How did we end up here, the four of us standing in the same darkness?
How did I get so lucky?
“Skye,” Cassian murmurs, and I lift my head before I even realize I am moving.
He steps aside just enough for me to see what the three of them have been standing over. At first it looks like a strange shape made from stone and earth, uneven and rough, as if someone built it with nothing but their hands from the ground up.
It takes a second for my mind to catch up.
It’s a grave.
Mygrave.
The rocks rise in a careful slope, their edges fitted together, and the top is smoothed with a flat piece of dark slate propped upright like a headstone. There is an inscription carved into it.
HERE LIES SKYE DILANO
A BEAUTIFUL SOUL
NEVER FORGOTTEN
My breath folds in on itself. Something inside my chest pulls inward and expands at the same time, too many feelings striking all at once. Cassian watches every flicker of emotion crossing my face as he steps closer. Talon moves in behind me, his heat settling along my spine where his hand rests. Nathaniel smiles softly.
“Is this… for me?” I manage, and my voice comes out smaller than I mean it to.
“You never got a funeral,” Nathaniel says.
It is such a simple sentence. So small, almost gentle, and it hits harder than anything else. I died a long time ago. I came back wrong, then came back again, and somewhere in the middle of all that I discovered a whole new side of mortality. A whole new kind of living. The four of us have been learning it together, piece by piece, like we are building something out of the wreckage.
And yet, in the space of a heartbeat, I realize I always wanted this.
To be remembered, and to be cared for.
“You deserved one,” Cassian adds. “A real one. Not whatever lie your ex-husband would have spun.”
The mention of my husband should sting. It doesn’t anymore. I mean, who would have cared about that asshole in the presence of these three?
“We wanted you to have a place,” Nathaniel says. “Something that marks that you existed, and that you loved.”
Loved.
I did love.
Idolove.
Talon leans down, his breath brushing my ear. “Go see it.”
He nudges me forward gently. When I reach the stones, I slide my hand over the slate. The surface is cold, but it warms under my touch. Or maybe I warm under it.
It’s nothing extra. Just stone and earth and a single plate set into the ground. And yet it might as well be everything.
“There will come a day when we leave this place,” Cassian says. “I don’t know how or when, and I don’t know what will become of us when we do. But we want to vow to you, Skye. We will never leave your side.”
I turn toward them.
“Never,” Nathaniel echoes. “Even if the whole world goes to shit, we’ll be right with you when the sky falls.”
“I hope you know that even if Death tries to tear us away from you, we won’t let him,” Talon adds. “We’ll find you, even at the furthest edges of the afterlife, if that’s where he takes you.”
