They drove back to Seattle through the night, arriving as the city woke to gray dawn. Arora's apartment was in Belltown, a small space filled with books and plants and the accumulated evidence of a life spent mostly elsewhere—at work, at the shelter, in other people's heads.
Asher stood in her doorway, hesitant, suddenly awkward. "I should go. Check the loft, see if Caleb left traces."
"You should sleep. You're running on adrenaline and black coffee."
"I don't sleep much. Nightmares."
"About your father?"
"About becoming him." He paused, studying her living room as if memorizing it. "May I see where you work? Your study?"
It was a violation of boundaries, Arora knew. An invasion of the space where she kept her truest self. But she found herself nodding, leading him to the small room that served as her office.
It was dominated by a painting—her mother's, abstract, dark swirls of color that resolved, if you looked long enough, into a face screaming in silence.
"She painted that the week before she died," Arora said. "I think she knew. That he had poisoned her, or willed her death, or simply taken too much of her spirit to survive."
Asher approached the painting with the reverence he gave his own work. "She was talented. The emotion here—it's controlled chaos. Like she understood the edge and chose to dance on it."
"She understood men like your father. She spent her career trying to heal them. In the end, they consumed her."
"And you? Will I consume you, Arora?"
She stood beside him, close enough to feel his warmth, to smell the cedar and the road and the fear that never quite left him. "That's my choice to make. Not yours."
"But I could make it for you. I could leave, disappear, remove the temptation to save me from your path."
"Would that be saving me? Or saving yourself from the possibility that you might be saved?"
Asher turned to face her. The morning light through the window caught his eyes, turning them gold, inhuman, beautiful. "You see too much," he whispered.
"And you show too much. We're well-matched."
They stood there, in the space between professional distance and something else, something that had been building since he first placed his notebook on her desk. Arora knew she should step back, should reclaim her boundaries, should remember that this man was her patient, possibly her predator, definitely her danger.
Instead, she reached up and touched his face.
His skin was warm, slightly rough with stubble, and beneath it she felt the tension, the constant vigilance, the effort of being human. He closed his eyes, leaning into her touch like a cat starved for affection.
"Tell me what you want," she said. "Not what you don't want. What you actually, truly want."
"You," he said, eyes still closed. "I want you to know me and not run. I want to be the man you think you see. I want to stop designing deaths and start designing a life. With you. Beside you. However you'll have me."
"That's wanting a lot."
"I've been saving it up."
Arora let her hand drop. "Then let's start smaller. I want breakfast. Real food, not gas station coffee. And then I want to go to the hospital, to Swedish, and stop your brother from killing someone in my mother's memory. Can we want those things together?"
Asher opened his eyes, and they were wet, shocked, alive. "Yes," he said. "Yes, we can want that."
They ate breakfast at a diner down the street, pancakes and eggs and the normalcy of other people's conversations surrounding them. Asher watched a family at the next table—father, mother, two children—and his expression was so hungry that Arora reached across and took his hand.
"You'll have that," she said. "Not exactly that, but your version of it. If you choose it. If you work for it."
"With you?"
"If that's what you want. If that's what we both want, when this is over. When we know who you really are, and who I am when I'm with you."
"That's a lot of conditions."
"That's being careful. You should try it sometime."
Asher laughed, surprised, and the sound was so genuine, so unpracticed, that the family at the next table smiled at them, assuming they were in love, assuming they were normal, assuming the danger they sensed was just the thrill of new romance.
They would learn, Arora thought. Or they wouldn't live long enough to learn.
Either way, the design was in motion now. The only question was who would write the ending.