I cut a line under his eye.One shallow one down the side of his throat.Then I lean in, bracing his leg, and start to carve.I finish the last line of the peel.Blood sheets down his shin, slicking the concrete.The skin over a kneecap is thin.Tender.It pulls away like old wallpaper, and when I reach the bone, that’s when he screams.
I don’t waste time with questions.I don’t try to be clean or precise.I stab the fucker in his eye, hilt smashing orbital bone.He’s begging but I can’t make out the words, just his scream tearing the silence open.
“Cassius.”Sava’s voice cuts through the warehouse.
I rip my knife from his face and then jam it into his throat.Blood shoots from the hole when I pull out my drenched blade.I push him over.
I crouch low, peel his shirt back, and carve a careless spider before pulling a black-widow charm from my pocket and shoving it between his teeth.Then I stand, still holding the knife, and turn toward the door.
Melinda is with her.
Her arms are tied in front of her with zip ties.Her lip is split.Her eyes are fire.
She sees me.Sees the man at my feet, what I’ve done, and she doesn’t flinch.She steps forward.
Sava blocks her.“No.”
“I need to go to him,” Melinda says, her voice raw.
“You don’t need to see that up close.”
“I do.”
Sava looks like she might argue.But she doesn’t.She steps aside.Melinda walks past her and stops beside me.Her eyes sweep down to the blood, the blade, the ruin of the man still oozing crimson.
“He deserved to die for what he did to you,” I say, not looking away from her.
“Yes,” she says.“But I don’t deserve to stand here any longer.”
TheMachinein me wants to make sure the whole city tastes this mistake.I make myself look at her instead, and a door to a room I didn’t know existed in my head unlatches.
Cold air.A streetlamp buzzing.A body cooling at my feet.And at the mouth of that alley: light catching a woman’s hair like a halo.
“The streetlamp,” I say, softer than I ever speak.“You.”
Her breath stutters.Mine does too.The same realization settles in both our chests.Inevitability.I wasn’t walking toward a stranger that night.I was walking towardmy wife.Neither of us was ever lost.We were steered.
“Of course it was you.”She steps into me.Her bound wrists press my chest, chin tipping up.I slide the blade flat into my palm so I don’t cut her, hook the tip under the zip tie, and pop it.Plastic snaps.She lifts the angry grooves to my mouth and I kiss them once, twice, again, but the red, raw, marks don’t disappear.
Her hands climb my shirt and drag me down.The kiss is careful and feral.Copper at the corner of her split lip, salt on her skin, the kind of relief that is oxygen after drowning.My marked knuckles frame her jaw; her fingers fist in my collar.Somewhere to my left, Sava turns away and gives us the room.The warehouse, the corpse, the blood, all drop away until there’s only her breath against mine and the fact that she’s here.Safe.
There was never anyone else.That night under the lamp, all that charge wasours.Something ugly in me goes quiet.I blink.Shake off theMachine.Really look at her.Find the mercy I wasn’t born with but became a piece of me the day I saw her, a sliver of glass lodged in the thin skin over my sternum.
“Say it,” she whispers against my mouth.
“You’re mine,” I answer, and feel her smile wrecked and holy against my lips.“Only mine.”
“And?”She brushes open-mouthed kisses up my jaw and behind my ear.
“And,” I take a half step back so I can look her in the eyes.“I’m yours.Only ever yours.”
Her breath catches, a prayer swallowed too fast.I reach into my pocket and pull out her ring, lost in that goddamn parking garage.Her eyes go wide when she sees it.
“Cassius—”
“I don’t lose things that matter to me,” I murmur, sliding it back onto her finger.The metal’s warm from my skin and remembers her.“You understand?”
She nods, a tear breaking loose, caught between a smile and a sob.
