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There was starlight in her eyes, flowing dusk through her hair; when the demon fled, it was like the world had split open on her command, luminous clarity surging to fill the space where there was only blind terror. And in the face of the woman who had surely been plotting to have him mysteriously vanished, who had instead saved him and called him hers, whose features he had drawn over and over out of mockery, frustration, rage, despair, he saw a certitude that he clung to, desperately, in the absence of heat and pain.
He was treating his love as an unspeakable thing. He was not actually sure it was love—it had come too quickly, like a lightning strike, and he could not trust it to remain. He was realizing how much of himself had come from the demon, all his vanity and cowardice, layers of scarring wrapped around the weeping wound at his core. Now his life was his at last, his to face with the wonder of a lost child.
He was getting used to the lack of flinching when the sun went down. He was getting used to Irina in his bed as he woke.