Sweet and Sour
The Ledger of Lost Things
The Surgical Intensive Care Unit hummed with the sterile, mechanized murmur of survival.
The cardiac monitors beeped in a steady, monotonous syncopation, punctuated by the rhythmic, pneumatic sigh of the vacuum-assisted drainage canister mounted to the foot of the bed. It smelled of chlorhexidine, fresh saline, and the sharp, coppery ghost of dried blood that twelve washcloths had failed to completely lift from beneath Cristina Yang’s fingernails.
Cristina stared at the acoustic tiles of the drop ceiling.
Her vision was clear now. The fentanyl from the patient-controlled analgesia pump kept the acute fire of the thirty-centimeter midline incision down to a dull, throbbing ache, but it did nothing for the cold, hollow emptiness sitting inside her pelvis.
Her hands lay flat against the white hospital blanket, resting just above the thick elastic abdominal binder.
Underneath that binder, beneath the four layers of pressure gauze and the stainless-steel staples closing her fascia, there was nothing.
No right tube. No interstitial junction. No cornual artery.
No uterus.
The organ had been weighed, photographed, sliced into five-millimeter bread-loaf sections, and dropped into a vat of buffered formalin in Miranda Bailey’s basement. It was medical waste. It was a pathology gross specimen: *Uterus, status post ruptured cornual ectopic gestation, non-viable, surgically excised.*
A single tear pooled in the corner of Cristina’s left eye. It didn't fall. She refused to let it fall. She blinked rapidly, her jaw clenching until her molars ground together, forcing the moisture back into the dry tissue of her eye socket.
"Yang."
Alex Karev sat on the low rolling stool beside the bed, exactly where he had been for fourteen hours.
He looked like hell. His green scrubs were wrinkled and stiff with dried fluids; his dark jaw was shadowed by three days of thick stubble; his eyes were shot through with broken red capillaries. But his hands—his large, scarred, clumsy hands—were resting gently on the chrome edge of the mattress, not quite touching her, hovering with an anxious, heartbreaking deference.
"Stop staring at the ceiling," Alex muttered, his gravelly voice thick with sleep deprivation. "You're gonna bore a hole through the drywall."
Cristina slowly turned her head toward him. The simple motion made her pulse thrum behind her temples.
"I didn't want it, Alex," she whispered.
The words were raw, stripped of all clinical composure, trembling with an agony that made the skin over her cheekbones pull tight.
"I know," Alex said softly.
"I had the appointment," she rasped, her throat dry, her vocal cords still irritated from the endotracheal tube Addison had pulled six hours ago. "I was going on Tuesday. I had the cash in my locker. I was going to pay four hundred dollars, lie on a table for eight minutes, take a dose of doxycycline, and come back for rounds. I didn't want a baby. I don't want a baby."
She turned her face into the thin hospital pillow, her fingers curling into the sheets until her knuckles turned translucent white.
"So why does it feel like somebody ripped my chest open?" she choked out, a ragged, violent shudder rattling her ribs. "Why am I crying about an organ I didn't even want? It was an obstruction! It was an undifferentiated clump of cells that almost blew out my pelvic floor!"
Alex didn't answer with platitudes. He didn't tell her it was going to be okay, because Alex Karev had grown up in houses where things were never okay.
Instead, he stood up from the stool, leaned over the chrome bed rail, and rested his rough, calloused palm flat against the crown of her head. He threaded his blunt fingers through her wild, damp curls, pressing her forehead gently into the rough wool of his scrub collar.
"Because it was yours," Alex said quietly, each word landing with the brutal, grounding honesty of an iron weight. "It was yours, and somebody took it without asking. You don't have to want a kid to be pissed off that someone stole your choice, Cristina."
Cristina let out a small, jagged breath against his chest—a breath that was halfway between a sob and a snarl.
"I’m never gonna have the choice," she whispered into his shirt. "Not at thirty. Not at thirty-five. Not when I’m Chief. It’s gone. It’s just... gone."
Alex closed his eyes, his jaw working as he swallowed down the knot in his own throat. He rested his cheek against the top of her head, breathing in the medicinal scent of her hair.
"You're alive," Alex murmured, his voice cracking with a fierce, possessive loyalty. "That’s the only part of this equation I give a damn about. You’re breathing, Yang. The rest of it... we’ll figure it out. Or we won't. But you’re here."
