“I’m trying, but I’ll be honest: part of me wants to blow off my responsibilities and go to a movie or something.”

He smiled and closed the distance between us. “Could I go with you?”

“Of course,” I whispered, suddenly breathless as his fingertips skimmed along my neck.

“There are so many things I’d like to experience here,” he murmured.

“What would you do if you could do anything?” I asked, remembering how he had looked when he was at school: like he’d hit the lottery. “If you were free. If you weren’t a Guard.”

He pondered that for a few moments. “I think I’d travel. I want to see the world as it is now. I’d go to Bratislava, maybe. I would walk the streets and breathe in the scents of the city and not worry about who was at my back.”

“And after that?”

“I think I’d like to go to university,” he said, and then gave me this adorably sheepish look. “I would perhaps study to be a teacher. Or maybe do something with computers. I like them.”

My voice was husky and strained as I said, “So basically, you’re saying you would be an ordinary guy. With a normal kind of life.”

He slid his arm around my waist. “I would love nothing more than that. To have a job. A home. A family. To wake on a Sunday and choose to stay in bed with my love warm beside me. To chase my children around the backyard. To watch them grow and know that they would have that chance. That it could not be taken from them.”

My chest ached fiercely. Suddenly I wanted these things for him more than I wanted anything else. And more than that, I wanted to be part of it. I touched his face, smoothing my fingers along the plane of his cheekbone. “Maybe you could have that someday. Maybe it’s possible.”

Our eyes met. “Maybe it is,” he whispered.

The door at the top of the stairs creaked open. “Hey, Captain,” Henry called from the top of the stairs.

I jerked away from Malachi. “Yes?”

“You want me to leave early? Maybe go scope the place out?” Unlike Jim or Malachi, Henry actually knew how to drive, and Raphael had gotten him a driver’s license. The plan had been for him to drive with Jim to the shelter in the generic gray sedan, but now he’d be going alone.

“Sure,” I said, sounding winded. “We’ll see you there.”

The door closed again, leaving Malachi and me staring at each other.