The Atlas Six (The Atlas, #1)(70)

Dalton blinked again.

And again.

His thoughts went cloudy and reformed; a different shape this time.

“How did you kill him?” Parisa asked.

“Knife,” said Dalton.

“Ambush?”

“Yes. A bit.”

“How Roman of you.”

“We were heavily intoxicated.” He scrubbed wearily at his jaw. “It is not easy, taking a life. Even when we knew it was required.”

Compulsory anything was not a concept Parisa enjoyed. “What if you had not done it?”

“What?”

“What if you had chosen not to kill someone,” Parisa repeated, clarifying as Dalton’s thoughts unraveled a second time. “Would the Society have stepped in?”

“He knew,” Dalton said, which was not an answer. “He knew it would be him.”

“So?”

“So he would have killed one of us instead, if he could have.” A pause. “Probably me.”

Ah, so that explained his fear, or at least part of it.

Parisa reached out, brushing Dalton’s hair from his forehead.

“Have me in your bed tonight,” she said. “I find I’m besieged by curiosity.”

His sheets were crisply white, cleanly tucked. She took great pleasure in unmaking them.

There were other times.

Once, she found him in the gardens. It was early, cold, and damp.

“The English,” she said, “over-romanticize their own dreary winters.”

“Anglophilia,” said Dalton, turning towards her. His cheeks were bright, spot lit by twin buds of cold, and she reached for him, taking his face between her hands to warm them.

“Careful,” he warned. “I may take this for tenderness.”

“You think I’m not tender? Seduction is not all lethality,” said Parisa impatiently. “Most people want only to be cared for. If I had no softness, I’d get nowhere at all.”

“And where do you want to go this morning?”

“Nowhere you cannot take me,” she said.

“Flattery is part of seduction,” he said, “isn’t it?”

“Inescapably, yes.”

“Ah. I regret being such a straightforward case.”

“No one is ever straightforward.”

He half-smiled. “So we’re not simple, we’re just… all the same?”

“A flaw of humanity,” said Parisa, shrugging. “The compulsion to be unique, which is at war with the desire to belong to a single identifiable sameness.”

They were out of sight already, up too early for anyone else to stir, but he pulled her into the nearby grove of birch trees anyway, concealing them.

“You make me so common,” he said.

“Do I?”

“Think how interesting I could be to someone else,” he suggested. “A homicidal academic.”

“You’re not uninteresting,” she said. “Why did he want to kill you?”

“Who?” The pretense was so very tiresome, but apparently necessary.

“How many people have wanted to kill you, Dalton?”

“Probably very many.”

“How deliciously uncommon,” she offered evasively.

He drew her into his arms, hips flush against hers.

“Tell me something,” he said. “Would you have wanted me more if I had denied you longer?”

“No,” Parisa said. “I’d have found you a considerable idiot if you had.”

She toyed with loop of his trousers, turning over stones in her thoughts.

“Tell me about the Forum,” she said, pleased to see the evidence of momentary startlement. “I find I’ve been wondering about this Society’s enemies. Specifically, whether they may be right.” She hadn’t forgotten that the Forum’s agents alone had been able to escape after slipping the Society’s wards during the installation.

Despite his initial flicker of surprise, Dalton seemed relatively unfazed. “Why should I know anything about the Forum?”

“Fine,” she sighed, disappointed but unsurprised, “then tell me why he wanted to kill you.”

“He had to kill someone,” Dalton said with an air of repetition, “before they killed him.”

“Were you too weak or too strong?”

“What?”

“Either he chose you as a target because you were too weak,” she clarified, “or because you were too strong.”

“What do you think?”

She glanced up to find Dalton watching her closely.

“You must have chosen me for a reason yourself,” he remarked, shrugging. “Was it because I was weak, or strong?”

“Are you making yourself a parable?”

“Maybe.”

“Why,” Parisa countered, “did you think it would be dangerous for me to have you? Who would it be dangerous for?”

“Me,” said Dalton. “Among others.”

“And yet you lack quite a bit of self-preservation, don’t you?”

“Most likely.”

“Is that why he wanted to kill you?”

She’d meant it as a joke, pushing him to see what might come to light even if she aimed blindly, but he seemed to regard her with new severity.