ALIZEH REMEMBERED HERSELF A MOMENT too late, jerking away from Cyrus’s hand with the shock that she’d allowed him to touch her at all. She studied him warily in the intervening silence, his eyes as startling as her own, her heart pounding in her chest with a delayed fear. Alizeh had been wrong; she could not manage him. She had been wrong, too, to underestimate him. Always Cyrus seemed to be one step ahead of her, and somehow she knew it would not do to lie to him now, for he seemed preternaturally attuned to deception. It made her wonder whether he owned a nosta, too.
