“Yes.”
“With a kiss.”
“That was the plan.”
“But you didn’t,” he says after a moment.
“Obviously not.”
“Even though you could have. Even after you found out that your kiss couldn’t poison me. Any time we were together, well,I suppose you could have picked up a shotgun and blown my damn head off so long as I wasn’t wearing my suit.”
He says this like it amazes him.
“I know what I could have done,” I say sharply. “I also know that the longer I was with you, the more likely that wouldn’t have happened.”
He frowns, wiggling his jaw back and forth. “You mean to tell me that if you discovered I was a weapon, if I started killing innocent people, that you wouldn’t have found some way to kill me?”
I go quiet. “I’m saying, that if London put in a directive to take you down, right now, as of today, I wouldn’t be able to do it.”
He lets out a dry laugh. “Well, today is my lucky fucking day isn’t it.”
I take another sip. The whiskey is starting to hit, warming my chest, loosening some of the tightness. “I still don’t know why you’re different, why the poison doesn’t work. I assume it has something to do with your ability to not catch diseases or whatever. You can’t be poisoned, at least not by me. You survived me. You keep surviving me.”
“And you keep not killing me.”
We stare at each other. The air between us feels charged, but not with desire, not the way it was before. This is something else. Something vulnerable and more uncertain.
He sets his glass down on the windowsill and walks toward me. Slowly. Carefully. Like he’s approaching something that might bolt.
He stops a few feet away.
“I don’t trust you,” he says.
“I can tell.”
“I don’t know if I can ever trust you.”
“And I don’t blame you.”
“But I don’t want you dead, as much as you don’t want me dead.” He crouches down so we’re eye level, and the earnest look on his face makes my stomach flip despite everything. “I had you falling, and all I could think wascatch her. Even after everything. Even knowing what you are. I had to catch you. I couldn’t lose you.”
I don’t know what to say. My throat is too tight for words anyway.
“So, here’s what I’m thinking,” he continues, his voice rough. “We start over. Not as…” He pauses. “Not as anything we were before. Just two people who’ve both been turned into weapons, trying to figure out what the hell to do about it.”
“What does that look like?” I ask softly, feeling that this as close to a happy ending as we’re ever going to get.
“I don’t know.” His mouth twists into a wry smile. “I’ve never done this before.”
“Neither have I.”
Silence fills the room again.
He holds out his hand. Not to touch—just an offering. A question posed in flesh and bone.
I look at his hand. At his beautiful, wicked face. At the man who threw me off a building and caught me before I hit the ground.
I take it.