The glass slider of the ICU room didn't just slide open; it was shoved aside with an authoritative, careless rattle that made the nurses outside at the telemetry station look up in sharp irritation.
"Excuse me, sir! You cannot go in there! That is an active critical care unit—"
"Save it, sweetheart," a smooth, cultured, entirely unapologetic voice drifted into the room. "I just wrote a half-million-dollar endowment check to your neurology research wing forty-eight hours ago. If I want to walk into this room, I will walk into this room. Go fetch someone who gets paid enough to argue with me."
A man stepped through the threshold, shaking a wet, bespoke cashmere overcoat off his broad shoulders with casual, effortless grace.
Alex’s head snapped up, his posture instantly locking into a defensive, territorial crouch, his hand instinctively dropping to the guardrail beside Cristina’s shoulder.
The man standing in the doorway was tall—nearly six-foot-one—with an athletic, sculpted build that filled out a four-thousand-dollar midnight-navy suit cut from Italian vicuña wool. He had the unmistakable Yang architecture: high, razor-sharp cheekbones, thick black hair swept back from a sculpted forehead, and dark, hooded eyes that evaluated the entire room in three tenths of a second.
But where Cristina’s intensity was cold, surgical, and stripped of decoration, this man wore his brilliance like a loaded gun wrapped in raw silk. He carried the easy, insolent swagger of a man who owned the airspace he moved through—a lethal hybrid of Mark Sloan’s decadent arrogance and Cristina’s terrifying, predatory intelligence.
Christopher Yang tossed his drenched coat onto the visitor’s armchair, unbuttoned his jacket, and looked straight at the bed.
"Look at you," Chris said, his voice a rich, dark baritone that carried a faint, mocking smile. "I leave you alone for four months, and you manage to exsanguinate yourself into a surgical gutter. You always were an overachiever, Crissy."
Cristina didn't jump. She didn't scowl.
A tiny, exhausted, utterly genuine exhale broke from her lips. "You’re late. My hematocrit was twenty-four three hours ago."
"My Gulfstream had to hold over Spokane because of the squall," Chris said, walking straight to the bedside, completely ignoring the warning glare Alex was projecting like an electric fence. "Then your third-rate valet service didn't know how to park an Aston Martin in the rain. I had to walk three hundred yards across wet asphalt. My Berluti loafers are entirely ruined."
He reached the edge of the bed, reached down, and took Cristina’s pale, bruised face between two large, manicured hands.
The insolence vanished in an instant. For a fraction of a second, his dark eyes darkened with an ancient, bone-deep terror that only a twin could feel. He leaned down, pressing his forehead against hers, his thumbs gently sweeping over the dark circles under her eyes.
"You terrifying little idiot," Chris murmured in rapid, fluent Korean—a quiet, private cadence that Alex couldn't understand. Then, slipping back into English with a low, ragged chuckle: "Did you really have to let them take the plumbing? Mom is going to have an aneurysm. She already hired an astrologer in Seoul to pick your wedding dates."
"Tell Mom to choke on her charts," Cristina rasped, though she leaned into his touch for two seconds before swatting his wrist away. "And stop talking like an asshole. My head hurts."
Chris straightened up, smoothing the cuffs of his French-collared shirt.
Only then did his gaze shift to the other side of the bed.
His dark eyes settled on Alex Karev.
The silence that fell between the two men was instantaneous and thick with violence.
Alex stood his ground, his broad shoulders squared, his fists loose at his sides, his amber eyes burning with the raw, alley-brawler suspicion that had protected him through three foster homes and twenty street fights. He looked like an unkempt pit bull guarding a porch.
Chris appraised him. It took five seconds. He looked at Alex’s blood-spattered clogs, the torn stitching on his scrub pocket, the dark circles of exhaustion, and the proprietary way Alex’s hip was braced against the chrome railing of the bed.
A slow, razor-thin smirk curved Chris’s lips.
"So," Chris said, his voice dripping with smooth, dangerous amusement. "You’re the stray."
Alex’s jaw clenched so hard a tendon jumped in his neck. "Who the hell are you calling a stray, pretty boy?"
"Alex," Cristina warned from the pillows, though she didn't have the lung capacity to enforce it.
"I’m Christopher," Chris replied easily, extending a hand that sported an eighteen-karat rose gold Patek Philippe on the wrist. "Cristina’s better half. The one who makes the money that buys the titanium instruments she uses to carve up degenerates."
