Her love for him closed within her like a fist. Nervous, bruised. She despised it. Wasn’t it the love of a beaten animal, slinking back to its master? Yet here was the truth: she missed her father.

You are important to me,” she said, and touched his face. Important. The word swelled and deflated. More than he’d thought. Less than he wanted.

Sometimes you think you want something,” Arin told him, “when in reality you need to let it go.

Every chip of her being slid into place, into the image of a lost world. The boy discovering it. The girl who sees it spark and flare, and understands, now, what she feels. She realizes that she has felt this for a long time.

I love everything more when I leave it. Maybe, then, it’s the most I’ll ever love it.

Little Fists, what’s wrong?

So you tell me what would make a good, quiet girl get herself in trouble, especially when she had so much to lose. Tell me.

Arin pulled her onto his lap. He held her shaking form, tucked his face into the crook of her cold neck as she sobbed against him. He murmured that he loved her more than he could say. He promised that he would always choose her first.

She breathed in the cold, and it felt free, so she felt free, and it felt alive, so she felt alive.

He wondered if he, too, was tempted by cunning. Maybe he was drawn as well to the biggest gamble.