Chapter 24 Zaria #2
Zaria shoved her magnispecs on top of her head—she’d found them in Cecile’s bedroom, and despite a small crack they were in fairly good condition—before vigorously rubbing her eyes.
Fletcher had left to deal with the bodies of Cleland and his cronies, and although Zaria didn’t relish the thought of him traipsing around Seven Dials on his own, there wasn’t much to be done for it.
She would be more liability than help, and Kane certainly wasn’t going anywhere.
She looked down at him now with a jolt. She’d been so focused on her task, fingers moving with clinical precision, that she’d almost forgotten she was working on a living, breathing human.
She’d never seen a boy entirely shirtless—other than brief glimpses of Jules during their childhood, which didn’t count.
But even as she recoiled from the impropriety, she couldn’t help scouring the ridges of his stomach, the firm planes of his chest. His arms were striated by tendons and overlapping veins, nothing like the soft, narrow curves of her own.
Every bit of Kane Durante looked sharp to the touch.
Zaria’s gaze snagged on the inner part of his forearm, and she frowned.
Tiny black x’s—or crosses?—had been scratched into the skin there, seeming to shimmer in the light of the candles she’d set up around them.
The marks varied in size, and it was obvious they hadn’t been done with care.
There was a scratchy quality about several of them that still looked rather painful.
“Are you—done?”
Kane’s question startled her, the words flat and lacking intonation. There was a rasping quality to his voice, as if he’d been screaming for hours, though he’d been remarkably quiet during her torturous amateur foray into his skin.
Zaria’s eyes snapped back to his. They were half-lidded, the pupils constricted. He looked exhausted, the muscles of his neck still tensed against the pain. “No,” she whispered. “I’m sorry. My fingers were beginning to cramp rather terribly, and I didn’t want to… Well. You can see the problem.”
Kane turned his gaze to the ceiling, lips curving in a smile that looked closer to a grimace. “By all means, take your time.” He paused to gasp a breath. “I don’t need you erroneously removing any organs.”
“I think those are all quite a bit deeper, thank heavens.” Zaria bent to retrieve a tiny stoppered bottle she’d placed on the floor. “You should take more laudanum.”
“No,” he snapped, abruptly sounding more alert. “I wish you hadn’t given me any in the first place.”
She winced, recalling how Fletcher had forced it down Kane’s throat at her instruction when they’d first returned. “I didn’t have a lot of choice. You were going into shock. It could have killed you.”
“I can’t help but feel that would’ve been more convenient for everyone.”
Zaria ignored that as she unstoppered the bottle. “You really should—”
“No. I have quite enough vices.”
The venom in his tone had her putting the laudanum down with a frustrated sigh. It was a common enough remedy for everything from headaches to sleeplessness to severe pain stemming from childbirth, but frequent use could inspire addiction.
“Fine,” she said evenly, flexing her hand. “I’m only trying to make this easier.”
“Don’t worry about that.”
“It’s easier for me if you’re sedated.”
He didn’t respond, didn’t look at her, the taut angle of his jaw flexing. His fingers dug clawlike into the edge of the sofa, causing the black marks to ripple along his forearms. Zaria took that to signify the conversation was over and he was ready for her to continue.
She did so, giving her hand a final stretch before taking up her tools once more.
They weren’t surgical tools, and she was far from a surgeon, but the steadiness required to put an invention together wasn’t wholly dissimilar from that required to remove bits of metal from the human body.
Of course, the human body had considerably more of a reaction to pain, and she kept glancing up from her work to gauge Kane’s reaction.
His lips were white, his face contorted.
“Zaria.” He invoked her name the way one might a curse.
She discarded another piece of metal. “Yes?”
“Say something.”
“I’m trying to work,” she reminded him.
“Please.”
The desperation in that single word was enough to break her resolve.
In that moment, Zaria knew, she could have said anything.
Kane wasn’t really listening. Her voice was a distraction—something to cling to that wasn’t agony or the clink of her forceps against the glass of alcohol.
When she eventually replied, the words were softer than she’d intended. “What do the crosses on your arm mean?”
His mouth thinned. “I have one for each time I disappointed Ward. Next question.”
“Kane—”
“I said next question.”
Zaria repressed a shudder, trying not to think about what tool Ward might have used to make those marks. How young Kane might have been for the first one. “Do you ever feel like you don’t truly know yourself ?”
It wasn’t what she’d meant to say. The question had slipped out of her in a rush. Kane didn’t answer, merely panting as she dislodged another metal shard, but his head canted to the side in acknowledgment.
“I killed a man tonight, Kane. I killed him, and it was one of the worst experiences of my life, and I’d do it again.
” She kept her eyes on her hands, cheeks warm.