Alex looked down at the extended hand, then spat into the plastic wastebasket beside his knee. He didn't take it.
"I know who you are," Alex growled, his voice low, guttural, and entirely unimpressed. "She talks about you. The Wall Street hotshot who thinks he owns the world because he pushes paper on a trading desk. You want to see your sister? Great. Look at her. Then get your expensive shoes out of the ICU before you contaminate my field."
Chris’s eyebrows lifted in genuine, delighted appreciation. He withdrew his hand, sliding it smoothly into his trouser pocket, rocking back on his heels.
"Feral," Chris remarked, glancing down at Cristina. "You really do have atrocious taste in men, Crissy. First the neurotic cardio attending who treats you like an apprentice carpenter, and now this. Did you find him behind an auto body shop?"
"I’ll break your nose, Wall Street," Alex said, taking half a step around the bed, his voice dropping into that terrifying, flat register that preceded a broken jaw. "Right here in front of the monitors. I don't give a damn about your endowment check."
"Alex, stand down," Cristina snapped, coughing slightly, which caused her to clutch her midsection with a sharp gasp of pain.
Alex was back at her side in an instant, his anger forgotten, his hands hovering over the blanket, his eyes wide with frantic panic. "Hey. Easy. Don't cough. The staples are fresh. Take small breaths, Yang. Small breaths."
Chris watched them.
The smug, superior mask on the banker's face didn't entirely slip, but the sharp, assessing glint in his eyes shifted. He saw the way Alex’s large, scarred hands steadied his sister’s trembling frame—without hesitation, without disgust, without the polite, squeamish distance typical of men of their social circle. He saw the raw, bleeding devotion in the boy’s bloodshot eyes.
"Nurse!" Chris called out suddenly, his voice ringing through the unit with administrative authority.
A weary registered nurse appeared at the slider. "Yes?"
"Bring a reclining chair into this room," Chris ordered smoothly, pulling a crisp hundred-dollar bill from a leather money clip and dropping it onto the telemetry desk. "A leather one from the doctors' lounge on four. And two roast beef sandwiches from the deli across the street. Real meat, not the grey sludge from the basement. My sister’s companion looks like he hasn't eaten since the Carter administration."
Alex blinked, his brow furrowing in confusion. "I don't need your charity, Yang."
"It’s not charity, Karev," Chris replied, pulling up a plastic chair and sitting down with an elegant cross of his legs. "It’s asset protection. If you pass out from hypoglycemia on top of my sister’s fresh incision, I’ll have to sue the hospital, and litigation is dreadfully boring. Eat the sandwich, shut up, and hold her hand. That seems to be the only thing you’re marginally qualified for."
Alex glared at him, but he didn't leave the bedside. He sank back onto his stool, his hand sliding back over Cristina’s, his fingers lacing through hers with stubborn, territorial permanence.
Cristina closed her eyes, letting out a long, ragged sigh. "I hate both of you."
"We know," Chris and Alex said in unison.
***
Six blocks away, on the quiet, tree-lined incline of Queen Anne, the heavy oak front door of Preston Burke’s brownstone swung inward.
The entrance hall was silent, illuminated only by the soft, warm amber glow of two low-wattage brass sconces. The air smelled of beeswax, polished cherry wood, and the lingering, rich aroma of the braised short ribs Burke had simmered for six hours in a Dutch oven, now sitting untouched and cooling on the soapstone island in the dark kitchen.
Preston Burke stood at the bottom of the grand central staircase.
He had discarded his tuxedo from the previous night, now wearing a soft, charcoal-grey cashmere turtleneck and tailored flannel trousers. His dark hair was brushed back, his bronze face set into lines of patient, dignified expectation.
Izzie Stevens walked into the foyer.
She carried two heavy leather duffel bags—the ones she had bought with her modeling checks three years ago in California. Her blonde hair was pulled back into a severe, hurried ponytail, her fair skin flushed pink from the freezing Pacific rain outside. She was wearing an old navy fleece, dark jeans, and water-stained leather boots.
Burke’s face softened instantly. The severe attending vanished, replaced by the warm, chivalrous lover who had knelt in the mud on Meredith Grey’s porch.
He stepped forward, his arms opening to take the bags from her hands. "Isobel. You are late. I was beginning to think Addison had assigned you another post-op protocol."
