"I think of the clasp of the bullet in the gun, the gun in the hand. I wonder—was he invincible then, in his happiness? I wonder—are we ever?"
“I would beg it of you.”
There is an emotion clawing its way across Caine's face and he is trying his hardest to deny it of everything it wishes to take from him.
“Take a piece of me if you can hold it.”
“Your name, then,” he says, and his voice is hoarse not from the salt but from her. “Allow me to leave with your name.”
He does not know why he has so easily let her—nameless girl, diamond choker, ethereal and not-quite-mortal—touch him. When he had refused Moira’s embrace so cruelly. When he had never quite dared with Seraphina. (Except for a feather-light brush of her hair.)
He invariably arrives at the conclusion that the problem must be buried deep within himself. How he scorns touch. How he has always scorned it. The worst is how Caine cannot quite blame it on Agenor, either, though he has tried—he has tried—because when Raum had driven iron stakes into his wings, when he had not seen daylight for weeks, when he had sneered up into the silver king’s face and saw not blue eyes but black—he had felt not fear but deeply wrong elation.
This is what I remember, his body had whispered to him. This is the touch I know.
The problem is buried deep within himself. There is something vital in him that was made intrinsically flawed, a cog never fully righted, and Caine has always known this.
Yet it has never bothered him like it does now.
How he hates the wave of weakness that avalanches over him when skin blushes hot beneath skin, when a soft touch on the neck or the shoulder or the haunch transmits a message he cannot understand, cannot ever hope to understand.
When he touches, he does it to kill. To snuff the life out of someone who, as horrible as they may be, as young or old or ugly or beautiful or damaged as they may be, may not deserve a fate as finite as death. Caine—when the letters arrived on his windowsill, or from Agenor’s hawk, or sometimes, from the bloodied pockets of a scene he'd arrived too late to finish—didn’t know what they deserved. He was not justice. He was not mercy.
He was merely a deliverance, from one dark world to the next.
And this has never bothered him. He tells himself this desperately. The emotion dragging across his face, as the girl made of shadows and light begs him to take something of her with him, is desperation.
You do not really want me to, he thinks. You do not know what you are asking of me.
How he hates it when she leans into him (and he leans back); when she drags her nose along the hollows of his chin (and his eyes flutter closed); when he hears her breathing against him as if it were his own.
How he hates it, and — how he utterly craves it.
She whispers to him that she is from somewhere far, far above, and Caine believes it. So she is an angel, of a sort, he thinks. So she comes from somewhere bright, and holy, and warm.
Of course she does.
“Angel,” he says, seawater leaving salt lines down his face, all of him screaming from the cold when he, at last, moves away from her. Far enough away, this time, that she cannot move back.
“Where I come from, those who fall from the sky are angels.” There is something that is breaking in Caine’s low, toneless voice, as he stands there apart from her, wondering if he will ever see her again.
He knows he shouldn’t. He knows this with the certainty that there is something broken in him, something vital, that he
He turns back to her and says:
“Will you walk with me? I left my things on the cliffs. I am going back to get them.” His ears perk towards her, to catch an answer if it comes.
Slowly, painfully, Caine begins walking back down the beach.
