Cole could see me, but none of them would be able to. What they would see was a man shouting furiously at the air. They’d think he’d suffered some brain injury when he went into thewater. I didn’t want to do that to him, but I couldn’t leave him with nothing.
Not again. Not now that he was looking at me while he was awake.
“You know who I am,” I finally murmured in a soft voice, and his eyes narrowed.
“I know what youdid.”
I reached for him, and the pained sensation that ripped through my chest when he jerked away was enough to let me know exactly what it felt like when the water from the river filled his lungs. Cold.
An icy weight.
He wanted nothing to do with me, and I wondered idly if this was my punishment for becoming something I was never meant to be, something unnatural.
Maybe it was my punishment for what I was about to do, because Deathknewwhen we were supposed to come back with Vitality. He knew… and I couldn’t take it from the place I was supposed to.
“I’m sorry.” I said it again, softer this time. He watched me with wary eyes as I leaned down and plucked one of the petals from the red flowers beside us.
“Stop saying that and tell me what you want.” So furious. So frightened… and I couldn’t give him what he needed. I leaned forward instead, catching his wrist when he tried to jerk away so I could press the petal into his palm.
“I don’t know what else to say, Cole.”
His eyes widened at the sound of his name on my lips, but his attention jerked away as the shouting from behind us drew closer. I let myself spill back into the shadows, dissolving from view as worried onlookers reached us.
I wanted to stay. I wanted to touch him, to run my fingers through his wet hair and tell him exactly who I was, what I’d been doing in that room with Caiden.
I wanted to tell him that his brother dreamed of a field of red, and he’d placed his entireworldin my hands before he died—that he’d trusted me withCole.
The words wouldn’t come. It seemed like some things were still sacred, regardless of how loose my tongue wanted to be. I couldn’t say the words to a living human. Bound in secret by Death…
And now I needed to find a way to pay the debt of a life I’d saved.
It was easy enough to follow the scent of someone on the edge, someone close enough to dying that a little push wouldn’t be remiss. It wasn’t as though I could go around killing humans who had years ahead of them—the soul would be fractured, it would call the hounds.
So I found a man on the streets instead—old, with lines worn into his face from the cruelty of time. Because of the Ardor, I noticed how they crinkled at the corners of his eyes, at the curve of his lips. He’d smiled through his struggles, and I could feel his exhaustion from keeping that expression on his face through the pain.
The sensation of exactly how tired he was poured over me in waves that made my body feel heavy, in stinging depths that clawed through the emotions I shouldn’t have been able to feel and made it nearly impossible for me to move forward.
How many lives had I taken where I could feel every trial they’d gone through? How many more would I be forced to reap knowing they wereafraid, that they weren’tready?
How much more could I take before something inside me broke and Death realized the game I’d been playing, the mask I wore when I came to his domain to deliver souls to the Lake?
I shuddered as I stepped from the shadows, and the man’s eyes turned up. He couldn’t see me yet—of course he couldn’t see me. It wasn’t histime. He still had months left, but…
Well…
If I had a soul, if the Ardor had truly awakened it, I’d sold it long ago to make sure I could keep Cole exactly where he was. Somewhere I could watch, could obsess over. Somewhere that, at night, when his guard was down and nightmares plagued him, I could run my fingers gently across his chest and calm him.
“I’m sorry.” I repeated the words I’d said earlier, and I truly meant it as I reached out and pressed my palm to the center of the man’s chest. The startled intake of his breath, like he’d been hit with a cold wind, tore through me.
The terror.
The pain.
The fear.
The sensation of his life ripping through him one memory at a time. Being a child with a mother who loved him, being a man who lost his family—who turned to addiction, who turned to the streets. Who was trying now, desperately, to overcome it all so he could be better.
So he could do better.
