His hands pulled her close enough to whisper, with a voice so human she could close her eyes and almost pretend he was. “Stay here. With me. The things I have done . . .” He stopped, and swallowed. “I’ve made so many mistakes, Cora.”
She didn’t know which mistakes he was talking about, but it didn’t matter. They had both made so many. In that moment, more had changed than just his eyes. In her, or in him, she wasn’t sure. When she had first seen him, she had thought him such a terrifyingly beautiful creature. Their captor. Their jailer. He was still those things to her, but he was something more. She didn’t want to put a word on it, and she didn’t know how she even would, but she knew it had to do with the times he had asked her what it meant to be human.
This was what had changed, and it was so devastatingly simple: she had become a person to him; he had become a person to her. Human, Kindred—it didn’t matter. It was just her, and him, standing in the sea.
His hand grazed the constellation markings on her neck. She couldn’t help but think about Lucky, who drew her to him as if they’d been made for each other—exactly as the Kindred engineered it. She and Lucky had everything needed to fall in love: attraction, respect, a shared past she hadn’t even known about. But in the same way the trees here were not quite trees, and the fruit was not quite fruit, the Kindred had misjudged something about humanity, and people, and the connections between humans. Love wasn’t just a combination of matching physical and personal criteria. It was something you couldn’t put into words, just a certainty, a twist of fate, a spark.
As much as Lucky drew her to him, she had never felt that spark. Not like she did with Cassian.
She pulled away, covering her face with her hands.
“Cora,” he murmured, and then said her name again and again. She was shaking so hard that she leaned her head against his chest and thought about how before him, before this place, everyone thought of her as a victim—her family, her classmates, the media, even Lucky. But Cassian had never looked at her that way. He had always known that beneath the smile she’d been told to wear, she was strong.
Cora started crying because she didn’t want this, and it was wrong, and she didn’t know anything about him. Cassian might have been Mali’s hero, but he could never be hers. How unfair, then, that suddenly she felt closer to him than anyone.
He touched a hand to her cheek. “Tell me what you’re feeling.”
He knew, just as she knew, that what was happening between them was wrong. That he couldn’t fall in love with a human and she couldn’t fall in love with her captor, but here they were.
“Please,” he whispered. “Whatever you ask, it’s yours. Just tell me that you feel—”
“Stop.” Her hand went to his lips, silencing him. “Don’t say that.”
His muscles were tensing and untensing as he gave up the last remnants of his fight to cloak his emotions. He rubbed a hand over the bump in his nose, turned his head to the side and cursed. He was acting just like . . . a person. And that scared her most of all.
“Cloak your emotions again,” she ordered.
“I don’t want to. You asked what I was like in my private life. Let me show you.” He leaned in, touching his forehead to hers, his lips a breath away. “You captivated me. I knew you were different. Strong. So full of potential. You baffled the researchers. You baffled me too. I did everything I could to understand you, and you were still a mystery.”
His chin started to tilt toward hers. His lips parted. “I want to know what it feels like,” he whispered.
My god. He was going to kiss her, and it was so wrong, and so was how badly she wanted him to.
She turned her head at the last second. “Don’t. If you cared for me, you’d help me escape.”
He balled his fists and straightened, trying to gain control over his emotions. He was a jealous person, she hadn’t forgotten. And Mali had said they were unpredictable when their emotions were uncloaked. As much as Cora wanted to think of him as human right now, she had to remind herself that he wasn’t.
He took a step away from her, pacing in the surf. “Is that what you want? To be away from me?”
“We weren’t meant to live behind bars.”
“What you are asking me goes against logic. You want to leave this place—leave me—when I’ve so recently discovered that you remaining close is the only thing I truly want.”
She urged her foot to take a step closer. Her hand drifted to her collar, to the charm necklace that tied her to a different world. She didn’t stop until she felt the heat from his body.
“I know,” she said. “I’m still asking.”
“Here I can at least see you, and touch you, and keep you safe from those who might do you harm. Why would I help you when I would lose even that?”
“Because I’d never be happy here. And caring about someone means you would sacrifice your own happiness for theirs.”