Clockwork Princess

about it as if Jem has all the choice about it and I have none,” she said, never moving her eyes from his face. “This engagement was not forced on me, nor do I have any illusions about Jem’s health. I choose to be with him for however many days or minutes we are granted, and to count myself blessed to have them.”
    Gabriel’s eyes were as cold as the sea off the Newfoundland coast. “I was only concerned for your welfare, Miss Gray.”
    “Better to look out for your own,” Tessa snapped.
    And now those green eyes narrowed. “Meaning?”
    “I believe the lady means,” Will drawled, “that
she
is not the one who killed her father. Or have you so quickly recovered from it that we have no need for concern for your sensibilities, Gabriel?”
    Cecily gave a gasp. Gabriel rose to his feet, and in his expression Tessa saw again the boy who had challenged Will to single combat the first time she had met him—all arrogance, stiffness, and hate. “If you ever dare—,” he began.
    “Stop,”
Charlotte said—and then she broke off, as through the windows came the sound of the rusty gates of the Institute grinding open and the clop of horse hooves on pavement. “Oh, by the Angel.
Jessamine
.” Charlotte scrambled to her feet, discarding her napkin on her plate. “Come—we must go down to greet her.”
    It proved, if an ill-timed arrival in other respects, at least an excellent distraction. There was a slight hubbub, and a deal of puzzlement on the part of Gabriel and Cecily, neither of whom really understood precisely who Jessamine was or the part she had played in the life of the Institute. They proceeded down the corridor in a disorderly fashion, Tessa hanging back slightly; she felt breathless, as if her corset had been laced too tightly. She thought of the night before, holding Jem in the music room as they kissed and whispered to each other for hours of the wedding they would have, the marriage that would follow—as if they had all the time in the world. As if getting married would grant him immortality, though she knew it would not.
    As she started down the stairs toward the entryway, she stumbled, distracted. A hand on her arm steadied her. She looked up, and saw Will.
    They stood there for a moment, frozen together like a statue. The others were already on their way down the stairs, their voices rising up like smoke. Will’s hand was gentle on Tessa’s arm, though his face was almost expressionless, seeming carved out of granite. “You do not agree with the rest of them, do you?” she said, with more of a sharp edge than she meant. “That I should not marry Jem today. You asked me if I loved him enough to marry him and make him happy, and I told you I did. I don’t know if I can make him happy entirely, but I can try.”
    “If anyone can, you can,” he said, his eyes locking with hers.
    “The others think I have illusions about his health.”
    “Hope is not illusion.”
    The words were encouraging, but there was something in his voice, something dead that frightened her.
    “Will.” She caught at his wrist. “You would not abandon me now—not leave me the only one who still searches for a cure? I cannot do it without you.”
    He took a deep breath, half-closing his shadowed blue eyes. “Of course not. I would not give up on him, on you. I will help. I will continue. It is only—”
    He broke off, turning his face away. The light that came down through the window high above illuminated cheek and chin and the curve of his jaw.
    “Only what?”
    “You remember what else I said to you that day in the drawing room,” he said. “I want you to be happy, and him to be happy. And yet when you walk that aisle to meet him and join yourselves forever you will walk an invisible path of the shards of my heart, Tessa. I would give over my own life for either of yours. I would give over my own life for your happiness. I thought perhaps that when you told me you did not love me that my own feelings would fall away and atrophy, but they have not. They have grown every day. I love you now more desperately, this moment, than I have ever loved you before, and in an hour I will love you more than that. It is unfair to tell you this, I know, when you can do nothing about it.” He took a shuddering breath. “How you must despise me.”
    Tessa felt as if the ground had dropped out from beneath her. She remembered what she had told herself the night before: that surely Will’s feelings for her had