“Cecile once told me that everyone is just a compilation of the choices they make. If that’s true, then what does that say about me?
I never know if I’m making the right choices; I can only tell when I’m making the wrong ones.
“But sometimes, even when I’m making the worst decisions possible, I don’t think I feel the way I’m supposed to.
I’m like an invention that hasn’t been put together properly—everyone can tell it’s not working quite right, but no one can explain what, exactly, the problem is.
” She let what she hoped was the last shard fall to the floor. “Better?”
Kane nodded. “Thank you,” he said, his voice thick with relief. He still looked dreadful, his eyes shuttered, but there was less tension in his face and neck.
Zaria watched the muscles of his torso expand and contract with each shallow breath.
His blood was on her hands, a distant part of her acknowledged, but she didn’t move to deal with it.
Now that she had finished, exhaustion slammed into her.
It was as if every emotion she’d repressed over the last few hours had returned all at once to drain her energy. “You don’t need to thank me.”
“You could have let me die. I told you to.”
End it, he’d begged, and something in Zaria balked at the memory. At the terror that had unfurled within her very bones.
“No,” she whispered. “I couldn’t have.”
He was quiet at that, and for a moment she wondered if he’d fallen asleep. She stared sightlessly at the wall, listening to the insistent beat of her own heart.
“Yes,” Kane said finally, startling her.
“What?”
“Yes, sometimes I feel as if I don’t truly know myself.
Maybe not in the way you described—I’m not generally concerned with how I’m supposed to feel about anything.
But if everyone is a compilation of the choices they’ve made, then the truest version of me is dead. He died when I wasn’t even looking.”
The dryness in Zaria’s throat returned. “I didn’t think you were listening.”
Kane continued as if she hadn’t spoken. “I try not to think about the boy I used to be, you know. How terribly the world let him down. How terribly I let him down. Whenever I dare to look back, I can’t quite remember how I got here.
Which parts of myself I stripped away, and which ones I replaced them with.
” A labored breath. “I try to tell myself that’s what it means to grow up.
Secretly, though, I wonder if this—the way I am now—is the product of layers of damage I can’t undo.
I wonder if I’ll ever recognize myself again. If it even matters.”
He said all of this with his eyes closed, the slant of his mouth tight.
Although she was sitting down, Zaria felt unsteady.
As if any sound, any abrupt movement, would irreparably fracture the delicate peace between them.
She didn’t know what to say to that kind of honesty.
What was there to say? She couldn’t lie, couldn’t tell Kane he wasn’t damaged.
She couldn’t tell him the boy he’d been would be proud.
“Maybe you’ll never recognize yourself again,” she said softly. “Not in the way you’re hoping. But that doesn’t make you wrong.” The silence stretched between them. “You’re exactly who you are.”
He opened his eyes, then, and Zaria knew he remembered. He’d said those exact words to her in the dark shed behind Moore & Sons, his face lit from beneath by candlelight, magic glittering between them.
“That may have been true for you,” he rasped, “but I’m not sure it applies here. You know me better than that, Zaria.”
“We’ve established I’m not necessarily the best judge of right and wrong.”
Kane’s lips curled up. “No, I suppose you’re not. If you were, neither of us would be here right now.”
She couldn’t help her own smile, sardonic though it was. “I bet you wish you’d never walked into the pawnshop that first time.”
“I think about it a lot.”
“Do you?”
“Part of always having a plan is playing each one back in your mind, wondering where things went wrong. Wondering what you should have done differently.”
Zaria stilled. She didn’t think they were talking about that night at the pawnshop anymore. “The day we went back to the Exhibition,” she began haltingly, “you said you’d changed your mind about the Waterhouse jewels. What did you mean by that?”
Kane’s attention was still on her, gaze arresting. He looked gaunter than ever. “Just what I said. I wasn’t going to leave you with nothing—I had decided to take the jewels after all.”
“You’re lying.” The reply slipped out before she could think better of it.
“And what reason would I have to do that?”
“So you can convince me I’m the bad guy. That only one of us was going to break our agreement, and therefore I should feel guilty.”
“Do you?”
His response was sly, and Zaria straightened. “No.”
Another long moment passed. Kane’s eyes never strayed from her face, and she forced her chin up even as her cheeks burned.
It felt like a physical inspection. Like he was prodding at her resolve, searching for the lie.
The tension between them peaked, reaching a breaking point, and Zaria railed against it, unwilling to capitulate now that her answer hovered between them.
It felt heavy, that denial. A weight threatening to snap something vital.
“Ah, Zaria.” Kane relaxed back into the sofa, one side of his mouth lifting almost smugly. “The only liar here, I suspect, is you.”