Caine Black Knife

I put my lips to her neck just behind her ear and whisper, “We can make them sorry they did this to us. We can make them weep for all the money we would have earned them-”

I slide my lips down her long smooth throat, and she lifts her chin to let me taste her to the collarbone. “And to do that we have to fight. We have to keep fighting. No matter what. Even when the Black Knives take us. Even when they torture us. We have to not quit. That’s our revenge: we’ll make those bean-counting shit-lickers mourn the stars we would have been.”

“Yes.” Her arms squeeze some more, and she better let up before I pass out. “Yes-I see it. .”

But now she goes gentle again and pulls away, and one of her hands goes back to my chest, her palm a wall of muscle and bone. “Caine. . do you really mean we?”

A tiny whisper, young and lost but still thinking it might be found: “Do you really think. . I mean, we knew-you know, about you. Everyone expected you to be a star. But do you-do you think. .?”

Her whisper trails away, but I know what she’s asking. “Yes. Absolutely. No doubt about it.”

“Really?”

The breath of hope in her voice is so faint it’s breaking my heart.

“Don’t lie to me, Caine. Not now. You really think I could have. . have been a star? That we could? Tizarre and I?”

“Marade-” If only she could know how much I mean this. “Marade, you are a star.”

Her hand is trembling again, and my heart is going with it. Better not stop now. Dunno if I’ll have the guts to start again. “I can’t say about Tizarre. She’s-nervous, y’know? Self-conscious. But you-the first time I ever saw you, I knew. I didn’t know you’re in the business, but I can tell a natural on sight. You’re already a bigger star than I’ll ever be.”

“Really?” Her voice is hushed. “You believe that?”

Here, safe in the dark, I don’t mind saying it. “Sure. What am I? A ghetto throat-cutter with a shitty attitude. But you? You’re . . magnificent. An honest to-shit Knight in Shining Armor. You walk into a room and people forget what they were talking about. You are all presence. Confidence and power. Grace in motion. You make people want to get on their knees and hope you might notice them.”

I take her hand from my chest and lift it to my face. Even blind, she might feel my conviction. “You’re a hero. A real hero. The best kind. Upright. Virtuous. Loyal. Defend-the-weak and your-strength- is-the-strength-of-ten-because-your-heart-is-pure, and everything that makes people love heroes in the first place. What makes people wish they could be heroes, too. The best in all of us, you know? Lancelot and Percival and Arthur all in one. And to top it all off-” I give her a come-on-laugh-with-me chuckle. “-you whip mountains of ass.”

“Caine, that’s-if only I was really like that. .”

“You are.”

“But I don’t feel like-inside, I’m not. . not-it’s all an act, Caine. Don’t you see? It’s an act, that’s all.”

“So what?” I shrug. “Why shouldn’t it be? That’s what we are.”

Has this never occurred to her? “What we are is whatever we can make people think we are. That’s what we do. It’s our job. And what I said-everything I said-that’s what I think of you. Which only means you’re really, really good at it. Not to mention that you. . you are-”

Fucking sack-of-shit coward. Say it.

Say it.

“That you are, without question, the most stunningly beautiful woman it has ever been my privilege to meet.”

Got it out. And I didn’t even sound like an idiot. I hope.

“Do you really think so?” The hand at my face comes alive, warm, sliding behind my neck. Another hand finds my collarbone, then slowly traces my chest down to the ribs of muscle below my ribs of bone. It lingers briefly on the fresh young scar there. Then heads south.

I guess sometimes I say the right thing after all.

“You really think I’m beautiful?”

And her lips are close enough to mine that her breath warms my beard. Her fingers find my pubic hair and my hard-on is back like a hurricane and I don’t think I can talk right now.

Her hand closes around me like I’m the steel haft of her morningstar.

“I understand now. I finally understand. You’re trying to save me.”

All I have is a breathless stammer. “Marade-Marade, I can’t-I can’t-”

“Stars. That’s the answer. We can be stars-we can make them believe in us. Believe we’ll be profitable. Believe we’ll be big. Then they’ll bring us home. All we have to do is convince them.”

Never gonna happen. Not to us. I should tell her.

I should.

Instead I just find her lips with my own and let her tongue slide into my mouth and shut me right the fuck up. She shivers and pulls my hand to her, into the warm slick wet between her legs.

Maybe false hope is her only hope. Maybe she needs to believe it. One of my dad’s favorite writers said, We must grant each other the illusions we need to live.

Or maybe that’s grant ourselves.

“ou are not what you pretend, Caine. I know it. I can feel it.” She lowers herself to the hard stone floor supine and draws me down along her, my spring-steel cock against her iron-within-velvet thigh. “There is a hero inside you. A star. We can live, Caine.”

And I am shivering too hard to answer her, and she reaches around me and pulls me into her, and my shiver becomes a shudder. She locks her legs around my hips and gives a little cry, a tiny yip, and lifts me from the floor with a hungry surge of her hips-

“We will live, Caine. That’s our promise. To live. To be the stars we know we can be.”

“Yes,” I tell her. “Yes.”

What else can I say? What else do I want to say?

“And if they take me home-if they take me-”

Her voice gathers power in the rhythm of her hips.

“I will not leave you here. I will not leave you in their hands. I swear, I swear, I swear it. I will come for you.”

“I know. .” Breathless. Gasping. “I nnnn-nnnn-”

“And you will come for me.”

“Yes.”

“Say you will-”

“Yes-”

“Say it-”

“Yes, Marade, yes. Yes, I will come for you-”

“You will. You will come for me, Caine-you will-you will- ”

She spasms around me and her legs clench, and she could crush my spine to powder and I don’t care now. It doesn’t matter and it will never, can never matter, for there is only her flesh and mine and the vast wave we make together that stretches forever toward a crest in an infinite white glare that dissolves away all the dread and hurt and regret and anger and everything that could ever be wrong with the world.

And-

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