My chest heaves a sob. It’s over. It takes every ounce of strength I have left not to keel over into the grass.
“Charlotte!” Ricardo’s yell from above makes me jump and swivel around to look upward. I drag an arm across my eyes.
He’s there, leaning over the side of the building. A familiar shape in the dark. “Are you okay? How about Grady?” The questions come out strangled.
“I think I’m okay.” My voice cracks. I prod at Grady with one foot, but he doesn’t so much as flinch. Wincing, I crab-walk further away and collapse on the shards of dormant grass. My entire body is heaving with the force of what’s just happened, and my mind is whirling so fast it’s being scrambled.
“I’m coming,” Ricardo calls. “Don’t move.” A door slams shut.
Little chance of me going anywhere. I don’t think I could get up even if I wanted to. Instead, I stay there: arms around my knees. I’m shaking so bad my bones are chattering. The neat twist I’d put my hair in earlier hangs sloppily off to one side of my head. It’s a tangled mess of pins.
Nearby, sirens slash through the silent winter night. Please, please let them be coming for me.
Grady’s still form draws my gaze like a magnet. The wind catches his hair and it floats above his head like seaweed in the deep. His chest continues to rise and fall in jagged, uneven pants.
I exhale loudly and watch as my breath wafts upward in a puff of swirling steam.
The door to the courtyard is flung open with a slam, and Ricardo sprints toward me over the grass. Collapsing on his knees he enfolds me in his arms. His heart beats a frenzied, uneven rhythm into my back. Shuffling around on his hands, he pulls on my arm, encouraging me to unfold from my little ball. I comply, and he looks me over from head to toe, his hands gentle on my elbows and knees. “Charlotte, mon coeur. Are you hurt? Anything broken?”
“I think my wrist is broken.” I hold out the arm that is radiating pain.
Taking a gentle hold of my forearm, he presses a kiss to the back of my hand, like my mother used to do when I got cuts and scrapes as a little kid. My heart squeezes, not unpleasantly this time.
Ricardo glances over my shoulder at Grady, and then his eyes fix on me. “My heart stopped when I saw you fall off that roof. I thought…” The devastation in his face does things to me. I put up a valiant fight, biting my tongue to keep from crying, but the tide won’t ebb. The boy looking at me won’t think less of me if he sees me crying. No, instead I have a sneaking suspicion it will make him like me even more. But the simple truth is I can’t hold it in anymore. Not sure I even want to. With a shudder, I let go. “Grady killed Professor Rook. And tried to kill you and Gul,” I whisper through my tears.
Understanding lights his eyes. “For Rhiannon.”
I nod, unable to speak.
“It’s over now,” he whispers, dragging me into his lap until my side is pressed against his chest. His arms tighten around me as I bury my face in the front of his shirt. There’s a gentle press of a kiss on the top of my head. Faint words carry on the breeze. “Je t’aime, mon coeur.”
Sniffing, I look up into his eyes, not sure I heard what he just said correctly.
“You still…?” I whisper, hardly believing it.
Tightening his arms around me, he nods. “Je t’aime, Charlotte.”
I have to give him something in return. Not because he expects it, but because I’m beginning to see that that’s what love is. A give and take between two people who care about each other so much it drives them to study each other, serve each other. Make each other happy in a bunch of little ways. Big ones too. “You asked me why I kissed you, our first day of school?”
He nods, staring into my eyes.
“It was… I wanted to… You were the most beautiful boy I’d ever seen, and you had this aura about you. You were so enthusiastic about being at the academy. So earnest. And I knew that we could be great together, if I just let you in. I wanted to see what it would be like.”