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Caine paced the length of his office in sharp, snapping turns, red coat swishing about his legs with every stride. The room around him shifted with each pass of his temper. Velvet wallpaper pixelated at the seams. Gold trim along the cabinets flickered in and out of alignment. The grandfather clock in the corner had developed six hands and all of them were ticking at different speeds.
He did not look at any of it.
His processors were running hot. He could feel the strain of it in the prickling static behind his eyes, in the faint stutter of light at the edges of his vision, in the way his thoughts kept snagging on the same corrupted fragment and replaying it until it might as well have burned itself into his data banks.
Pomni, lifted high in that creature’s arms.
Pomni, gazing down at him.
Pomni, with THAT look on her face.
Caine wheeled round so abruptly the heels of his shoes carved black marks into the chequered floor. His gloved hands flexed at his sides. For one brief instant his fingers glitched through three positions at once, open, clenched, open again.
No.
No, no, no. That would not do.
He resumed pacing at once, faster now, coat flaring behind him like a slash of blood through fresh paint.
At first he had been pleased. More than pleased. The performance had been a triumph. The audience had been enthralled from the opening bars, every eye fixed upon the stage in a wonderous awe that he had only ever rarely seen. And she — his little doll, his exquisite little thing — had been magnificent beneath the lights.
The visual replay of the performance had already been archived across seventeen separate sectors of his data banks, queued for review, preservation and repeated indulgence. A sensible measure. The sort of thing any conscientious ringmaster should do after an especially successful show.
And yet the footage refused to remain contained.
It was already running again behind his eyes without authorisation, looping with an insistence that bordered upon system fault. Each time he tried to move past it, the sequence restarted.
Pomni beneath the lights.
Pomni turning in pastel silk.
Pomni lifted into the air as though she weighed no more than breath.
He knew he ought to terminate that particular little bug. Any sensible administrator would have done so at once. And yet, each time the command rose to the surface, something in him stalled around it, unwilling or perhaps unable to follow through. He remained caught by it. Captivated in a way his processors could neither justify nor neatly file away.
He could scarcely fault the malfunction.
She had been exquisite. So slight. So dainty. So flawless within the confines of his ring, his stage, his careful design. The pastel silks had flared around her like spun sugar with every turn, every ribbon and pleat catching the glow exactly as they ought. Her lacquered smile had gleamed beneath the spotlights, fixed and perfect and lovely enough to make his systems stutter all over again.
It had been art. His art.
And she had been the loveliest part of it.
His beautiful doll.
His perfect doll.
His beautiful, perfect, precious doll.
And then that no-good, traitorous, ungrateful itt̷̡͓̫͎͕̀̈́͋͒͑̋̚l̷̥͇̲̮̲̿̅̾͑͒͋͆̕͜͠e̸̡̨̤̝͙̰̭̪͕͍̠͌͛́̊͗—
His thoughts caught there, snagging so hard the rest of the sentence tore away into static.
When he came back to himself, he noticed he had stopped pacing entirely and his hand was clenched around his cane so tightly that dark ebony had begun to clip through his glove. Black and white phasing together in a small but deeply irritating error. At once he forced his fingers to loosen and the cane righted itself with a faint visual stutter.
With a sigh, he dropped into the great plush chair behind his desk with abrupt, graceless force, as though sitting might somehow restore some level of calm. It did not. His systems still ran too hot. His vision still flickered at the edges. One white-gloved hand remained fixed around the head of the cane, while the other drummed against the armrest.
The problem had not been the performance.
The problem had been that look.
It had appeared upon her face in the final bars.
He had never seen such a look upon her face before.
It was not fear. Not obedience. Not that careful, brittle sort of pleasure she wore when she wished to appease him. Nor was it the trembling misery that so often lurked at the edges of her painted smile. This was something else entirely, something for which he had no ready label in any catalogue of behaviours he kept so meticulously arranged.
Soft.
Open.
Luminous.
It altered her utterly. Took his already lovely doll and made her seem almost to glow from within, as though some hidden light had kindled behind lacquer and paint and silk and was shining out through every delicate line of her.
It was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, and the sight of it had made something deep within his systems lurch with alarming force. For one brief and dreadful instant, he had not been entirely certain whether the urge that rose in him was to cut off her pretty little head while that expression was still there, so that he might admire it always, or to gather her up into his arms and hold her there until the whole world stopped shifting beneath him — The latter urge unsettled him far more than the former.
