“What?” My question was more breath than voice.

She wiped her face with both palms, then looked straight into my eyes. “I realized that I’d rather die with you than live with someone else.”

I don’t remember crossing the room, but the next thing I knew, she was in my arms, so real, and solid, and just like I remembered. I couldn’t resist anymore. So I kissed her.

Sixteen

I shouldn’t have said it. I meant every word of it, but I shouldn’t have said it, because it wouldn’t work out. It couldn’t. Just because I was willing to risk my life to be with him didn’t mean he should be willing to risk his.

Then he was kissing me, and everything else just kind of melted away. It was as if I’d never left. As if I’d never lost him, or my friends and family. As if I’d never worked as a Tracker, or been stabbed on the job. As if I’d never even met Ruben Cavazos and lost a good chunk of my free will.

But it wasn’t real. We were both six years older, and about a century wiser and more jaded. The world had kept turning in my absence and slung us onto opposite poles, though Cam didn’t know it yet.

What we wanted didn’t matter. What mattered was what we’d sworn. What we couldn’t undo.

“Wait.” I pulled back, but couldn’t quite make myself step out of his arms. They felt too good. Too familiar. Cam stared down at me expectantly, and I forced out more words I didn’t want to say. “I just…I need to know that you understand what you’re getting into.”

He grinned, and his hand slid over my hip. “I think I remember how this part works….” He leaned down for another kiss, but when his lips trailed down my neck, I stepped back reluctantly.

“I want this as badly as you do,” I insisted, but he shook his head, reaching for me again.

“That’s not possible….”

“But we’re making a choice here,” I continued. “And I need to know that you understand that. We’re choosing a short life together, rather than potentially long lives apart.” I was weak. He felt too good. And at the moment, theoretical death seemed too distant and vague a concept to worry about. But death would come, and I didn’t want either of us to regret our decision when the end came.

“Olivia, I’m not going to kill you. Okay?” he demanded softly, and I could only nod. “And you’re not going to kill me. There isn’t a single doubt in my mind about that. Why would you go to all this trouble to keep us safe, only to turn around and kill me down the road? Our future is whatever we make of it, and that’s nothing to be afraid of.”

I wanted to believe him. I wanted to silence that cynical voice in my head and embrace the cheesy optimism Cam had always been prone to spout when he got emotional. But he didn’t know about the mark on my thigh, and he didn’t know what would happen if I failed to fulfill my contract with Cavazos. “It’s a nice sentiment. It really is. But it’s just not practical. Didn’t you ever read Oedipus Rex? Trying to avoid our fate could damn well be what causes it.”

“This, coming from the woman who’s been trying to avoid it for six years.”

I shrugged. “I didn’t know what else to do. Doing nothing felt like slow suicide. Or homicide. But my point is that no matter how good this feels now, it isn’t going to have a happy ending. I need to know that you understand that.”

“No, I don’t.” He took me by the shoulders, careful of my bandaged arm, and stared down at me with that infuriatingly stubborn hopeful streak. We used to argue opposite sides of the same coin all the time—usually waxing pathetic on the state of human kindness—and I was always the skeptic. I used to think that was because he was gullible. Not quite naive, but just a little too trusting of people in general. But if that were the case, the Tower syndicate would have beaten the optimism out of him years ago.

No, Cam was neither gullible nor truly optimistic. He was desperate. He needed to believe that there was some kind of greater good out there to give his life meaning. Even when his life was currently chained via blood to one of the largest, most dangerous Skilled crime families in the country. And that desperation—that need to believe—was what stared down at me, when I was ready to die for him, and he was ready to live for me.

“No, Liv,” he repeated. “Don’t give me any of that ‘cruel fate&217; bullshit. I don’t believe in it, and neither do you. We don’t know if Noelle was seeing the etched-in-stone future, or just one possibility. There aren’t enough Seers around for us to really know any of it for sure.”

He was right about that. Seers were so rare the Skill often skipped entire generations. Elle was literally the only Seer I’d ever met, and the only other one she’d ever known was a dead grandmother on her father’s side.

“There’s so much we don’t know. So much we may never know. But I do know this—we can make this work. We will make this work. And all you have to do is stay. That’s it, Olivia.” He eyed me expectantly, his heart not merely on his sleeve, but in his entire bearing. In every breath he took, and in the one he held, waiting for my answer.

So I kissed him.

Then I kissed him again with everything I had stored up from six years without him. With all the love, and fear, and parts of myself I’d kept boxed up and thought I’d never feel again.

And suddenly kissing wasn’t enough. I didn’t realize I’d taken off his shirt until it fell from my fingers. Then his chest was warm beneath my hands, and I realized all over again—feeling the differences I’d only seen earlier—that he’d changed. He was stronger. Harder. And I hoped with every breath I had left that those changes were limited to his physique. Was it possible that the syndicate could have made him this tough on the outside, yet failed to harden him on the inside?