I leaned closer, close enough to see the flicker of her breath. “If you’d chosen me,” I said, my voice low, trembling between anger and want, “you’d never have to stitch another wound or wash blood from your hands again. No more healing. No more tending to the broken.”
I could almost see it—the life I could’ve given her. “You’d have gold, Amara. An estate of your own. Servants. Safety. Everything you’ve ever deserved.”
My jaw tightened. “You could’ve lived easy,” I said, my voice breaking into something rougher, smaller. “If only you’d chosen me.”
“You and I,” she said softly, her hands still working the cloth against my wounds, “were born to different worlds. And you… You don’t love, Salvatore. You try to possess. Lazarus saw me. He never wanted to own me—only to stand beside me.”
Her words were knives. Her touch was fire.
“I always cared for you, Amara,” I confessed. My hand moved before I could stop it, fingers brushing her wrist and lingering too long. “I love you—more than he ever could. And I can give you what he never will.”
Her eyes flickered, the look caught between pity and disgust. Yet her hands kept tending my wounds with that same unbearable tenderness, the same care that once saved me. That only made it worse.
“You don’t know what you’re saying,” she whispered. “You’re hurt. You’re angry. You’re not yourself.”
But I was myself.
For the first time, I saw exactly what I was becoming—something formed from want, from pain, from everything she would never return.
The room went still. Even the slow drip from the ceiling seemed to hold its breath. The air narrowed until it was only the space between her pulse and mine.
“I’ve never been more myself,” I rasped, closing my hand around her wrist. Her skin was warm beneath my fingers; my heartbeat hammered against hers. “I’ve wanted you for years, Amara. More than I’ve ever wanted anything.”
For a heartbeat, I saw the boy I had been—the one who ran barefoot through the fields with Lazarus at his side and Amara’s laughter chasing after us. We had nothing then but sunburnt skin, stolen bread, and the foolish belief that friendship could outlast the world. I wanted to be him again, just long enough to matter.
Her lips trembled. “Salvatore?—”
I leaned in.
She turned her face aside. “No,” she said, her voice cutting clean through the quiet. “You don’t love, Salvatore. You wound. You destroy. That’s why you went to Helena.”
The words stung.
My fingers tightened on her wrist.
“Salvatore—don’t,” she warned, breath unsteady now.
I moved anyway. The air tasted of stone and salt. My mouth brushed her cheek, then her neck; her skin was soft, the memory of nights she’d held me together, when my father would beat me.
“Stop,” she said, struggling. “You were never mine.”
“You’re mine,” I growled. “You were always supposed to be mine.”
Her palm struck my face hard. The sound cracked the air and rolled through the chamber, bouncing from wall to wall until it came back changed, hollow and strange, as if the Dreadhold itself had flinched.
For a single breath, everything froze. The world narrowed to her breathing and the sting burning across my cheek.
Even the air held still, thick and waiting.
The Dreadhold seemed to draw in around us, stone folding tight like a ribcage locking its heart away.
Then she turned to flee, and I caught her.
My hand closed on her arm, rough, desperate, unforgivable. The fabric of her tunic tore under my fingers. Her gasp filled the space between us, sharp enough to cut through the quiet. Her eyes met mine—fear and defiance warring in their depths—and I felt the last of the boy I had been vanish.
The silence that followed was not peace. It was punishment.
The Dreadhold groaned—deep, mournful—as though the stone itself understood what I had done.