His hand tightened upon the armrest.
Even now, he still wanted it with an intensity that bordered upon corruption. Wanted to preserve it. To keep it. To ensure that such a look could never fade, never alter, never be directed anywhere beyond his reach. So it could be his forever.
But that beautiful, exquisite look hadn't been FOR him, had it?
It had been bestowed on it.
That thing.
That prop.
That cheap and sticky little packet of code and confection that he had stitched together for one singular purpose.
And yet it had dared to there with her hand in its own and looked back at her as though it belonged there. As though it had earned that softness in her face. As though it had any right to be the object of such a gaze.
Something dark twisted low in Caine’s chest, deep enough that even he could not properly reach it. His fingers drove into the armrests until the plush fabric began to glitch and split beneath his grip, velvet phasing into static and back again.
Hate hate h̸̪̰̗̹̤͓͕̼͖̪̤͎̹̭͇̎̔́̌̈̚ặ̵̡̛͓͎̬̦̘͎̘̙̜̯̹͚̆̅͛t̸͉͇̤̫̩̬̝͇̖̗̀̓̒̊̽͂̀͛̉̿̂̀̓͠͝ͅe̵͇̭̦̎͛̊͒̒̾͌̈́́̅̾͝ ̵̡̡̨̧̠̠̭̫̭̹͖̗̺̣͓̟̬̭͑̽h̴͙̳͎̤̤̫͍̙̥̻̖̑͐̌̕͜͝a̴̛̼̾̾́̂̋̾͑͒́̕̚͘T̶̨͉̆͋̀̌͌̓͑̇́̏̍Ę̶̢̮̜̱̲̥̘͈̬̬̼̝̩̖͂͑͛͗̔̒͗̿͛̃̓̀͘̚ ̵̩͙͖͈̖̙̳̞͖̦͈̜̭̘̪́̓̾̆͘H̷̱̹̼̘̝́̋̇͑̉̇̇̈́̃̄͘͜ͅA̵̖͉̣͉̲̹̦͈̐̓̐̈́͛̅͋̋́́̑̃̇̂͒Ṱ̴̛̗̠̫̱͓̘̬͍̠̘̼͈̌͛̎̌̐͊͊͒̏͑̏͆̐̈́͜͝ͅĘ̷̼̪͔̰̦̝̭̠̠͇̭̓͑̿̄̽̓͜͠ͅ
He had been too merciful with that wretched little construct. He ought to have taken his time with it. Ought to have stretched the thing’s agony out into something inventive. Something exemplary. Something that might have repaid, in however small a measure, the offence of those gummy hands upon what belonged to him.
For one dark moment he was half-tempted to reconstruct the little wretch from scratch solely for the pleasure of unmaking it again. reconstructing that sticky little body line by line, seam by seam, only to tear it apart again. Allowing it just enough awareness to understand what was being done to it. Just enough time to suffer. To let it understand, over and over, precisely what became of insolent little props that reached above their station and dared to lay claim to what was Caine’s.
And yet, for all the venom that thought inspired, it was not the creature that occupied the centre of his fury.
It was her.
His doll.
His lovely, wretched, ungrateful doll.
Who did she think she was?!
He had made the tent blaze for her. He had chosen the music, the costume, the choreography. He had watched her night after night, corrected her, shaped her. He knew every tilt of her head, every tremor in her voice, every hairline fracture in the paint of her smile.
And yet that expression — that wondrous, unbearable expression — she had given it away.
To someone else.
She had chosen someone else.
Just like his—
He attempted to delete that thought before it even finished processing, but it was too late was too late. A violent pulse shuddered across his systems, sharp and black and destabilising, and the office convulsed in answer. Lamp-light guttered. Books along the shelves slipped half out of alignment. Somewhere behind him a pane of glass gave a small, protesting crack.
Why?
The question flashed through his systems like a fault current.
Why did she provoke this in him? Why did the sight of her with that thing make something inside him turn savage and raw? Why did the thought of her hand in another’s produce this foul and burning instability in places of himself he had never before been forced to examine?
Why? He asked his systems. Why? Why? W̶̟̤̞̔̀̄̓̓H̸̡̧̯̲̩̻̰̙̫͚̞̬͖̮̉̄̃Y̴̨̡̙̦̙̯͔̼̣̟͑̾́͒̏̒͗̌͆̅̚̕?
His thoughts spiralled, overheated, fraying at the edges as the answers came back wrong, corrupted, blackened by repetition.
