I close my mouth.
He returns the blade to my throat. Steel kisses skin, cold enough to make every nerve skitter awake. His other hand cradles the back of my head, bony fingertips threading intomy hair, drawing me forward until his forehead presses against mine.
Bone to skin. Endless to mortal.
The blade ceases to exist. There’s only this: his breath on my lips, the pulse of his heart, the two remaining strings visibly shivering.
“Elara.” My name has never sounded like that before. Like a prayer from someone who has never prayed. “Say it. Say you love me.”
“I love you.” The words come as easily as breathing. “I’m yours. I was probably born yours.”
“And I love you.” Gold softens against the ridges of his skull, beading into slow, molten pearls that trace the hollows of bone the way tears trace a cheek. One trails down his temple, pools in the socket of his eye, slides along the edge of his jaw, and hangs there. Trembling. Refusing to fall. “Will love you until the day I die.”
His lips press against mine. Dry. Trembling. Tasting of frost and carnations and ancient, aching loneliness.
The kiss deepens. Just enough.
Then the blade bites.
Heat slams into my throat, a deep burn that wraps around something thick, something choking. Copper floods my mouth, sweet and warm, bubbling onto the back of my tongue. My hands fly to the slick heat on my neck. The world tilts. My legs dissolve, and I can’t breathe.
I can’t?—
Oh my god, I can’t breathe!
Death rips his mouth from mine on a sound that isn’t a scream. It’s worse. Lower. The kind of noise that comes from a chest being split open from the inside. His knees hit the ground, his arms ripping me down with him.
And yet he cradles me against him as he takes the fall, absorbing the impact the way the earth absorbs a body.
My cheek hits his chest. Through the blur, through the dark pressing in from every edge, I see it.
Gold slides between the open slats of his ribs. Molten. Slow. It drips onto his heart and stretches, pulling long and thin and taut, spinning itself into a thread that pulses once, twice…then holds. Three strings. The third brighter than the others, burning with a newness that hurts to look at.
His trembling palm finds my cheek, smearing thick dampness across it as his mouth moves. I can’t hear him.
The throne room dims. The vaulted ceiling folds inward. Miss Hampshire’s silhouette shrinks to a pinprick before it vanishes, and everything collapses into a tunnel that narrows around the only thing still shining.
His heart. Pulsing like a lantern held up in a storm.
I follow it. Not because I choose to. It’s the only direction left. It pulls me gently, warmly, the way a current pulls a leaf, and the farther I drift, the quieter everything becomes. No pain. No copper. No choking. Just a vast, humming stillness that settles into me the way soil folds over a grave.
It feels like the space between headstones on a summer evening. Like the quiet after a burial, when even the wind holds its tongue. It feels like the place I’ve always belonged, among the silent, the still.
Among death.
Then…a sound.
Distant. Wrecked. A voice dragged across gravel and broken glass, shaping itself around three familiar syllables. “Elara…”
It isn’t a summons. It’s a sob. The kind of sound I’ve heard a thousand times at gravesides, the grief of someone who isn’t ready to let go.
“Come back to me.”
The light holds. Warm. Perfect. Infinite.
But that sob…
It hooks into something I no longer have, somewhere below the light, below the peace. It pulls. Neither hard nor violent. Just a steady, aching tug, like a hand reaching into deep water and closing around my wrist with the grip of a man who refuses to let go.
