Sometimes, I looked at him and wondered what he saw in me. And then I remembered hearing him laugh for the first time, and how it had been accompanied by a look of surprise, like he couldn’t recall the last time he’d done that. Or watching him do magic tricks to amuse a bunch of giggling little girls. Or walking in on him making paper airplanes and arguing aerodynamics with Jesse and Jiao, the sole boys at my estrogen-filled court, so they wouldn’t feel left out.

All of which had made me start to think that maybe we weren’t so different, after all. We’d spent our whole lives wanting a home, a place we fit in, somewhere we could contribute something. Pritkin had joined the Corps hoping to do just that, after his wife betrayed him and his life fell apart. But the Corps wasn’t a home, and as useful as he might have been to them, he’d never fit in.

He did with me. We just worked; we always had. And yes, I’d brought a lot of chaos into his life, and even more problems; I didn’t deny that. But I hoped that I’d brought other things, too, good things.

Because he had, for me.

If I hadn’t just thrown them all away.

I drifted lower in the water, until just my nose was poking out, and felt the warmth surround me. It reminded me of Mircea’s arms, in that terrifying moment on the bed, when he’d first showed himself. I’d briefly thought that Zeus had found a new way of attacking me, or at least of imprisoning me, but I hadn’t really believed it.

I knew those arms.

Which brought up another problem I didn’t want to think about. A whole list of problems, in fact, like how good that embrace had felt, how much I had missed him, and how much the estrangement between us had hurt, even though it had been my idea.

Mircea and I didn’t work; we never had, no matter how much I had wanted us to. But part of me didn’t understand that. Part of me felt like an open wound, like I was missing something vital without him in my life.

Part of me still loved him, and had for almost as long as I could remember. He’d always been there: my first crush, my friend and confidant, my supporter and defender when nobody else cared. Loving him was my default setting, and the reason that long, silky hair on a man was my ideal, why brown velvet eyes always made me melt, why a Romanian accent, barely audible on the end of a syllable, caused my heart to skip a beat.

Like the mere mention of the word dulceață.