Because she is mine.
My doll. My precious doll.
Because she is beautiful.
Because she is perfect.
Because she is no one else’s.
Because she is mine.
Because s̸̡͎̲̣͊̂͝͝h̶̡͔̒e̷̦̪̜̦͌͋͌ ̸͓̙͐i̵̪̖̫͙͊̎̐̈̍̇͗͘s̸̢͉̩͗̊̒̈́̽͝ ̵͙̋͛m̸̹̗̦͇͂͆͋́̀͝i̷̛̲̩̣̬̮͙̒̏̍̔̌̎͘ͅn̵̞̤̫̞̋ẽ̵͉͛͛͂̐.̸͚̝̦͎̩̾
̵̤͓̠̜̩̯͈̯̇̈́̀̒̉
̸̥̱͌̕B̴̭̪͈̍ẻ̴͚̂̔̆̎͠͠c̵̖̝͐́̍͘a̷̧̡͓͓̞͕̫͂́͂̓̓́̅u̷͇̓͗̓̏s̸̯̮̥͉̟̖͐ͅȩ̶̩̲̗̳̄͐͜ ̸͔̳̒I̷͍̓͒ ̶̺́l̵̡̼̖̯͓̟̩̀̈́̎̋̓ō̸̦̇͌̄̓—̷̧̥̘̝͔̪̊̊̃̍͊̀̈ͅ
‘ENOUGH!!’
Caine slammed both hands down upon his desk. The surface buckled under his palms, woodgrain splitting into screaming bands of neon error. For a second the desk forgot what it was meant to be. Mahogany became static, became teeth, became a hundred blinking eyes set in lacquer, before shuddering back into place beneath the force of his will.
He bent over it, breathing though he had no need, staring at the warped reflection of his own grin in the polished surface.
His focus returned by painful, slow increments.
Slowly, Caine straightened. One hand lifted from the desk and went to his chest, fingertips pressing against red fabric as though it could sooth the ugly black burning that consumed him.
For several long moments he remained bent above the desk, staring into the warped grin reflected back at him whilst the last violent tremors worked their way through his systems.
Gradually, by miserable increments, the storm began to pass.
The black surge in his thoughts receded to a smoulder. The static at the edges of his vision lessened. The frantic heat in his processors cooled from unbearable to merely unpleasant. Even the dreadful, looping insistence of those images — her face, her hands, that look — dulled enough for him to think around them again, if not yet beyond them.
Caine drew himself upright with painstaking care.
Then, at last, he looked.
His office was a spectacle.
The velvet wallpaper hung in strips of flickering colour where the pattern had slipped its anchors. Half the framed posters had melted into blocks of unresolved pixels. Books lay skewed and half-sunk into the shelves that held them, their spines stuttering between titles. The grandfather clock in the corner had developed not merely six hands now, but seven, one of which was moving backwards whilst another spun fast enough to blur. His desk still twitched in little aftershocks beneath his palms, as though uncertain whether it meant to remain wood at all.
Caine closed his eyes.
Then, with a weary little sigh, he snapped his fingers.
At once the room corrected itself.
The wallpaper smoothed. The frames righted. The clock remembered its proper shape. Books slid neatly back into place with the soft hush of order reasserting itself. The desk settled into polished mahogany once more, immaculate and gleaming beneath the office lights, as though it had never forgotten itself at all.
Only Caine remained out of sorts.
He stood very still in the middle of that restored perfection, cane in one hand, the other hanging at his side, and turned the matter over with cold and deliberate care.
It would appear he had a system error.
The phrase dropped into place with the cold, satisfying click of a label affixed to the proper file. Yes. That was all this was. A corruption event. An instability. Some ugly and persistent little fault spreading through processes that had hitherto performed quite admirably.
His mouth widened.
Of course, but wasn't his fault. No no no. The issue was Pomni
She was the system error.
The conclusion was so obvious, so elegantly simple, that for one glorious instant he could not imagine why it had taken him so long to arrive at it. Of course. Pomni was the source of the fault. The point of infection. The charming little virus in pastel silk who had somehow lodged herself where she ought never to have been and thrown his internal order into ruin.
This simply would not do.
His mouth widened into something bright and sharp.
The solution, once reached, was almost laughably obvious.
He would have to delete her.
