“You want to go out?" he asks suddenly.I blink. "As in a date?""Yes. That's what a guy usually means when he asks that question.”

“What question?" I ask, breathless."Whether you're as beautiful in the morning as you are during the rest of the day.”

“He may be stronger, but I'm not defenseless. He knows that, of coarse. That's why he's here. He wants me for what I can do after all.”

“That's what this is about then? Some blasted grudge you harbor against my father?" She muttered something indecipherable beneath her breath in a language he suspected was not English. French, perhaps? Her words were too low for him to determine. "Has the world gone mad?""Has it ever been sane?" he asked. He ahd decided the world a far from logical place long ago, when he'd been lost to the streets at the tender age of eight. "When you mull it over, you and I marrying is scarcely absurd. Fitting perhaps. Face it, neither of us is a feted blueblood.”

“I will never see him again. Never know why he let me go. Never learn if he really whispered what I think he did. Beautiful.”

“I won't leave you! Do you know how unbearable it's been without you? You're not like the rest of them." His hand swipes through air almost savagely. I stare at him, my eyes wide and aching. "You're not some well-trained puppy content to go along with what you're told. You have fire." He laughs brokenly. "I don't mean literally, although there is that. There's something in you, Jacinda. You're the only thing real for me there, the only thing remotely interesting.”

“Sudden conviction races through me, almost terrifying in its total certainty. I can't give him up. He's the other part of me. He gets what it feels like to be separate from everything and everyone, to reject the path others lay out for you. We're the same. Two sides to the same coin.”