“Do you want it to?”
Hale looked at me then.
Fully.
It was worse than beingtouched.
Touch would have given me something to blame. His hand. His mouth. The space between us closing.
This was only his attention, steady and dark, moving over my face, my throat, the wrist I had hidden under my sleeve, and leaving heat everywhere it landed.
“Asking what I want is not the safest question.”
“I didn’t come here to ask the safest questions.”
For a moment, I thought he would retreat into one of his hallway answers. Rules. Warnings. The kind of sentence that left me with less than I’d asked for.
Instead, he said, “Then yes.”
That simple admission was the last thing I’d expected.
“You could have said that sooner,” I said.
“No, I couldn’t have.”
“Why?”
His eyes went to the uncovered Mark on his forearm.
“Because my family sent me here to do the opposite.”
I went still.
“Sent you here?”
“Yes.”
“For me?”
“Not by name.”
“That distinction isn’t doing much for me.”
“They believed another Star-Marked girl would come to Zenith.”
The old word moved through me.
The Council would never have chosen to use it.
That made it feel more like mine, somehow, though I had only been given it yesterday.
“Juno called me that.”
“If anyone would know the proper name, it’s Juno.”
“And your family?”
“My grandmother used that word when the curtains were closed.”
