He stopped. His eye closed.
Lu’s heart bucked and she folded to her knees next to him, the vial in her hand.
“I don’t blame you,” she said.
Vex didn’t look at her.
“I need you to know that,” she continued. “I need you to know that everything I said to you... I do trust you. It wasn’t about you. It wasme, and I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry too. I—” His face stayed impassive for one full breath before the corner of his mouth lifted in a small smile that sent a flurry of sparks into her gut. He opened his eye, finally. “I apologized. Again. To your apology. Can we... can we just stop apologizing to each other?”
Lu smiled too. It broke apart the darkness, a sliver of light in the strain.
Vex’s smile faded, and Lu was suddenly, overwhelmingly aware of how close she was to him. The air between them was heady with sweat and mint, the tang of plants from her own clothes and Tuncian spices that were embedded in the very fiber of this shack.
“I know most of our interactions since Port Camden have been apologizing,” Vex said. He tried for humor, but there was something tense to it, like he’d noticed how close they were, too. “Guess we’ll have to find some other way to interact. I mean,whoa, that sounded—ahem—ignore me. I should leave now.”
He took the vial from her open palm and started to stand.
“Why?” she asked.
Her question eased him back down. The orange coals caught the sheen on his face, highlighting the smooth expanse of his cheeks, the lines across his lips, the single bead of sweat sluicing down the contours of his throat as he worked a swallow.
His body was bowed toward her, knees bent. “You want me to stay?”
Lu sipped in a breath. Held it.
Why did you go to him?she asked herself again.You don’t deserve him. Milo was right.
She hadn’t told Vex yet that she had killed Milo. The confession gathered on her tongue, but she held down the mention of him, not wanting him to intrude here.
“Yes.” Lu could barely hear her own plea. “Stay.”
Vex thumbed the vial. His eye never left hers, one cheek caught between his teeth. “I don’t... ah. I’m really not good at—this.” He waved to encompass something unseen and warm and as close as the air brushing Lu’s skin. “Horrendous, in fact—god, you’ve met my whole history with women, so I need you to beexplicitlyclear about what it is you want—”
Lu started. “Rosalia.”
Vex choked. “Well, that’s... disappointing.”
“That’s not what I—no.” Lu shifted upright. “She called you something. What was it?”
Lu knew as soon as it left her mouth that it was the wrong thing to ask. The sweet calm took a jagged turn inthe tension on Vex’s face, his body rocking back.
“No.” Lu shook her head. “I’m sorry. Don’t answer that—”
“Mezzochi.”
Lu froze.
“It’s Grozdan,” Vex continued. He tipped his head out of the firelight. “For half blind.”
Revulsion seized Lu’s throat. Rosalia had tossed that word out as though it was something humorous. Even Vex shrugged, tried to smile, but his head was still angled away. The scarred part of his face, away from the light—away from Lu.
“I didn’t know what it meant until a few weeks into our... whatever it was,” Vex said, forced ease gripping his voice again. “Which is why I don’t trust myself to act on anything unless you tell me, in very clear terms, what you want to get out of this. I’m marvelously bad at reading what’s real, and what’s a joke, and what I—”
His words cut off in a startled gasp when Lu grabbed the collar of his shirt. His face whipped around to meet hers, shock trading for wonder as she lifted her other hand to cup his neck, the vial forgotten on the ground beside them.
“I want—” Lu’s mouth stayed open, trying to form theclear termsthat Vex asked for. But nothing followed those two words, and they became their own plea:
