My knees buckled, and Eden pulled at me, trying to hold me up, but I was sinking. The blood loss was catching up to me all at once. I had never planned on having to make it this long. I collapsed onto my knees, then my side, my cheek pressed to the cold concrete like it was the only real thing left. My hand was still outstretched toward her, fingers twitching, trying to hold onto the last thing that had ever made this life worth crawling through.
My body was trembling, but inside? Inside, I was calm. Not peace, not exactly. More like surrender, acceptance. This was how it ended: not in glory, not in triumph. Just a man with an empty gun and a girl who should’ve never followed him here.
The pain blurred, dulling into distance. My ears rang, and my vision pulsed at the edges. My breath came slow and ragged. It felt almost euphoric, like slipping into a hot bath. Like floating.
And beneath that warmth… the cold, the knowing. I had always been meant for this. This was the card fate had drawn. Even before the blood and guns and gangs, long before Matteo, before even Eden, something in me had always known how this ended. It was tattooed across my chest, right over the heart thatwouldn’t stop bleeding: Memento Mori.Remember you must die.
A whisper, a promise. A prophecy I’d written into my skin like I was trying to warn myself. And now it was here. The curtain was falling. I turned my head, eyes straining to keep her in focus.
Eden.
She was screaming something I couldn’t hear anymore. Holding my face, cradling it like it mattered. Her lips moved. Her tears hit my skin, warm and useless.
“I’m sorry,” I said. Or maybe I didn’t. Maybe I only thought it. It was hard to tell what was real now, because the light was dimming and all that was left was her face and the sound of my heartbeat counting down to zero.
This is how it ends,I thought.
Not with fear, not even with courage. Just with love and loss all at once. And the silence that waits for all of us.
I don’t know how I stood. Maybe it was her voice, pleading with me not to give up. Maybe it was the last spark of whatever soul I had left. I pushed against the ground with blood-slick hands, vision doubling. My legs buckled again, then locked, and I swayed as the world tilted and spun in a cruel carousel of rust and moonlight… but I got to my feet.
Because she was still behind me, still in the line of fire, stillalive.
I pulled her in close. “You have to go. You can still go.”
She shook her head at me, eyes wide with that fucking defiance and hopefulness that I loved so much. I started dragging her, one step at a time, shielding her with my body and praying that if I could just get her far enough, I could give her time. If I could buy her twenty seconds, that would be enough. That would have to be.
Chapter forty-six
Eden
“Where the Light Ends”
Ididn’tknowwhatI thought dying would feel like, but it wasn’t this. It wasn’t this loud, this cold, thisslow.My hands were slick with his blood where I gripped his arm like an anchor. I kept thinking if I just held tight enough, if I pressed hard enough, I could stop the pieces of him from falling apart in front of me. But I couldn’t. He was right. I wasn’t made for this world, and he was bleeding out trying to shield me from it.
Matteo's men advanced with a newfound confidence. They had every angle, every shot. They knew they’d won. But Halo stood tall in front of me, broken and burning. I could feel the tremor in his muscles, the barely-there sway of a man holding on by threads. Still, he didn’t waver, or cower, or beg. He just turned his head slightly, like he wanted to say something to me. Maybe a last word, a warning, or maybe just a goodbye.
I saw it in his eyes then, that heknew. This was the end, and he’d accepted it before I even got here. His body had already started letting go, but his will hadn’t. He wasn’t afraid of death; he was afraid of losing me.
He was moving like he hadn’t just been on the floor moments ago, fading before my very eyes. I saw the tremble in his fingers and the haunted flicker behind his eyes. He wasn’t unfeeling. He wasbreaking, piece by piece, and he didn’t care if the cracks swallowed him whole.
“Keep your head down,” he snapped, guiding me through the labyrinth of rusted crates and bullet-pocked corridors.
I could barely breathe. The air reeked of iron and oil and smoke and beneath it something older… like this wasn’t the first time this place had been a graveyard.
His voice came out low and ragged. “You don’t belong here, Eden. This was supposed to bemyend. Not yours.”
“I know,” I said, “but I’m making my own decisions now.”
He looked at me, gaze torn and furious and desperate. “How did you even find me?No one knew—”
“I looked at your phone. You left it behind.”
Halo’s jaw clenched. “You fucking brilliant andstupidwoman.”
Boots, several pairs, sounded across the pavement in double time. Halo yanked me behind a metal pillar and scanned the shadows. I followed his gaze, and saw Matteo… and at leastsevenmen, fanned out in a half-circle. Guns drawn, faces hard.
No more running.