Izzie didn't let go of the straps.
She stood on the Persian runner, her fingers locked around the heavy leather handles, her breath coming in short, visible puffs of mist in the drafty entryway.
"I’m moving in," Izzie said.
Burke paused, his hands resting lightly on the leather of her bags. A slow, brilliant smile broke across his features—a smile of pure, triumphant relief that made him look ten years younger.
"Good," Burke murmured, leaning down to press a warm, lingering kiss to her cold cheek. "Very good. I had the walk-in closet in the master suite cleared this morning. The cedar drawers are empty. We will unpack your things, we will have the short ribs, and we will put this terrible weekend behind us."
"Preston," she said.
The tone was not soft. It was not the blushing, starry-eyed cadence of the girl who had swooned over his vintage town car or marveled at his great-grandmother’s diamond.
It was flat. It was heavy. It was the voice of a woman who had spent four hours in the ICU watching a brilliant surgeon bleed out from the inside.
Burke straightened his spine, his dark eyes narrowing slightly as he caught the chill in her demeanor. "What is it, Isobel?"
Izzie dropped the duffel bags. They hit the hardwood floor with a heavy, deadening thud that echoed into the high plaster ceiling.
She reached into her coat pocket.
She withdrew the antique Lyon heirloom ring.
She did not throw it. She did not slam it onto the marble console. She held it out on the palm of her hand, the Old European-cut stone catching the amber light, throwing its cold, prismatic fire against the wainscoting.
"I am moving into this house," Izzie said, her voice steady, clear, and ringing with absolute, terrifying finality. "I will sleep in your bed. I will cook in your kitchen. I will love you, Preston. I will support your service, and I will be your partner."
She took a slow, deep breath, her chin tilting up at ninety degrees.
"But I am not having a wedding. Not in June. Not at St. Michael's. Not in Charleston. Not anywhere."
Burke stared at her palm.
For three long seconds, his face was utterly blank, as if his brain—trained to process micro-vascular anomalies in fraction-of-a-second intervals—refused to register the input.
Then, the bronze mask hardened into stone.
"Take the bags upstairs, Isobel," Burke said quietly. The baritone was low, smooth, and laced with the lethal, icy control of an attending dismissing an incompetent student from the scrub sink. "You are exhausted. You spent the day in the ICU with Yang, and you are allowing her trauma to dictate your emotional stability."
"Do not patronize me, Preston!" Izzie flared, her blue eyes flashing with blue-hot fire. "Do not stand there and treat me like an intern presenting a poorly researched differential! This isn't about Cristina! This is about *us*!"
Burke stepped around the bags, closing the distance between them until he was towering over her, his broad shoulders casting a massive, dark shadow across the foyer.
"It is entirely about our standing," Burke rasped, his aristocratic composure cracking just enough to let the deep, burning wound beneath show through. "I am Preston Burke. I am the Chief of Cardiothoracic Surgery at a major teaching hospital. I am forty years old. I do not 'shack up' with my residents, Isobel! I do not engage in an informal domestic arrangement like two undergraduates in an off-campus apartment!"
"An informal arrangement?!" Izzie cried, taking a step toward him, her hands balling into fists at her sides. "I am offering you my life! I am standing in your hallway with all of my worldly possessions in two bags, telling you that I want to wake up with you every morning! How is that an informal arrangement?!"
"Because without the church, without the vows, without the public declaration before my family and my peers, it is an arrangement of convenience!" Burke roared, his voice finally breaking through his disciplined control, vibrating the crystal droplets of the chandelier above them. "My mother has carried that ring for forty years! The Burke family has stood in Charleston since 1882! I do not bring a woman into this house as a concubine, Isobel! I bring her as my wife!"
The word *concubine* hung in the cold air like a slap across the mouth.
Izzie flinched. The color drained from her cheeks, leaving her fair skin chalk-white, her breath hitching in her throat as if she had just taken an eighteen-gauge needle between the ribs.
"A concubine," Izzie whispered, the word tasting like poison on her tongue.
Burke closed his eyes. Instantly, an expression of profound, agonizing regret flashed across his sculpted features. He reached out, his long fingers trembling as he tried to touch her shoulder. "Isobel... I did not mean—"
"No, you did," Izzie choked out, pulling back from his touch as if his skin were white-hot iron. "You meant every single syllable. That’s what this is about, isn't it? It’s not about love. It’s not about sanctuary. It’s about *respectability*."