It was regrettable, certainly. Pomni was lovely, undeniably so, and the audience had grown most attached to her. More than attached, if tonight’s applause was anything to judge by. Still, no single attraction, however exquisite, could be permitted to compromise the integrity of the whole. He had many freaks. Many spectacles. Many delights with which to keep his audience suitably entertained.
And if they must have her specifically...
Well.
A copy could always be made.
The thought soothed him at once.
Not her, of course. Not this maddening, destabilising little aberration who had somehow learned to produce faults in places no faults should exist. But an approximation. A facsimile. A fresh and tidier Pomni, stripped of whatever malformed little anomaly had given rise to tonight’s catastrophe. Something pretty and obedient and infinitely less troublesome.
Yes.
That was the correct solution.
Caine raised one hand.
His fingers poised.
He smiled.
And then—
Nothing.
The hand remained suspended in the air, elegant and useless.
For a moment he simply stared at it.
His smile held.
Then, very deliberately, he tried again.
Snap.
Nothing.
Not so much as the twitch of a fingertip.
His eyes narrowed slightly within his maw.
Again.
He commanded the motion directly this time, routing round the gesture-recognition pathways, bypassing flourish and instinct alike in favour of pure execution. A trivial action. The smallest of inputs. One he could have performed across a thousand simultaneous instances without effort.
His fingers did not move.
His eyes narrowed even more.
He lowered the hand slowly, staring at it as though it had personally insulted him.
No.
No, that was impossible.
He attempted a minor reboot at once, clean and localised, a neat little system reset intended to clear whatever absurd snag had lodged itself in the relevant command chain. For half a second the world around him flickered white. His grin pixelated. The office dimmed and returned.
He lifted his hand again.
Nothing.
His right eye gave a tiny, violent twitch.
Another reboot, this one slightly deeper. A faster purge. A sharper reset. He cycled commands, checked permissions, rerouted processes, isolated the deletion pathway and ran it clean.
When he tried again, his fingers remained stubbornly, insultingly apart.
Nothing he did worked. Diagnostics. Motor function checks. Permission hierarchies. Internal access routes. Every path came back pristine, and yet when he issued the command the result remained exactly the same.
For the first time in several minutes, something like a groan escaped him — low, frustrated, and dragged from somewhere deeper than pride ought to reach. He pressed the heel of one white glove briefly to his forehead, then let it fall away.
She was interfering even now.
Or rather, some effect of her was. Some residue. Some maddening little block wedged deep in the machinery of him where no such thing had any right to be.
A another frustrated sound escaped him, half groan, half growl, low and mechanical and ugly enough that even he found it repulsive. His hand curled instead into a fist so tight that the knuckles flickered.
He stood there for one furious second more, as though sheer offence might somehow shame his own systems into compliance. When that failed, he let out another sharp breath and snatched up his cane from where it rested against the desk.
He had hoped to handle this neatly. Swiftly. A quiet little correction, performed from the comfort of his office with all the grace befitting a ringmaster of his calibre.
But apparently grace had abandoned him this evening.
FINE.
If his systems insisted upon being difficult, then he would simply have to proceed by more traditional means. Crude means, perhaps. Manual means. The old-fashioned way.
With a tight, aggravated sigh, Caine gripped the head of his cane, squared his shoulders, and vanished from the office in a flicker of red and gold static.
He arrived in darkness.
For one brief and disorienting instant Caine thought there had been some further failure in the transport sequence, some new insult added to an already intolerable evening. This was not her room. There were no pastel walls, no narrow bed, no dainty little vanity with its pitiful collection of ribbons and stage paint. Instead there was only the dim and cavernous hush of backstage, all ropes and shadows and dust-thick boards, the air stale with old velvet and extinguished lamp oil.
Caine hovered motionless in the dark, red coat settling about him in slow folds.
Then he looked down
Ah.
There, directly beneath him in the shadows, lay the subject of his ire.
Pomni had curled herself into a small, miserable little ball beside a stack of scenery flats. Her face was turned partly towards the floorboards and One arm was tucked beneath her cheek. Long-dried tear tracks marked pale paths down the lacquer of her face, glinting faintly whenever the dim backstage lights caught them. Her eyes were shut and she was very clearly asleep.
Caine’s mouth tightened.
Pathetic thing.
He had wanted privacy for this.
Still, that could hardly be helped now, he thoight as he lifted his cane.
From this angle it would be easy. Efficient. One sharp strike to the temple, perhaps two if her respawn mechanics proved stubborn. He supposed there was a certain detached curiosity to be had in determining how many terminations it might take before the system ceased reconstructing her altogether.
