Another shot rang out, then another, yet Cassian did not scream or struggle while the bullets continued tearing into his body. He remained seated against the wall, calmly smoking his cigarette while the gunman fired again and again.
By the time the seventh shot echoed through the night, police sirens began to rise in the distance. The masked shooter glanced toward the sound and fled before he could fire the final bullet into Cassian's head.
Cixi cried helplessly while watching Cassian struggle to remain conscious as blood continued draining from his body. His eyes slowly lowered.
"Could you please keep your voice down? You are too loud."
Her sob froze. She lifted her head to witness that Cassian was staring right into her eyes, directly at her.
"Y-you can see me?" she asked in shock.
"Yeah," Cassian replied weakly while leaning his head back against the wall to steady himself. "I can hear you too... What are you doing here?" he asked casually while studying her with fading strength. "In ghost form? And when did you colour your hair platinum? F.Y.I., the colour platinum is not even in my preference list."
Of all the things he could say while dying, those were the questions he chose.
Cixi could never understand this man. She concluded.
"You are dying!" Cixi reminded him. "Can't you see that?"
"Yeah, sweetheart," Cassian replied calmly. "I can see. I felt every bullet tearing through my skin and then into my flesh. It's not a pleasant experience, I must say."
Cixi did not know whether to cry harder or scold him for taking death so lightly, yet a terrible thought suddenly crossed her mind—every person whose death she witnessed eventually died. And if that rule remained unchanged, Cassian would soon share the same fate.
Not knowing what else to do, she gathered her courage and asked softly, "Do you have any final wishes? Do you want to send a message to someone? I can do it for you."
She placed her hand on his shoulder, and this time her hand did not pass through him. She could feel him — solid and real.
She waited eagerly, impatiently, to hear his last wish or last message.
"Kiss me." Came his nonchalant reply.
Cixi stared at him in stunned silence, caught off guard. She wasn't sure if she had heard him accurately. So she asked him to repeat his wish.
"A kiss," He repeated.
Throughout her twenty years of life on this planet, no one had ever asked for a kiss from her—until now. The first man ever to request one, who was lying in a pool of his own blood on a rooftop, asking for it as someone might ask for the time.
"Time is ticking, Cixi." Cassian reminded her that he was running out of time.
After a quick moment of hesitation, Cixi leaned forward and pressed a small, careful kiss to his blood-stained cheek before pulling away.
Cassian's hand rose and gripped the back of her neck.
The contact sent a jolt through her body before her mind could catch up. His fingers slid into her translucent hair, feeling its warmth, and then closed around the nape of her neck with a grip that was firm yet gentle. He didn't yank; he simply held her the way a man holds something he has already determined belongs to him with a certainty so complete that it left no room for argument.
"Do I look like that seven-year-old Melisha to you?" he murmured, and his breath grazed her lips as he spoke.
"W-wh—" Her lips parted on the unfinished question, but he stole the word before it could form. His mouth collided over hers without warning, and for a heartbeat, the world around her fell completely silent.
Cixi froze.
It was her first kiss.
She had never prepared for it, never imagined it would happen like this — not on a blood-stained terrace, not with a dying man holding her as if she were the only thing keeping him alive.
Her eyes widened as his lips moved against hers, and the sudden closeness stole the air from her lungs.
His hand held the back of her neck, firm and warm despite the blood, not hurting her, yet not allowing her to escape either.
He kissed her unnervingly slowly, savouring her. That was the part that undid her the most, as if he were writing something against her mouth that he wanted her to remember long after the ink had dried.
Her fingers instinctively clutched his shirt.
She had planned to grant a dying man a final wish. A simple, quick farewell kiss. Something she would forget by morning.
This was not that.
His lower lip dragged across hers, and the taste of him flooded her senses. Smoke first, then a metallic taste, his blood. She could taste them mingling between their mouths wherever his skin met hers.
It should have horrified her. It should have made her stomach lurch, her translucent body recoil. Instead, the taste anchored her to the moment with a visceral pull she could not name, binding her to him in the same way his fingers were bound in her hair.
Cassian's lips were moving with the skill of a seasoned champion, while Cixi tried to follow him, learning his rhythm.
He sucked, nibbled, and licked, catching her lower lip gently between his teeth at first, as if it were a tug that felt almost like a question. But then he bit down harder until a sharp sting bloomed suddenly, igniting a rush of sensations. Cixi gasped, clutching his blood-soaked shirt, and he took that moment to deepen the kiss in the same breath as though they were the same act, the gasp and the claiming, a single thing that could not exist without the other.
Cixi felt her heart pound wildly, even though she didn't possess a heart in her ghostly form. She was confused by the strange mix of fear, shock, and an unfamiliar emotion that she could not yet identify.
She should have pulled away.
She should have stopped him.
Yet she didn't.
Because somewhere between the shock and the warmth of that unexpected closeness, she realised he was not kissing her like a dying man desperate for pleasure.
He was kissing her as if he refused to leave the world without feeling life one last time.
When his tongue brushed hers, the taste shifted. There was hunger in it with the same heated, dangerous intensity she had heard when he spoke in that low, dangerous warning.
A sound escaped her throat, low, unbidden, completely involuntary, and Cassian's hand tightened in her hair. And his kiss now turned into starvation. He pressed his lips harder against hers, while his breath rushed hot against her cheek. She felt his jaw clench beneath her palm, where her hand had drifted to his face without her permission.
He tasted her blood, and she tasted his.