She pointed a shaking, accusatory finger at his chest.
"You’re terrified, Preston! You’re terrified that if you don't wrap me in eighteen-karat gold and march me down the aisle of an Episcopal church with three hundred blue-bloods watching, someone might look at me and remember where I came from! You think if you don't put a veil over my head, someone is going to whisper that Dr. Preston Burke married the girl from the mobile home who posed in a lingerie catalog!"
"That is not true!" Burke shouted, his hands clenching at his sides.
"It is true!" she screamed back, tears of pure, furious grief spilling over her lashes. "You want the traditional wife! You want the bread, and the cookies, and the Christmas trees, and the four babies! But you don't want *me*! You want the version of me that fits inside your mother’s dining room! Well, I’m not going to Charleston, Preston! And I am not going to let you erase seven years of medical school so you can have an immaculate living room!"
She set the heavy Lyon ring down on the marble console table.
It made a sharp, final *clink* against the stone.
"The bags stay in the hallway," Izzie said, her voice dropping into a terrifying, icy whisper that cut deeper than any shout. "You decide what you want, Dr. Burke. You can have the woman standing in front of you—the woman who loves you enough to give you her days—or you can have the ghost of your great-grandmother's wedding. But you don't get both."
She turned on her heel, pushed open the heavy oak door, and walked out into the pouring Seattle rain, leaving Preston Burke standing alone in the grand hallway with an empty ring and a cold pot of short ribs.
***
The smell of rain and wet wool hit the corridor outside Cristina Yang’s ICU room forty minutes later.
Izzie Stevens didn't bother knocking. She hit the pneumatic button with the palm of her hand, the glass slider hissing open as she marched into the room, her coat drenched, her hair plastered in wet, wild tendrils to her cheeks, her chest heaving with the ragged, electric aftershocks of the fight.
"I did it," Izzie blurted out, her voice loud, raw, and vibrating with pure, unadulterated adrenaline.
She didn't look at the chairs. She didn't look at the monitors. She marched straight to the foot of Cristina’s bed, her hands gripping the metal railing so hard her knuckles turned blue.
"I told him, Cristina," Izzie gasped, half-laughing, half-sobbing, the rain dripping from the hem of her jacket onto the linoleum. "I told Preston. I brought my bags to the brownstone, I dropped them on his antique rug, and I put the three-carat Lyon diamond right on his marble table. I told him I’ll live with him, but I’m not doing the wedding. I’m not doing Charleston. I’m not doing St. Michael's, and I’m not becoming his mother’s pet!"
She took a massive, shuddering breath, wiping a wet strand of hair from her eyes with the back of her sleeve.
"He called me a concubine, Cristina! A concubine! Can you believe the arrogance of that man?! Forty years of manners, and the second I won't play the blushing Southern bride, he treats me like a scandal in a parlor! But I stood my ground. I didn't back down. I walked out and left him with his short ribs."
Silence met her.
Absolute, heavy, dead silence.
Izzie blinked, the adrenaline fog finally clearing from her vision as she realized the room was not empty.
Cristina was lying on the bed, her mouth slightly open, her dark eyes wide with disbelieving shock.
Beside her, Alex Karev sat on his stool, halfway through chewing a massive bite of a roast beef sandwich, his jaw completely frozen, a smear of mustard on his thumb, staring at Izzie as if she had just detonated a grenade in the middle of rounds.
And standing on the other side of the bed—leaning his hip against the stainless-steel supply counter with an air of complete, predatory languor—was Christopher Yang.
Izzie froze.
The man was staring at her.
Not casually. Not politely.
He was staring at her with an intensity that made the air between them feel suddenly, dangerously thin. His dark, hooded eyes—so terrifyingly like Cristina’s, yet burning with an unhurried, decadent male heat—traveled slowly down her drenched frame.
He looked at her wet hair clinging to her neck. He looked at the oversized navy fleece pulling tight across her chest. He looked at the flushed, furious heat radiating from her cheekbones, and the wild, untamed blue fire burning in her eyes.
A slow, dazzling, utterly wicked smirk spread across Chris Yang’s sculpted face.
He didn't move. He didn't introduce himself.
