Daughter of Smoke and Bone - Laini Taylor [55]
As if it had all been some silly mistake. And wasn’t it still possible?
She crossed the street. Her heartbeat a throb of hope, she lifted her hand and knocked, three sharp raps. No sooner had she done it than her hope crested painfully. She sucked a big breath and found herself holding it as her heart beat its please please please and her eyes pricked with gathering tears. If it opened or didn’t, she would weep. The tears were ready for either disappointment or relief.
Silence.
Please please please.
And… nothing.
She breathed again, a slumping exhalation that unspooled a single track of tears from each eye, and still she waited, curling herself against the cold for minutes, minutes into minutes, before she finally gave up and headed home.
That night, Akiva watched her sleep. Her lips were softly parted, both hands curled childlike under one cheek, her breathing deep. She’s innocent, Izîl had claimed. Asleep, she looked it. Was she?
Akiva had felt haunted by her these past months—her lovely face tilted up to look at him as she cowered in his shadow, believing she was going to die. The memory scalded him. Again and again it hit him, how close he had come to killing her. And what had stopped him?
Something about her had conjured another girl, long-ago and long-lost, but what? It wasn’t her eyes. They weren’t loam-brown and warm as earth; they were black—black as a swan’s, stark against the cream of her skin. And in her features he could pinpoint no resemblance to that other face, beloved, first seen through fog so long ago. Both were beautiful, that was all, but something had made a connection and stayed his hand.
Finally it came to him. It was a gesture: the birdlike way she had cocked her head to look at him. That was what had saved her. So small a thing as that.
Standing on her balcony, looking in the window, Akiva asked himself, What now?
Memories rose unbidden of the last time he had watched someone sleep. Then, there had been no glass between them frosted by his breath; he hadn’t been on the outside looking in, but warm beside Madrigal, propped up on one elbow and testing himself to see how many minutes he could go without reaching for her.
Not even a whole minute. There had been an ache in his fingertips that could be assuaged only by touching her.
He had borne far fewer marks on his hands then, though he hadn’t been free of his death ink. He was already a killer, but Madrigal had kissed his marked hands, knuckle by knuckle, and absolved him. “War is all we’ve been taught,” she whispered, “but there are other ways to live. We can find them, Akiva. We can invent them. This is the beginning, here.” She laid her palm against his bare chest—his heart jumped at her touch—and she brought his hand against her own heart, pressing it to the satin of her skin. “We are the beginning.”
It had felt like a beginning, from that first stolen night with her—like the invention of a new way of living.
Akiva had never used his hands so softly as when he traced Madrigal’s sleeping eyelids with his fingertip, imagining what dreams chased behind them and made them flutter.
She had trusted him enough to let him touch her while she slept. Even in recollection, it amazed him—that from the start she had trusted him to lie beside her and trace the lines of her sleeping face, her graceful neck, her lean, strong arms and the joints of her powerful wings. Sometimes he’d felt her pulse spike with jagged dreams; other times she’d murmured and reached for him, waking as she drew him against her and then, silkily, into her.
Akiva turned away from the window. What was it that made these memories of Madrigal rise so thick and fast?
The tendrils of an idea were unfurling in the deep reaches of his mind, beginning to probe for connections—a way to make the impossible possible—but he didn’t admit it to himself. He wouldn’t even have believed that somewhere in him lurked the capacity for hope.
What, he asked himself, had made him leave his