Kaine was awake, too, fingers tracing patterns along her arm.
She sat up, leaning forward, and kissed him slowly, memorising the sensation of their lips meeting, the tip of his nose tracing against her cheek.
She slid her fingers through his hair, deepening the kiss, wanting to lose herself in the familiarity of it. She had felt this before.
Kaine’s hand rose up to curve around her neck, sending a shudder of heat through her, her blood alight in her veins. She’d buried the memories of this in the deepest recesses of her mind.
She leaned closer, her hand sliding down his chest.
His hand closed instantly around her wrist, stilling it. “What are you doing?”
She sat up, drawing a deep breath. “I want to have sex with you.”
The tips of her ears burned at saying it so baldly, but she watched him as she spoke. Searching for his reaction.
There was a hard, flintlike look to his eyes, visible even in the dimming moonlight.
“No.”
She tugged at her wrist again, and he let go. She pulled her knees up against her chest, wrapping her arms around them. Her heart was pounding a hard, unsteady tempo.
“I don’t want the last time to be when you were—” She swallowed. “—when we were being forced.”
“No,” was all he said.
Her fingers spasmed, but she nodded, and sat, staring at the deepening shadows across the room.
“Why?” he finally asked.
“I just told you.”
“There’s never only one reason with you,” he said.
She didn’t answer for a long time. “I can’t remember what it was like. Before. I know it happened, but when—when I try to remember any details, I’m always here. If it never comes back—that’ll be all I’ll remember.”
She paused then, thinking of all the ways it could go wrong. There was no going back. What they’d had was gone. It wasn’t something they could just re-create. Attempting it might destroy the fragile safe haven they still had in each other.
“Never mind.” She shook her head. “You’re right, it’s a bad idea.”
He said nothing, but the next day, when he kissed her, it was different.
Hungrier.
After he was gone for several days, he came back and his touch was like fire, his teeth grazing her neck, his face buried against her skin, breathing her in. Heat rushed through her, and she gave a shivering moan, body turning liquid against him.
“Tell me to stop,” he said, his mouth over her throat. “Tell me to stop.”
She pulled him closer. “Don’t stop. I don’t want you to stop.”
His teeth dragged across her skin, and she drew his hands to the buttons on her dress, helping to unfasten them. His fingers slid over her bare skin as she shuddered into his touch, aching for him.
It used to be like this. Feeling it again, she could remember it, the way he used to touch her, hold her, consume her.
He kissed her neck until her head dropped back and she was gasping. Her hands trailed along the curve of his jaw, down over his shoulders, as the physical memory of him awakened beneath her skin.
She brought his face back to hers. “I love you,” she said, kissing him. “I wish I’d told you a thousand times.”
She found the buttons on his shirt and began unfastening, pushing his clothes away, running her hands across his skin, fingers craving the warmth of his body.
“Tell me to stop, and I’ll stop,” he said, his voice ragged.
“Don’t stop,” she said, fingers trembling as they grazed the familiar patterns carved into his back. Her clothes were slipping off, and want pulled at her from within.
She was pushed back on the bed, her body under his as he kissed across her breasts, but then everything inverted; she was lying there, trying to hold still and stay quiet, frozen with fear of what might happen if she didn’t, the bed canopy above her, and the body over her, every sensation a wretched betrayal.
Her hands froze and her eyes went wide as her ribs clamped down around her lungs, suffocating her.
“Stop.” The word was ripped out of her, so painful that it took her lungs with it.
Kaine froze, jerking back, but she caught him, pulling him to her, not letting him go, burying her face against his shoulders, and breathing in and remembering that it was him. And he was hers, she could not let him go.
Her body shook, as she choked back a sob.
Kaine was not even breathing.
“It was just for a moment,” she said, her chest hitching. “It was just too much for a moment. It’ll be better now that I know I can say stop. It was good.” She wouldn’t let go. “It was good. It was just for a moment that I—It was good.”
But he pulled away until she finally let go. He sat up slowly, his face drawn, pupils contracted so that his eyes resembled cracked ice. He looked so fragile.
He was covered in scars. Her hand shook as she reached out and touched one that ran nearly the length of his torso. “What has he done to you?”
He looked away. “Anything he wants.”
She rested her head on his shoulder, entwining her arm with his as they sat there in the lengthening dark, amid the ruins of all they’d once been. They just needed more time.
HELENA HAD READ THROUGH ALL the works ever attributed to Cetus, organising them in order of likely legitimacy. She felt that she was beginning to grasp what Cetus’s fundamental ideas were regarding alchemy, but she was in desperate need of a more recent glimpse at his methods, and she knew exactly where she might find one.
When Kaine was gone, she left her room, moving slowly, avoiding the shadows, using the walls as a touchstone.
She knew which rooms Morrough might be watching from, and she was careful to avoid as many as possible.
Davies materialised as Helena reached the foyer, but Helena passed through the main wing, moving onwards.
She finally stopped, looking over. “Can Morrough see me here?”
Davies shook her head slowly.
Helena went over to the far door. The frame was warped to lock it in place. Without iron resonance, a person would never get through. Helena’s resonance hummed in her fingers as she placed her hands on the frame and pushed the iron back as if it were a curtain. She gripped the knob; it was a simple lock mechanism.
She glanced back at Davies, who had a look of terror on her face, the only emotion she seemed to still express.
“I’m sorry,” Helena said. “I need to see it.”
“No …” Davies said; her voice came out warped, hollow and gasping. She didn’t know if it was Kaine or the remaining shadow of the woman protesting.
Helena shook her head. “I have to know how it was done.”
Davies did not follow but hovered near the door, stricken, uttering her ghastly pleading Nos as Helena turned on the light and went towards the array.
The lights flickered unsteadily overhead. Looking at that too-small cage, knowing who had lived inside it for months, Helena felt sick. Her heart was beginning to pound. She forced her eyes past, focusing.
She stood at the edge of the array, surveying all the careful work to obscure what had been there, trying to superimpose the sketch that Wagner had provided and the drafts in Bennet’s folio. Somewhere amid those three was the complete array.
Her fingers moved slowly, trying to feel out potential patterns, but it had been so long since she’d done more than simple vivimancy.
She got on her knees and began to trace her fingers across every shape and pattern. It was incomprehensible the first several times she crawled across the floor following the lines, trying to visualise the patterns of the energy. It was the third time that it finally began to make sense.
It was an animancy array. She recognised the feeling of the energy, the patterns it would follow.
Her resonance trailed through her fingers as she swept them along one line of the array. Yes, she knew that feeling. Another line. False. The energy would never twist that way.