He just tilted his head by a fraction of an inch, his voice dropping into a low, smoky, intimate purr that cut through the sterile hum of the monitors like silk tearing across iron.
"'Bethany Whisper,'" Chris murmured smoothly. "'Spring 2002. The Savannah Morning collection.'"
Izzie’s breath caught in her throat. Her heart gave a sudden, sickening jolt against her ribs.
"'Pale lavender silk camisole,'" Chris continued, his dark eyes never leaving her face, his gaze tracking the line of her collarbone with photographic, sensual precision. "'Lace trim along the bias. Standing on a wrought-iron balcony in the rain, holding a porcelain cup, looking over your shoulder like you were daring the photographer to touch you.'"
"What?" Izzie whispered, her voice trembling with sudden, horrified shock.
Chris took a slow, unhurried step away from the counter, his hands sliding into the pockets of his four-thousand-dollar trousers.
"'Winter 2003,'" Chris recited, his smirk deepening, his baritone thick with an effortless, arrogant delight. "'The Alpine Chalet campaign. The cream cashmere boy-shorts and the cable-knit sweater slipping off the left shoulder. Page forty-two. You were lying on a white flokati rug in front of a stone hearth, Stevens. You didn't smile once. You just looked through the camera lens like you owned every single man who bought the catalog.'"
Alex choked on his roast beef, coughing violently into his paper napkin. "Holy hell..."
Cristina slapped her forehead with her uninjured hand, groaning into her pillow. "Chris, shut your disgusting mouth."
Chris didn't hear them. He didn't care about Alex, or Cristina, or the hospital.
He stopped four feet from Izzie, towering over her, his broad shoulders blocking the fluorescent glare of the room. He looked down into her wide, furious blue eyes, his gaze unapologetic, appreciative, and entirely consumed by the living, breathing woman standing before him.
"I had that issue framed in my dorm room at Wharton," Chris said softly, the arrogance in his voice laced with a genuine, intoxicating fascination. "My roommate offered me two thousand dollars for the tear-sheet, and I told him I’d break his collarbone if he touched the glass. You were always my favorite, Stevens. By an absolute mile."
He paused, his eyes gleaming with an insolent, lethal charm.
"And you look significantly better in wet wool than you did in the cashmere."
Izzie Stevens did not blush.
She did not swoon. She did not giggle.
She had spent eight months fighting for her life in this hospital. She had scrubbed Alex’s centerfold pictures off the clinic walls with her bare fingernails. She had stood over open uteruses with Addison Montgomery, and she had just broken the heart of the Chief of Surgery to protect her right to be a doctor.
She looked at Christopher Yang.
She saw the tailored suit. She saw the gold watch. She saw the smug, predatory entitlement of an elite man who thought that because a woman’s body had once been printed on glossy paper, she was an open invitation for his amusement.
Izzie’s spine snapped into steel.
Her lip curled into a feral, vicious sneer—the raw, unvarnished ferocity of a girl from a Chehalis trailer park who had spent her childhood throwing beer bottles at men who looked at her sideways.
"You touch me," Izzie spat out, her voice a low, venomous hiss that made the hair on the back of Alex’s neck stand up, "and I will take a ten-blade and sever your femoral artery before your private jet can clear the tarmac, you Wall Street parasite."
Chris’s eyes widened slightly, caught completely off-guard by the pure, undiluted violence in her tone.
Izzie didn't wait for a response.
She threw one last, furious glare at Cristina—"Call me when your brother gets hit by a bus"—spun violently on the heel of her wet leather boot, and slammed through the pneumatic exit, her footsteps echoing down the tiled hallway like gunshots.
The room fell dead silent.
Alex slowly lowered his sandwich, staring at the empty doorway, then turned his head to look at Chris.
"Told you she was tough as nails," Alex grunted, taking another bite. "She grew up on a farm. She’ll castrate you with a butter knife, Yang."
Chris didn't answer.
He stood in the center of the ICU room, completely motionless, staring at the glass door where Izzie Stevens had just vanished into the rain.
His hands remained in his pockets, but his fingers had curled tight against the silk lining. His breath was coming slightly faster, his pulse hammering against the collar of his tailored shirt, his dark eyes burning with an intense, electric, and terrifyingly total fascination.
A slow, brilliant, dangerous smile spread across Christopher Yang’s face.
"God," Chris whispered softly into the quiet room. "What a magnificent creature."