But another part—a quieter, more insistent part—remembers the way he held me last night. The patience he showed teaching the children. The genuine joy on his face during our dancepractices. The way he defended me against my mother without once overstepping or making it about himself.
Those things are real too.
Aren’t they?
“I need...” I swallow hard. “I need to think. I need time.”
“Of course.” He steps back, giving me space. “I’ll go. I won’t—I won’t come back unless you ask me to. The showcase, the contract, none of it matters if...” His voice breaks. “None of it matters without you.”
He turns toward the door. And something inside me snaps.
“Wait.”
He freezes mid-step.
“You don’t get to do that.” My voice is steadier now, stronger. “You don’t get to drop three hundred years of trauma on me and then walk away dramatically like we’re in some gothic novel. That’s not how this works.”
Slowly, he turns back. “How does it work?”
“I don’t know yet.” I release the barre, wiping my face with the back of my hand. “I need time to process. I need to understand what I’m dealing with. But I’m not going to figure that out if you’re gone.”
Hope flickers across his features, quickly suppressed. “What are you saying?”
Good question. What am I saying?
I think about my mother. About growing up with impossible standards, never being quite good enough, learning to hate myself for every imperfection. I think about the way I’ve spent my entire life striving for a perfection that doesn’t exist, punishing myself for failures real and imagined.
I think about what it would mean to demand that same perfection from someone else.
“I’m saying...” The words come slowly, each one deliberate. “That I’m not Elena. Or Constance. Or any of the others. I’m not going to run or betray you or try to bind you. I’m also not going to pretend that everything you’ve told me is fine. It’s not fine. It’s horrific.”
He winces but doesn’t look away.
“But.” I take a breath. “I also know that people can change. Not just humans—people. And the Mal I know, the one who makes the children laugh and brings me coffee and held me through the nightmare of my mother’s birthday party... that Mal isn’t the same demon who did those things three hundred years ago. Is he?”
“No.” The word is barely a whisper. “No, he’s not.”
“Then tell me the rest.” I move closer, one step, then another. “All of it. The parts you were afraid to say. The things you think will make me leave. Tell me, and let me decide for myself whether I can accept them.”
His crimson eyes search my face. “You might hate me.”
“I might.” It’s honest. “I might hear something that I can’t get past. I might decide that full knowledge is exactly as impossible as Azrael claims. But I won’t know unless you tell me.”
The silence stretches between us.
Then Mal takes a breath—another unnecessary human habit—and begins to talk.
He tells me about his first century. About the intoxicating rush of power, the thrill of watching carefully orchestrated chaos unfold. He tells me about specific incidents—villages burned, families torn apart, wars started with whispered lies. He names victims when he remembers their names. When he doesn’t, he describes them anyway, refusing to let them remain anonymous.
I listen without interrupting. My stomach turns. My heart aches. Several times I have to look away, unable to meet his eyes while he describes atrocities that would make a war criminal blanch.
But I don’t leave.
He tells me about the children—three of them, siblings, caught in a fire he’d started to fulfill one of Azrael’s contracts. He’d tried to save them. He’d actually tried, for the first time in his existence, to mitigate the damage he’d caused. He’d failed. Their faces still haunt him.
He tells me about the plague in Constantinople. About the way it spread through neighborhoods he’d personally visited, spreading discord that weakened immune systems and opened bodies to infection. About the mass graves. The wailing. The smell of death that lingered for years.
He tells me about Elena. He tells me about the guilt that consumed him afterward, the decades he spent in a kind of living death, going through the motions of demonic service while something essential inside him withered.
