Will ever experience only with Nora.

Breathing heavily, I withdraw from her body, letting her collapse on the bed. Then I lower myself onto my right side and gather her against me, knowing she needs tenderness after brutality.

And in a way, I need it too. I need to comfort her, to soothe her. To bind her to me when she’s at her most vulnerable, so I can ensure her love.

It might be cold-blooded, but I don’t leave important things like that to chance.

She turns around to face me and buries her face in the crook of my neck, her shoulders shaking with quiet sobs. “Hold me, Julian,” she whispers, and I do.

I will always hold her, no matter what.

II

The Healing

4

Nora

“Julian, do you have a minute?”

Entering my husband’s office, I walk over to his desk. He looks up to greet me, and I marvel yet again at the tremendous progress he’s made in his recovery over the past six weeks.

His arm cast is gone now, as are all the bandages. Julian tackled healing the same way as he approaches any goal: with single-minded ruthlessness and determination. As soon as Dr. Goldberg approved removal of the cast, Julian dove headfirst into physical therapy, spending hours each day on exercises designed to restore mobility and function to the left side of his body. With his scars beginning to fade, there are days when I almost forget that he was so badly injured—that he had gone through hell and emerged relatively unscathed.

Even his eye implant doesn’t seem jarring to me anymore. Our stay at the clinic in Switzerland and all the procedures cost Julian millions—I saw the bill in his inbox—but the doctors did a phenomenal job with his face. The implant matches Julian’s real eye so perfectly that when he looks at me straight on, it’s almost impossible to tell that it’s fake. I have no idea how they managed to make it that exact shade of blue, but they did, right down to every striation and natural color variation. The fake pupil even shrinks in bright light and dilates when Julian is excited or aroused, thanks to a biofeedback device Julian wears as a watch. The watch measures his pulse and skin conductance and sends the information to the implant, allowing for the most natural-looking responses. The only thing the implant doesn’t do is replicate normal eye motion… or allow Julian to see from it.

“That part—the connection to the brain—will take a few more years,” Julian told me a couple of weeks ago. “They’re working on it now in a lab in Israel.”

So yeah, the implant is remarkably lifelike. And Julian is learning to minimize the weirdness of only one eye moving by turning his entire head to look at something straight on—like the way he’s looking at me now.

“What is it, my pet?” he asks, smiling. His beautiful lips are fully healed now, and the fading scars on his left cheek add a dangerous, yet appealing edge to his looks. It’s as if a bit of his inner darkness is visible on his face now, but instead of repelling me, it draws me to him even more.