Page 138 of His Eternal Claim

Her forehead crashes against mine.

She’s crying so hard she can barely breathe.

And I feel every tremor. For years I imagined this.

Her running to me. Choosing me. And for the first time in my miserable, violent life, I let everything else go.

The darkness can have all of it.

I’ll survive it. I always do. Because she’s here. In my arms.

Alive!

My wife’s tears mix with rain and blood while she grips me like letting go might kill us both. And maybe it would.

Maybe there was never a version of this story where I made it out untouched. Maybe loving Selene was always meant to ruin me. Maybe she was always destined to become my favorite weakness.

My holiest sin.

My sweetest punishment.

My eternal claim.

I slide one bloodied hand to the back of her neck, hold her there, breathing her in. Storm and jasmine and gunpowder.

Mine. Always.

And after however many years it had been, I let the storm take everything else but her, as I let the darkness play little games with me, because if she’s in my arms, I can be on my knees forever.

Chapter 51

Dancing With the End

THE REQUIEM | Present

Ican’t tell where the storm ends, and my own pulse begins. Everything is too loud, too bright, clicking violently into place beneath my skin. The lavender fog is gone, incinerated the exact microsecond the dagger sank into his side. In its place is a roaring wildfire of memories. I remember the white walls. I remember the leather restraints biting into my wrists while my Mother watched with that serene, devastating smile. I remember the dead son we almost had.

And I remember him.

“Pressure! Keep the pressure on the lateral wound!”

We are out of the alley, extracted by a man with a buzz cut. I don’t know him, but he pulls Zagreus, who refuses to let go of my hand even unconscious.

I am sitting on a steel stool beside the hospital bed, frozen but vibrating at a frequency born of pure terror. My hands are resting on my lap, palms upturned. They look like a macabre canvas. The blood has dried, venous crimson from the Mother I just shot, mixed with the blood of the husband whom I betrayed. I do not deserve him.

“Signora Vitale, you need to step outside. We need to establish a central line, and the field is compromised.” A doctor reaches for my arm.

“Don’t.”

I don’t look at the doctor. My gaze is welded to Zagreus, who’s drifting in and out of consciousness. He is flat on his back; the white sheets beneath him are already drinking the deep red blooming from his shoulder and his side.

The terrifying relief of finding each other again.

I don’t move. If I step away from this bed, the horizon will collapse again. I dismantle myself piece by piece just to keep from screaming. I compartmentalize the grief of the child we lost, the fury at the forgery I’ve been living in, and the sheer, agonizing weight of his sacrifice. He knew. He knew my mind was a sieve. He knew his own blood was the only trigger violent enough to shatter the memory block Hannah had built inside me.

I reach out, my trembling, blood-crusted fingers wrapping around his uninjured hand. His skin is burning hot against my ice-cold palms, anchoring me to the earth.

Breathe. Just watch his chest rise.