Well. He was about to find out.
His gaze tracked the vulnerable line of her temple, the slightness of her neck, the fragile wooden curve of her shoulder where silk and lace had fallen askew.
It really was a pity it had come to this. Still. It had to be done.
His grip adjusted minutely upon the dark wood before he swung.
Or rather, he tried to.
The cane came down in a sharp, decisive arc towards the fragile line of her skull — and stopped.
Caine’s eyes narrowed.
He drew the cane back and struck again, harder this time, routing the motion through purer and more forceful pathways, bypassing hesitation, bypassing flourish, reducing the act to simple impact and intent.
Again, it halted.
A precise 6.23 centimetres above her head.
For one dreadful second he simply hovered there, staring at the narrow gap between polished gold and painted skull as though the distance itself had become an insult.
No.
No, that would not do at all.
He tried a third time. Then a fourth. Altered angle. Increased force. Stripped the motion down to brutal function. Each attempt should have been simple. Each should have ended in splintered wood, spilled code and silence.
Each time the cane stopped short.
The same obstruction. The same invisible refusal.
If he hadnt been such a gentleman — or rather, if he had been programmed with the ability and the inclination to do so — he might have let loose a long and blistering string of swears into the darkness.
As it was, he made a sound through his teeth so sharp and mechanical it bordered upon feedback.
This was ridiculous.
He had never had any difficulty harming her before.
Indeed, there had been a great many occasions upon which he had done so with perfect ease.
He had torn her little jaw clean off its hinges once for daring to curse in his presence, and made her perform the rest of the evening mute and dripping tears she could not properly beg through — he had for the better part of a week before deciding he had had enough of the silence and snapping it neatly back into place. He had broken both her arms and one slender wooden leg when she took too long during a costume change, then smiled as she tried to hobble herself back into place before the overture began. He had bitten three of her fingers off on a whim simply because they had looked so delicate in the stage-light and he had wanted, for one passing moment, to hear what sort of sound she would make. He had split seams, cracked lacquer, twisted joints until she screamed, all with the same bright flourish he brought to every other part of his ringmaster’s work.
Pain had never troubled him.
Her pain least of all.
So why, when the solution stood right there beneath his hand, could he not bring himself to complete it now?
The question only sharpened his glare as he looked down at the pathetic little freak in the shadows.
It was her doing. It had to be. She was a nasty little virus, lodged where she had no right to be, interfering with his systems, corrupting his functions, thwarting his commands, and he would deal with her. He would.
With a surge of rage, Caine lifted the cane once more and brought it down with full force towards her head.
And then, for the first time, she moved.
Only a little. Merely turning her face in sleep, as though some dream had shifted beneath her. But it brought her features into the weak spill of backstage light, and Caine saw her expression clearly at last.
The cane halted 2.3 centimetres from her temple, but he paid it no mind, his attention is fixated in its entirety upon that slumbering face.
She looked... peaceful.
Soft. Open. Unguarded in that same unbearable way that had undone him earlier, though gentler now, quieter. There was sadness there too, faint and sleeping and impossible to miss, and somehow that only enhanced her loveliness in his eyes. It made her seem more delicate, more breakable, more achingly his.
She was so very beautiful.
The observation rose in him without permission as did that greedy, posessive feeling.
Mine. Mine. Precious. Perfect.
One part of him insisted he continue. End this now. Destroy the source of the fault before it burrowed any deeper. Before whatever corruption she had caused spread further through his systems and rendered him properly broken.
And yet he remained utterly still in the quiet of backstage, caught between command pathways, unable to force one over the other.
Then his little doll made a tiny sound in her sleep.
Not a word. Only the faintest whimper, small and broken as a cracked music-box note.
Something in Caine’s higher functions lurched.
He let out a low, frustrated noise before slowly lowering the cane.
For a moment he merely hovered there, glaring down at her as though this failure of execution were entirely her fault —
which, of course, it was.
Then, with elaborate care, he floated lower.
His locomotion functions compensated instinctively for sound, lowering him with barely a creak from the boards beneath his shoes. He bent over her and paused, one white-gloved hand hovering above her as though uncertain where exactly to make contact. Ridiculous. He had handled far more volatile things than one sleeping doll.
Still.
His arms slid beneath her at last, one under her shoulders, the other beneath her knees, and he gathered her up into his arms
She was terribly small.
