But I don’t hate them. My pulse thuds in my throat.
“Is that all I am?” I whisper. “Property?”
He looks at me, his gaze softening a fraction. His thumb brushes across my cheekbone, catching a tear before it falls.
“Property can be replaced,” he says. “There is no replacing you.”
He didn’t claim me. He placed me above his own life.
“I tried to fight it,” he admits, his voice dropping to a low, dangerous rumble. “I tried to keep you at a distance. I tried to make you a weapon so I wouldn’t have to worry about you. But in that tunnel... when I saw that rifle aimed at your chest...”
His hand tightens in my hair.
“I felt fear,” he confesses. “For the first time in five years, I felt absolute, paralyzing fear. Not for me. For you. I couldn’t let them take you.”
He leans his forehead against mine.
I close my eyes, leaning into his touch.
“You’re hurt,” I whisper.
“I’ll live.”
“You need to rest.”
“Yes, stay with me,” he says.
“I’m not going anywhere.” I place my hands on his knees and look up at him.
He exhales a long, shuddering breath.
“Close your eyes,” he whispers. “And let me know you’re still here.”
I rest my head on his thigh. His hand drops into my hair, his fingers curling tight against my scalp, and the room goes completely quiet.
23
IRIS
Cassian’s breathing slows, evening out into an exhausted rasp. I keep my face pressed to his thigh, desperate for the solid heat of his muscle to calm me, but it doesn’t work.
The adrenaline that kept me moving through the tunnel, that kept my hands steady while I packed his wound, is beginning to curdle. The shock is wearing off. The reality of the night is creeping in like frost under a door.
I close my eyes.
I see the black bore of the suppressor aimed dead at my chest. The spray of blood hitting the stone wall. I feel the cold draft of the grave I almost walked into. I hear the deafening crack of gunfire in the confined tunnel.
My body starts to shake. It starts in my hands, then spreads to my core. I’m shivering. A deep, bone-rattling cold that the gray wool blanket can’t touch.
I lift my head.
Cassian is watching me. He must have felt me shivering, because his eyes are open now. They are half-lidded, clouded with the pain in his shoulder, but the fire inside them hasn’tgone out. It smolders, dark and dangerous. He looks at me not like a victim he saved, but like a necessity he craves.
“Iris,” he murmurs. His hand pauses in my hair. His voice is a low rumble that I feel straight through the mattress.
I don’t answer. I can’t speak. The words are stuck behind a wall of panic.
I scramble up to my knees between his legs. I look at him. The stark white bandages on his shoulder contrast against his blood-drained skin. The soot smudged on his jaw.
