Then I saw it. The stone. His name was carved into cold granite. Adrian Valente. Born. Died. Buried.
No.
My breath strangled itself. My knees caved. I folded, graceless and broken, onto the earth in front of the grave as if my body hadbeen waiting to fall. This was real. This was final. I pressed my palms to the soil. It wasn’t warm. It wasn’t him.
And then I heard it. The drag of leather boots behind me. A presence. A pause. Zagreus stood a few feet back, watching me with that same dead calm he wore like skin.
“You did this,” I whispered.
A laugh. Low. Hollow. “I buried him, Dolcezza.”
I looked over my shoulder, and the fury that surged up from the pit of my grief wasn’t something I’d prepared for. “You didn’t have to kill him to destroy him.”
His eyes narrowed, head tilting just slightly, the shadows under his lashes deepening. “Careful, Dolcezza.”
“Or what?” I spat. “You’ll kill me too?”
“You’re not that special,” he replied. But something inside him twitched.
I pushed myself up from the grave, dirt clinging to my palms, my chest rising and falling in a rhythm I couldn’t control. “You think this makes you powerful? This… killing? This silence?” I laughed bitterly, stepping toward him. “All this death you carry—you’ll face it one day too.”
He moved closer.
“I’ll tell you what I see,” I whispered. “I see a man who’s going to die alone. And no one’s going to cry over your grave, Zagreus. Not one soul.”
His jaw tightened.
“You’ll rot somewhere just like this. But the difference is—” I stepped into him, my chest brushing his coat, “—you won’t have a name etched in stone. You’ll vanish. Forgotten. No one will light candles. No one will miss the monster.”
The air changed.
Something inside him snapped.
The next second happened like a thunderclap. His hand shot out, curled tight around my throat—not choking, but holding. Owning. The breath stalled in my lungs.
“You talk like you know me,” he said, voice low, rasping, barely human. “But you don’t. You see the mask. You kiss the devil’s teeth and think you know his hunger.”
I clawed at his wrist. “Let—go—”
But he wasn’t listening.
His other hand fisted the front of my dress and shoved me back with brute, calculated force. My spine slammed into the cold marble of Adrian’s grave. A gasp tore out of me. The stone bit into my skin.
Zagreus pressed in, body a wall of fury, lips close enough to graze mine if he leaned just a breath forward. “You think I haven’t felt love?” he whispered, and this time there was something else—something raw, ugly, broken in the way his voice trembled at the edges. “I have. I killed it. I buried it. I slit its fucking throat because it made me weak.”
He laughed. One short, bitter sound. “And look at you, trying to tell me what I’ll never have. Like you’ve seen the ending to a story I’m still writing.”
“I have,” I whispered, gasping. “It ends with you—alone, bitter, with nothing but a name carved in a stone no one visits.”
That broke him.
His hand slammed beside my head on the grave. The marble cracked beneath the force. Dust and splinters of stone trembled into the night air.
His eyes—God—his eyes weren’t human anymore. There was violence there. A storm that hadn’t broken yet.
His voice dropped, dark and dangerous. “Keep talking, Dolcezza. Let’s see how many pieces I have to break you into before you stop.”
I stared at him, trembling. Not from fear. From the sheer weight of everything I was trying to hold in. The grief. The rage. The loss. But I didn’t look away. Not this time.
