There was a vague sense of having been here before, though the circumstances were different. Here were the two of them, again. Separated by glass: one possessed by something primal, something desperate. The other silent as the grave.

Again.

Before, it had been she who'd gone off the rails. When they'd been retrieved from the arena the first time, and he was pale and cold and still like death, and she'd given herself over to some kind of savage hysteria. She'd flung her body at the wall between them, scrabbled wildly at the glass, tried to drive her fists through it to reach him ... Except that he'd been unreachable. And they'd had to sedate her and take her away from him.

Perhaps not so different, after all.

He was fighting, now, on the other side of the glass, resisting the men who endeavored to restrain him with all the adrenaline-fueled strength of a cornered animal. She stood motionless in her darkened corridor, observing him through the partition but far, far beyond his reach. She could see that he was dangerous in this moment. His movements were frenzied and unbalanced, and twice he lunged at the opaque window between them as though he could tell she was there. Playing possum in her cold disbelief. Shocked, paralyzed. Still as death.

His eyes were strange, dilated. She saw in them a primitive terror, something wild and incoherent that did not relent until the doctors managed-finally-to subdue him.

Just as they had been when he'd wrapped his fingers around her neck ...

She turned away.

No, this was nothing like the last time. Nothing at all. Unless it was to be believed that love and fear were the same thing.