GRAYSON DID NOT PULL AWAY.
He did not scoff. He simply stood there, a mountain of dark, brooding intensity, his silver eyes tracking the slight tremor in Mailah's hand as it rested against his neck.
The silence stretched, filled only by the rhythmic tick-tock of the clock he had recently "repaired" with terrifying efficiency and the soft, crackling hiss of the gramophone's needle reaching the end of its track.
"Love," he repeated. He tested the word as if it were a foreign blade, gauging its weight and the sharpness of its edge. "A human classification."
"It's more than that, Grayson," Mailah whispered.
"Is it?" His hand shifted from her jaw, his fingers tangling into the hair at the nape of her neck, pulling her just a fraction closer until their breathing was a shared, jagged thing. "If this is love, it is a catastrophic structural failure of the logic I once lived by."
