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“You make me want to live,” he told her, as if this were an altar and these were his vows. “You make me want to grow things, not only destroy them. You make me happy.You make me believe in things I thought were lies when I was a kid, things I dismissed a lifetime ago. You make my heart beat when I thought it was dead. You make me imagine that somewhere inside, I’m a regular man.”

Her eyes were so bright then. Her voice was so thick. “I love you, too,” she whispered.

“You make me want to be human.” And Jonas didn’t have it in him to be horrified by the sound of his own voice cracking. Not with Bethan. “You make me imagine it’s possible. For you. Only for you.”

“Jonas,” she said, coming even closer so she could take his face between her hands. “You always have been human. Always.”

And then she showed him.

She leaned forward and she kissed him, as if she were turning him from stone into living flesh. She kissed him as if it were all a foregone conclusion, life and happiness. Bright and reckless and almost too beautiful to bear.

Bethan kissed him until the sweet of it shifted into that kick of familiar heat. And they were bothalive. They had survived too many wars to name, SuperThrax, and Grand Central. They had more fights in front of them, because that was who they were.

And still she kissed him as if these were the kind of happy stories someone could tell while raising a glass under a wedding tent someday.

Jonas couldn’t believe that something in him wanted that. Not the stories, maybe, but the rest of it. The whole wild pageant with Bethan front and center, smiling at him in a pretty white dress.

He needed to stop being so surprised at the things she brought out in him.

He pulled away, his eyes tracking over her face, trying to take in every detail. There was color in her cheeks again. That pallor that had terrified him in New York was gone.She looked like his Bethan again. Those serious green eyes, those freckles, and that mouth he couldn’t get enough of whether she was kissing him, fighting him, or smiling at him and making him real at last.

“I love you,” she said again. And when she smiled this time, it was like summer. “It’s okay. You don’t have to say it. You don’t ever have to say it. I know who you are.”

And she did. His whole life, Jonas had assumed that all there was to know about him was what he could do. The wars he could wage. The fights he could win.

He’d been born an afterthought and fashioned into a crude weapon by careless hands. Then the military had gotten to him and made him sleeker. Meaner. Templeton and Isaac had tempered him some, but he’d still gone his own way to that cabin in the Alaskan interior to weigh his options. He’d always thought that someday, he’d end up there again.

But Bethan had never looked at him like he was broken. She never looked at him like she was trying to figure out how to use what he could do to her advantage.

She looked at him the way she always had, from the day they’d first met. As if he were nothing more and nothing less than a man.

Human straight through.

And if she believed it, he would try.

For her, there was nothing he wouldn’t do.

“I love you,” he said, because he did. “I’ve never loved anyone else. Not like this. And Bethan, I never will.”

She grinned at him then, his sweet, soft soldier, made of steel. “You certainly won’t. Or I’ll kill you myself.”

Then she took his hand again and pulled him down into the embrace of that couch.

Where together, they celebrated the fact that they’d survived.

More than just survived. Theylived. Bright and hot, tough and tender, and marvelously alive.

And more often than Jonas had ever imagined possible, happy.

***

The first time Jonas saw Bethan cry was when he took her to his own cabin.

And maybe he’d known how she would react, because he could suddenly see this home of his through her eyes.

Stark. Empty.

Dark and cold, the way he’d always been.