since he’d looked into Nina’s eyes and seen his own humanity reflected back at him, the war inside him quieted.
To hell with revenge, to hell with his schemes. If Rollins had done something to Inej, Kaz would paint East Stave with his entrails.
“You’re better than waffles, Matthias Helvar.”
“Let’s not say things we don’t mean, my love.”
“Do you know the Suli have no words to say ‘I’m sorry’?” “What do you say when you step on someone’s foot?” “I don’t step on people’s feet.” “You know what I mean.” “We say nothing. We know the slight was not deliberate. We live in tight quarters, traveling together. There’s no time to constantly be apologizing for existing. But when someone does wrong, when we make mistakes, we don’t say we’re sorry. We promise to make amends.”
“Stop treating your pain like it’s something you imagined. If you see the wound is real, then you can heal it.”
He didn’t deserve peace and he didn’t deserve forgiveness, but if he was going to die today, maybe the one thing he’d earned was the memory of her—brighter than anything he would ever have a right to—to take with him to the other side.
This city’s price is blood,” said Kaz, “and I’m happy to pay with yours.”
“I told you, I like your stupid face.”
