“I looked for you every day for a month,” he says, pouring hot water into a cup. “Drove by your place a few times. It was all I could do not to get a boat and go out there. I could see your caretaker once, looking out the window. I worried she had seen me. And I waited. Till the day you showed up at the grocery.”

He’s just set down the kettle by the time I cross the few feet between us. The cup tips and spills as he pulls me against him, a soft sound escaping his throat.

He kisses me hard, arms hungry around me. His fingers slide into my hair. And the desperation is back without even the guise of control as he pulls me against his chest and off my toes.

He can’t get enough of my mouth, my neck, my skin. “I miss the way you smell. I miss this smell,” he whispers, hand cradling my head as we fall back against the opposite counter. And then he’s lifting me up, my arms and knees locked around him, and carrying me down the narrow hallway to the wrong room.

“That one,” I say, grabbing the doorframe, steering us across the hall.

He kicks the door shut behind us, and the kaleidoscope of stars dances on the ceiling.

*  *  *

“Don’t sleep,” Luka murmurs. He’s curled behind me, nose against my ear, his fingers caught in mine.

“Why not?” I say, drowsing.

“I still owe you.”

“Owe me what?”

“I made the mistake of falling asleep at your friend’s flat once, where you were staying. I woke up late for work and ran out the door . . . with no idea you had drawn a purple Hitler mustache on me. With a Sharpie.”

I laugh.

“I mean, you kissed me good-bye with a completely straight face.”

“Wow. I’m good.”

“You’re evil.”

I close my eyes. I haven’t felt this at ease in days.

“What’re you thinking?” he whispers, brushing the hair from my cheek.

“It must be tiring telling stories more than once.”

“No. I love it.”

After a minute, I ask, “You said I changed your mind. How?”

I feel him shrug. “You weren’t a thing anymore. You weren’t a belief. You had a soul. A laugh. A smell I was addicted to. A twisted sense of humor. It wasn’t just that I loved you. It was that even though you were Progeny, you were more like me than unlike me. And then, somehow, you were more me than I was.”

“So you just gave it up?”

“I went into a tailspin.”

“Because you couldn’t kill me.”

“No. Because the Scions were the only church I knew. Their God, who wanted revenge and justice, was the only God I knew. For the first time, I didn’t know what to believe.”

“I’m pretty sure God doesn’t condone killing.”