Zane is the other half of me, the other half of my everything. The words part the air between them with their rawness. Cait doesnât expect them to catch the air the way they do. Soulmate. Thatâs a road Cait does not want to go down, a spiral she doesnât really want to descend.
Cait doesnât believe in soulmates. Not really. The word makes her bristle â too soft, too final, like a lie people tell themselves to make loss feel fated instead of hollow. The idea that thereâs one perfect match for every person sounds suspiciously like bad magic: comforting, seductive, and dangerously easy to misuse. Sheâs seen what people do when they think theyâve found âthe one.â How far theyâll go. How much theyâll bleed. Soulmates, in her experience, are just another excuse to justify madness â to carve someone open and call it devotion.
But still... still, there's something about watching Harley talk about Zane that tugs at something small and quiet inside her, something old and aching and hard to look at. Maybe itâs envy. Maybe itâs grief. A part of her â tiny, inconvenient, buried under years of discipline and deliberate distance â wonders what it would feel like to be someoneâs inevitable. Not needed. Not feared. Just⌠chosen. And maybe even loved for it.
She smothers that thought as soon as it rises, but it leaves a bitter warmth in its place â like the ghost of a fire she doesnât remember lighting. "Soulmates... I donât know if Iâll ever believe in that," Cait says quietly. "But I hope, for your sake, that itâs true."
Thereâs a beat of silence after she says it, the kind that stretches too long if you let it. Cait doesnât. She shuts it down the way she shuts most tender things down â by pivoting. Her expression shutters, gaze narrowing back to the thread she can control: magic, theory, the mechanics of whatâs real. Whatever sentiment had cracked loose is gone by the time she speaks again, tucked away beneath the practiced calm of someone who prefers certainty to hope.
"Fear and guilt," she echoes, soft but precise. Not mocking. Diagnosing. "Thatâs a heavy foundation to build anything on."
But the words arenât judgment. They're acknowledgment. Cait knows all about building weapons out of pain. She paces a step, thoughtful, one hand skimming the edge of the worktable, mind ticking through calculations he canât see. Patterns. Systems. Leverage. What Harleyâs doing â raw instinct shoved into structure by the force of grief and love â thatâs rare. Dangerous. The kind of thing the wrong person could break open and weaponize without even meaning to.
"But I donât just want to interrogate you," Cait says, her voice smoothing back into steadiness. "I want to understand you."
A beat. Her expression softens â just barely. "If youâll let me," she continues, "Iâd like to run some experiments. Safely. On your terms. No tricks. No exploitation."
Her mouth tilts into something almost â almost â like a smile.
"I think youâre neat, Harley."
