She remembers one dawn, late in their mating contract, when she asked him if he loved her. He didn't answer, but his swallowed silence was answer enough. The silence stung, though she'd suspected as much, had expected the very answer which he provided though she had to know dammit. It had been there in his fingers, and his lips. An affection for her, but love? No.

She burned to break him, for so long afterwards. To shatter him completely so that he'd see her as she really was, and not just the woman that he happened to be mated to. She'd tear him apart, rent him open with her nails, sink them like claws into his arms and hold him there until he caved beneath the relentlessness of her assault.

But though she longed to shatter him, she longed too to hold him. To grip him close, body flush with hers, and never let him go. To die in his arms, and him in hers. There had been such dawns between them, both pressed tight together, hiding on the world, as if their only protection was each other. She'd felt his tears in her hair, and had gripped all the tighter.

Though he didn't love her - not to that extent - he was driven by love. Everything he did in that time was out of love - love for people, humans or vampires, and love for That Woman, the one whose death shattered him so completely that Arra never really stood a chance at doing the same. She can understand that. She's defended him out of a sense of love (love or loyalty?) ever since.

It rushes back to her, a wave, a torrent. His fingers linked between hers. Memory's floodgate opens so that he is a vampire and she is a witch's assistant, and he is in a hotel room in Berlin quietly telling her that no, they cannot mate as he is loyal to a human woman. He is lying in a coffin, the injuries inflicted by Vancha March still healing. They are in sewers and tunnels and caves and crypts hunting vampaneze and hiding on daylight and his lips are so careful and his fingers are so gentle with her though she's seen them tear their blood cousins apart. And he is insensible with his injuries and she is bent over tending him and it's all there in his touch.

Maybe, for them, all of these years later there is such a thing as a second chance. But to ask him if he loves her? She knows what's in his touch and what isn't, knows his hands have changed from before and the answer could be in her favour, but does she really want to know? Or is it enough to just know that there could be hope for them?