Heat flushes into my cheeks. Can Hunters read minds? No, not like that. I didn’t think.
“Did you take one?” I ask.
He nods.
“It would be nice.” I don’t move to do it, though. There’s something lodged between us right now, and I don’t know what to make of it. I saw this man drenched in blood. I saw the bodies he left behind, smelled the viscera staining the inside of those houses. I smelled the inside of his body, layered with cordite from the shotgun.
I know he’s a monster. Iknowit.
And yet all I can feel is a warm, strange gratefulness. That he went out into the cold and brought me a generator. That he thought of me while he was dead. Or half-dead. Or whatever the fuck he was.
He still orphaned Oliver, though.
“You’re upset.” His hands speak, but his face is unreadable.
“Yes,” I breathe out. “Can you even understand why?”
Something darkens across his features, and he jerks back a little, and I think I might have hurt him. Is such a thing even possible?
He makes the sign he did earlier,killandmoon.
“Do you mean the murders?” I snap.
Theo’s expression turns steely. “Not murders,” he says. “I’m not human.”
My confusion hardens, then, into fear. “Excuse me?”
“A murder would be if I killed another of my kind.” His eyes are cold as his hands flash out his words. “But I didn’t. I killed humans. Three of them hurt another human, that I—” He stops, and I bite down on my tongue to keep tears from spilling out along my lash line. “That I care about.”
I feel dizzy. “Oliver, you mean.”
“They didn’t hurt you, did they?”
I blink. For a moment, I don’t understand what he means. And then I do.
“You care about me,” I breathe.
Theo gestures toward the window. Toward the generator, as if that answers the question.
Except maybe it does. He dug himself out of the ground exactly how Penelope said he would, and the first place he came to was me.
And although I’ve tried so hard to stop them, the tears finally spill over, streaming down my face in long, hot rivers. I suck in a shuddery breath and squeeze my eyes shut, and all I want to do is cry—it’s all too much, how I was trapped in the cold and the dark and then it’sTheo,a fucking killer, who brings me warmth.
He wraps his arms around me, pulling me up to his chest. I sob into his flannel shirt, and he strokes his hand over my hair, soft and gentle, with not a single trace of violence. And I let him, because it feels good to be held like this. To be held byhimlike this. To know he didn’t really abandon me after all.
Theo lifts my chin, forcing me to look at him. “I’m sorry I made you cry,” he says. “I’m not going to kill you.”
His brow is furrowed, his expression serious and concerned and a little confused, as if he thinks the only reason I might be crying is because I think he’s going to murder me.
“I don’t—” The words come out all jagged, and so I try to sign them instead. “I don’t think you’re going to kill me.”
“Then why?” He finishes the question by wiping some of my tears away with his big, rough fingers.
I take a deep breath, considering all the ways I could answer that. “It’s too much,” I finally sign, and Theo tilts his head, his confusion clear.
“I missed you.” My hands shake. “And I was furious with you, with what you did.” I look up at him, and I tell him the truth. “I hated you,” I say. Out loud.
He doesn’t react, not really. I expect hurt in his eyes, but there’s nothing.
