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The question caught me off guard. I hadn’t thought of that place in years—hadn’tallowedmyself to.

I kept walking. “It doesn’t matter.”

“When I went into the Pit of Shadows,” he said. “They asked me to rip my heart from my chest and renounce love forever.”

He stopped in the middle of the path, his eyes dark against the sea.

“They gave me a choice,” he said. “I could keep love, or I could take power. But not both. If I wanted to ascend, I had to tear it from my heart and leave it behind.”

I turned to him. “So, you chose power.”

He gave a bitter laugh.

“You think it was that simple? You wouldn’t understand.”

He stood there with his cloak snapping in the wind.

“They didn’t just take love, Lazarus. They let me feel it first. Completely. The warmth, the hunger, the ache that burns through everything else. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever known. And then they made me choose—either be loved forever by you, by Amara, by Helena, even by my father… or give up love entirely and ascend.”

He paused, his voice turning low, ragged.

“I chose power. I thought I could save my mother from her tome. I thought I could use what they gave me to fix everything. But the moment I chose, the shadows tore love out of me piece by piece until I was hollow.”

He laughed again, but the sound broke halfway through.

“I’ve tried everything to feel it again. I’ve taken men and women, fed them pleasure, drawn out ecstasy, pain, all of it. But love… It’s gone. Ripped from me.”

His voice cracked, rare and jagged.

“And then your father—Severen.”

He stopped, his voice low, shaking. “He cursed me. He made it so I would bechildless.”

His eyes burned in the dim light, hollow but defiant. “The shadows told me that true love would make me feel again—real love, not lust, not hunger. They said the touch of something truly mine, something born from me, would bring the warmth back.”

He laughed once, a sound too broken to be cruel. “So, I tried. I sought it through creation, through blood. I thought a child might undo the emptiness. I thought if I held life that was mine, it would make me whole.”

His gaze drifted toward the floor. “But Severen’s curse still hangs over me. No matter how many I’ve taken to bed, no matter how many shadows I’ve fed with pleasure, none have ever carried my blood. Not one.”

He lifted his head, voice quivering now, stripped of arrogance. “I will never be a father. Never know that kind of love. Never feel it ever.”

The wind moaned through the cliffs.

I said nothing. I hadn’t known what he’d given up—hadn’t wanted to.

But even knowing it didn’t erase the blood between us.

We reached the house in silence. The door groaned as I opened it, and the familiar hum of the jars filled the air—each one pulsing, gold, blue, and red, breathing like three fragile hearts.

Salvatore set down the newest jar beside them. Its light joined theirs, spilling over the walls like molten color.

He turned to me.

“I know you hate me,” he said. “You should. I earned it. But I’m grateful you were beside me once—before all of this. Before the chains. Our friendship… it meant something. I’m grateful for what we had. For Amara.”

I stared at the floor. “Yet, you killed her.”

He met my gaze, unflinching.