“We don’t start fights, Canto,” his grandmother had once said as they sat, faces awash in the spray thrown by the crashing water below her clifftop home, “but we do end them.”

Payal finished the protein bar in silence and accepted a second one he’d brought down with him. He took the opportunity to look at her, the line of her profile not a thing of hard edges like his own, but of soft curves.

He ached to touch her.

Though he’d hung around the affectionate, touchy bears for months, this was the first time in his life he’d wanted a woman to give him the gift of skin privileges. Was it just an echo of the past? No. The boy he’d been had been too young to have such thoughts.

This was about Payal Rao, the woman.

While the bond they’d forged in blood would never break, he would’ve never been attracted to her had he discovered that she’d sacrificed her sister to the wolves. He’d have fought to haul her into the light, but his heart would’ve broken at the realization of who that wild and heroic girl had become.

What he’d instead discovered was a fucking miracle of a woman.

Despite all that had been done to her, Payal could be fiercely loyal, did not harm the weak, and had a mind like a razor. It had begun in blood for them, but there was no road map for where they were now going.

She spoke without warning. “I believe that the wiring for trust—for all positive emotion—was damaged early on in my development. I don’t seem to have the capacity.”

Canto wanted to kill everyone who’d abused her heart, just crush them out of existence. “You held my hand so I wouldn’t be alone.” It came out a harsh rasp. “You protected me when I was alone and broken even though you’d been equally brutalized. You have more courage and hope and generosity inside you than most people on this planet.”

PAYAL screwed on the cap of the empty drink bottle with infinite care, Canto’s words hitting her as hard as a thousand bricks. She didn’t know what to do with them, how to make her mind understand them.

Wedging the empty bottle carefully into a space between two rocks and leaving the half-eaten protein bar in the same safe spot, she moved to a succulent garden a bare foot away. “Can I change this?”

“What? Yeah, go for it.”

Payal uprooted no plants. This wasn’t about harming living things. She just began to rearrange the stones in a pattern that calmed her mind. The manic little girl inside her was as stunned as the woman she’d become, breathing too fast as she tried to see the trap in his words, the betrayal … and not finding any.

Her mouth opened. “I’m on medication.”

Every part of her believed him, their bond a thing beyond politics and family loyalties. In this quiet desert night lit by the stars strung into the trees, they were just Payal and Canto, 3K and 7J, two people who’d been bathed in blood as children and changed profoundly as a result.

“To help with migraines?” Canto leaned forward with his forearms on his thighs. “I never managed to dig up your medical records, but did hear rumors that you used to suffer from migraines.”

“This particular medication is for my brain chemistry,” she told him, because this was far more critical to her than the tumors. The tumors could kill her, but her confused brain chemistry could destroy every piece of Payal Rao while leaving her alive. “Do you remember how I was when we were children? Out of control and manic at times, really flat at others?”

She was watching him out of the corner of her eye, saw him frown. “You were being a child. Some of our race just don’t accept that.”

“No, Canto, it was beyond that—you’re being loyal, but you know I wasn’t right, Psy or not.” When his expression grew dark, this man whose first instinct was to defend her—her breath short, jagged, her pulse rapid—she said, “Once, I took a knife from the kitchen and stabbed holes one inch apart in the wall of my bedroom.” It hadn’t been about anger, but about compulsion. “I felt so peaceful doing it—yet at the same time, I was screaming inside because I couldn’t stop.”

His expression shifted into an intensity that burned. “These meds. Do they help?”

“Nothing will make me neurotypical, but the medications smooth out the spikes and crashes, so I have brain chemistry more similar to most other people.”

“It’s not something forced on you?”

“No. My father finally had me assessed after he took me from the school, and the medics recommended the regimen. I didn’t want to be on it then, but that was because I was in a manic state after attacking the teacher. After the meds took effect, I began to realize I could actually think properly for the first time that I could remember.

“No constant murmur of noise at the back of my head, no sudden periods of darkness, no urges to do compulsive acts over which I had no control.” She put a single white stone next to three black ones. “I felt … like myself.” She glanced up at the starlit sky. “As if the broken pieces of me had been stitched together into a coherent whole.”

Coherence.

That was the word that she always associated with her brain-chemistry medication. “I have control over the regimen these days.” Her father didn’t care about these meds—had probably forgotten about them since she’d been stable for so long. And the one good thing he’d ever done for her was to not tell Lalit about her brain. Else her brother would’ve found some way to sabotage her. “It’s been tweaked and adjusted over the years, but there’s no doubt I’ll be on this regimen or something similar the rest of my life.”

“Okay.” Canto picked up her protein bar. “As long as it’s your choice, I don’t see the problem. Here, you should finish this—you still look drained.”

She sat back on the path, her arms hooked around her knees, and stared at him. “I’m telling you the extent of my damage, Canto.” She teleported the bar back to the shelter, earning herself a scowl. “The Payal you see, she’s the Payal I’ve constructed out of the ruins of who I once was; my personality is held together by precarious glue that could one day fail.”

Canto shifted on the stone to fully face her, the intimacy of the eye contact stealing her breath. “Come here.”

Chapter 14