The callous manipulation.
He startled when she set her hand over his, and he suddenly found it difficult to breathe.
“And sometimes we have to stand up and fight for what we know is right in spite of it.”
“And how do we do that?”
Logan’s gaze swept her way when he asked it, his eyes tracing the pretty curve of her jaw as she turned her focus upward. He got the sense neither of them knew how to admit their innermost fears while looking at the other.
“We take the chance when it’s presented to us. Refuse the heartache when it’s demanded of us. And we make sure to never surrender to the greed. It’s what drives these men and what has ruined them.”
His spirit fluttered at her words, and Logan shifted his hand so their fingers were threaded together.
Energy crackled.
This feeling that rushed up his arm and settled in his chest.
“Are you going to refuse it, Aster?”
He’d heard the rumors. The rumblings that Aster had newly been pledged to Jarek Urso, to be married on her nineteenth birthday which was less than a year away.
Jarek’s father was one of Andres’ closest allies.
The marriage would make them family.
“I’m going to figure a way out of it, Logan. One way or another, I will find a way. I won’t be forced into marrying a man I don’t love. I don’t care who my father is.” Her voice was pure determination.
The pad of his thumb ran circles on the back of her hand.
“You’re so brave.”
She choked a tiny sound. “No, I’m terrified. So terrified of the alternative that I’m willing to fight to keep it from happening.”
Her smile was soggy when she looked at him.
His chest tightened in a fist.
He had to tear his attention away and return it to the sky before he did something more reckless than he was already doing.
A soft giggle left her. “Why are you always staring at the sky when you can’t see anything?”
Her curiosity burned on the side of his face.
His lips twitched at her question. He realized then why her covert messages came in the shape they did.
“Even if we can’t see them, the stars are there, waiting for us to find them. To look beyond the smoke and distortion to the beauty obscured just on the other side of it. And if you look hard enough…”
He took their woven hands and lifted them, pointed with his index finger at the tiny shimmer that broke through the dingy sky. “See right there? That little star? It always shines through the haze.”
“Can you find it every night?” Her voice was the rasp of a whisper.
He tightened his hold on her hand. This girl who shined the brightest of them all.
Through the ugliness of her world.
Through the atrocity of their calling.
Maybe he really could rise above, be better than it all.