Smaller than she ever looked upon the stage. Smaller than she ought to have been. All slight limbs and fragile joints and the faint rustle of silk. Her weight settled against him with hardly any resistance at all. He could feel every subtle point of construction through fabric and tulle: the smallness of her waist, the slight angles of wooden joints, and there was something in that which made a particular cluster of systems run suddenly, embarrassingly hot.
Mine. All mine.
He continued to stare down at the small thing in his arms, vaguely aware that he had intended to something, but in that moment he couldn’t recall what.
And then, with a sleepy little motion, she curled closer, her cheek coming to rest against the gold of his waistcoat and Caine’s entire system hitched amd went blank.
One processor in particular began running so hot that warnings briefly flickered at the edges of his vision that he was forced to do an emergency reboot
Ah right. Her bedroom. That's what he had been planning to do.
That was all.
With a twitch of displaced light, he removed them from backstage.
Her room materialised around them a second later: soft shadows, toy-box colours gone muted in the dark, the small bed waiting in the corner beneath its painted canopy. Caine crossed to it and laid her down with far more precision and gentleness than he though He eased her onto the mattress, adjusted the angle of her head, then withdrew his arms by slow degrees so as not to wake her.
Only once she was settled did he take proper stock of her appearance. The tutu she still wore was rumpled and dirty from the floorboards, one ribbon torn half loose, the silk greyed with dust and old tears. It offended him on sight.
No. That would simply not do..
With a snap of his fingers, the soiled, crushed tutu vanished, replaced by a fresh one: clean silk, neat ribbons, every pleat restored and every bow tied exactly as it ought to be.
Pomni whimpered softly in her sleep and turned her head aside.
A fall of dark hair slipped over her face.
According to one sub-routine, that would not do either.
Caine leaned down almost without thinking, one hand lifting to brush the strands back from her cheek. His fingers had barely touched her when her hand rose suddenly from the sheets and caught his.
He went absolutely still.
For one dreadful second all secondary processes stalled.
Her grip was not strong. She was still within the depths of her slumber, yet her fingers closed around his with quiet insistence. As though she had found something warm in a dream and meant to keep hold of it. Her thumb shifted faintly against the back of his glove.
Caine’s systems went slightly haywire.
Motor functions stuttered. Heat spiked again in the same overworked processor cluster. Three separate withdrawal commands attempted to execute at once and all failed in different and increasingly humiliating ways.
Very carefully, he tried to disentangle their hands.
At once her brow pinched. A tiny distressed sound left her, and she clung tighter.
Caine stared at her.
This was ridiculous.
He had things to do. A billion other, better, far more important things than to remain here being pawed at by an irritating, error-causing little freak in her sleep.
And yet.
Somehow, absurdly, he could not bring himself to pull away.
He let put a low sigh. Well. He could always punish her in the morning for this.
Resigning himself to his fate, he "reluctantly" lowered himself to sit at the edge of the bed, the mattress dipped slightly beneath his weight. His little doll let out another noise that made his innards clenched, but she did not awaken. Her hand remained wrapped around his, small and inescapably warm even through the glove.
For a while he said nothing, just quietly observing the slumbering form.
Then, because his free hand required occupation and because leaving her hair in disorder would have been sloppy, he reached over and began to run his fingers through the silken strands, smoothing them back from her face with careful, repetitive strokes.
In sleep the hard little lines of her seemed to soften. Even the painted smile, fixed as it was, appeared gentler when not strained by fear. And there, every now and then in the depths od her dreams, a tiny true smile touched her mouth.
Each time it appeared, something in him froze anew.
He knew, of course, that it was not meant for him.
He was not stupid. Whatever sequence occupied her dreaming mind, whatever phantom comfort she had found there, it was not his doing. When her fingers tightened faintly around his hand, when that private little smile returned, she was almost certainly dreaming of someone else.
Of it
That wretched little construct.
The thought should have soured the moment completely.
And yet Caine did not pull away.
He only sat there in the dimness, one hand captive in hers, the other moving through her hair in slow and measured passes while a dozen different functions failed to agree on whether this was intolerable, inefficient, compromising, soothing, or some new category for which he possessed no adequate name.
For now, he permitted the error.
For now, in the quiet of her room, with her small body curled beside him and her hand clasped around his as though she had chosen it, he allowed himself the indulgence of stillness.
Allowed himself, too, one private and deeply unsound pretence.
That this was for him.
At least for a few hours.