karinka8730: переводы

→Clear up the evidence all you want, Cristina thought as she knelt down to peer over the railing of the balcony. It still happened.

→The inside of the Gard was quiet. Head down, she walked rapidly down the corridors, following the sound of voices toward the Hall. She veered aside to take the stairs up to the second-floor seats, which jutted out over the rest of the room like the balcony in a theater. There was a crowd of Nephilim milling around on the dais below. Someone (the Silent Brothers?) had cleared away the broken glass and blood. The window was back to normal.

→They must have been in the Council Hall. She remembered the window smashing inward as Annabel had disappeared. It had been a blur of noise, splintering light: Cristina had been focused on the Blackthorns. On Emma, the look of devastation on her face. On Mark, his body hunched inward as if he were absorbing the force of a physical blow.

→Cristina pressed herself back against the wall. She wasn’t doing anything wrong—any Shadowhunter could come to the Gard when they liked—but she instinctively didn’t want to be seen. As the Brothers passed close by her, she saw that it wasn’t rain after all sparkling on their robes but a fine dusting of glass.

→As she reached the front doors of the Gard, they opened and a group of Silent Brothers emerged. Their ivory robes seemed to glimmer with what looked like raindrops.

→The sky was a mixture of dark blue and black, where storm clouds had gathered over the mountains in the distance. Fortunately, the way up to the Gard was lit by witchlight torches. Cristina slipped along beside the path, keeping to the shadows. The air held the ozone tang of an oncoming storm, making her think of the bitter-penny tang of blood.

→But he was already up, retrieving the rest of his clothes, yanking them on while she stared. He was gone without putting his boots on, almost slamming the door behind him. Emma stared into the darkness, as stunned and disoriented as if she had fallen from a great height.

→* * *

→“Julian, don’t—”

→He leaned over the edge of the bed to grab his torn and bloodied shirt. He looked at her with a sort of wildness. “I do,” he said. “I really do.”

→“All right—but, Julian—” She struggled into a sitting position, pulling the blanket up over herself. “You don’t have to go—”

→He had already drawn away from her. Sitting up, he reached for his clothes, pulling them on with shaking hands. “We can’t,” he said, his voice muffled. “Emma, we can’t.”

→Her hands curved over the wings of his shoulder blades. He kissed her throat, her collarbones. She felt him flinch, hard, and whispered, “What—?”

→She knew what he wanted to say: Let me please you, let me make you feel good first. But that wasn’t what she wanted, not now. “Come closer,” she whispered. “Closer—”

→Frantic gestures rid them of their wet garments. She and Julian were skin to skin now: She was holding him against her body, her heart. His hand slid down, shaking fingers dancing across her hipbone. “Let me—”

→She nodded, feeling the muscles in his arms tighten as he swung her up into his arms. She shut her eyes, clutching at him, his shoulders, his hair, her hands slippery with water as he carried her into her bedroom, tumbling her onto the bed. A second later he was above her, braced on his elbows, his mouth devouring hers feverishly. Every movement was fierce, frantic, and Emma knew: These were the tears he couldn’t cry, the words of grief he couldn’t speak. This was the relief he could only allow himself like this, in the annihilation of shared desire.

→“Emma.” He sounded stunned, his hands knotting in the soaked material of her camisole. “Can I—?”

→He drew back as she raised her head, and their lips brushed—and it was instant, desperate, more like a tumble over a cliff’s edge than anything else. Their mouths collided, teeth and tongues and heat, jolts shuddering through Emma at the contact.

→She put her arms around him. “It’s all right,” she said. His skin was hot against hers. She swallowed the salt of her own tears. “Julian—”

→She froze. The shower had stopped running, but steam rose up around them. Julian’s chest was rising and falling fast, as if he were close to collapsing after a race. Dry sobs, she realized. He didn’t cry—she couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen him cry. He needed the release of tears, she thought, but he’d forgotten the mechanisms of weeping after so many years of holding back.