Zayne didn’t respond for a long moment. The silence stretched my nerves, forcing me to look at him again. The moment our eyes connected, I couldn’t look away. Couldn’t get enough air into my lungs with the shallow breath I took. “You’re sad,” he said, his voice low. “It feels like...a heaviness in my chest. I can feel it, Trin.”

I closed my eyes, thinking I really needed to get better control of my emotions.

“Talk to me,” he whispered in the quiet.

“I was... I was thinking about Misha.” That was a lie, yet another I’d told today, and also not something I wanted to talk about, either. But it was better than the truth. “It was just a random memory. Not important.”

His hand touched my shoulder, surprising me. The weight was light, but I could feel the warmth of his hand through the material of my shirt, branding my skin. “But it is important.”

Exhaling roughly, I said nothing.

“I know you miss him.” His fingers curled around my shoulder. “Even with everything he did, you still miss him. I understand.”

Did he really? Things might have been tense between him and his father before his passing, but it wasn’t like his father had wanted him dead or had sought to betray him. Or orchestrated the death of his mother. Then again, his father had gone after Layla.

“I know I’ll never replace him. I’ll never be what he was to you.”

My eyes flew open as my hands curled into fists. “That’s a good thing. I wouldn’t want you to be anything like him. Everything about him was a lie, Zayne. I didn’t really know him.”

His lashes lowered, shielding those extraordinary eyes. “But there are good memories, Trin. What he became doesn’t change that, and they’re not going away because of what he ended up doing.”

“But they did.” I stepped away from his touch. I needed space before everything to do with Misha cracked wide open. “Because what if he’d always been like that, and it was all fake?”

“You don’t know that.”

“That doesn’t matter. He tainted those memories, Zayne. He made them not real.”

His hand fell to his side. “They’re real as long they belong to you.”

I sucked in a breath, his words hitting me hard in the chest. When I looked at him again, I found him watching me, his expression stark.

He took a step toward me, arms rising as if he was about to pull me into his embrace, but he stopped short of doing so. Relief and disappointment flooded me. His stance stiffened and then he turned toward the steel door. “Come on. Let’s head home.”

Home.