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Which was why the second he looked up at me, tears clinging to his eyes… eyes now full of hope, it broke my heart all over again when he lowered his lips to mine. Lowered them ready for a kiss that I couldn’t return. Which was why, before they were close enough to touch mine, I placed my hands on his chest, applying pressure before stepping back.

And he let me. Of course, he did. This was Riley, the first man I ever fell in love with. It just so happened that he wasn’t the last.

Atlas was.

“Riley,” I said his name softly, and in a way where I intended to say much more, but nothing came, realizing now that I’d tiptoed around Atlas when explaining how I had got here.

His head dropped, and for a long moment, he didn’t say anything at all. Then, quietly, without looking up, he uttered a name once used for a man who no longer fit the title.

“The General.”

My breath hitched.

“Atlas,” I said, and even here, even now, the name did something warm and aching to my chest that I couldn’t have stopped if I tried.

“He’s… Riley, he's nothing like what we thought he was. Nothing. He's been trying to save us. All of us. This whole time.” I said, my voice pleading for him to understand. To understand that I hadn’t just fallen for the villain… no, I had fallen for my hero.

Riley lifted his head, and I watched him swallow it down. When he spoke, his voice was steady in a way that seemed to cost everything. “You don’t have to explain. Not to me.” He took a breath and then broke my heart all over again when he added, “Not after what I did.”

“No.” I crossed back to him and took his hand in both of mine and held it, hard. “No, Riley. It has nothing to do with that. Don't you ever think that.” I squeezed until he looked at me. “I never expected this. Any of it. I didn’t go looking for it. It just… it just kind of happened, the way the worst and best things always do, without asking.” I felt my own eyes sting again. “But you listen to me. I will never forget what we had. Even if it was only ever a few stolen minutes of it. You are my best friend. You’ve left a mark on my life that I know won’t fade. And I am always going to love you… just like this. Just the way we are now… Always.”

He looked down at our joined hands. And when he looked back up, the grief in his face had something gentler underneath it. Something that had made its peace, and he gave me a small, crooked, heartbreaking ghost of the smile I had known since the first day we met.

“Then I will take whatever I can get, and if it’s only ever your love in the form of friendship, then I still consider myself the luckiest guy in the Apocalypse,” he said roughly. He brushed his thumb once across my knuckles and let go, repeating the word… “Always.”

For one breath, in the middle of hell, it was almost enough.

Then his head came up sharply, his whole body going rigid, listening to something I couldn’t hear.

“We can’t stay here.” He was already moving, already holding my hand firmer, but differently now, urgently, our moment lost to the terror of this place we were still trapped in. “It knows you’re awake. It’ll have felt it. Come on, I know a place. Somewhere it took me a long time to find, somewhere quiet. We might be safe there, for a little while at least.”

He pulled me through another of those impossible doors, and the half-dark house was gone. We were somewhere I hadn’t let myself think about in a very long time.

The cramped little office at the train yard. The one Riley and I had shared for only a handful of days, before everything came apart again. But there had been a bed crammed into the corner of it, and a few short, stolen nights when the fear ebbed long enough for us to reach for each other in the dark. When we had very nearly let it become something more than two frightened people keeping each other warm.

Where it had so nearly begun.

I stood in the doorway of it and felt the past reach up and close around my throat. “Here,” Riley said quietly, pulling the door shut behind us, sealing us into the quiet and the dark. “We’re alright here. Just for a minute. Just long enough to catch our breaths.”

And I did. God help me, I let myself believe in it, in him, in the lie of a safe room at the end of the world. I let my guard come down for the length of a single breath.

That was all it took. All it took before this hell fought back against the calm and won.

The door behind me didn’t just open. It vanished. Gone in an instant. One second, we were safe, and the next, Riley’s hand was torn out of mine so fast and so hard that I cried out. I fought to get back to him. Fought with everything I had in me, but something seized me from behind. A hellish strength dragged me backward out of that little room and into a roaring, freezing dark, just as I screamed his name.

“RILEY!”

But it was no use. Not when an arm like iron clamped around me, lifting me clean off my feet.

I twisted in its grip, and I looked up, gasping at the sight.

It was Atlas.

The relief hit me so hard it buckled my knees, a sob of his name already breaking out of me… Atlas, he’d come, he’d found me, of course he had, he always found me.

But then, his face began to move. It was a small thing at first. A wrongness in the eyes. A shadow crawling beneath the skin where no shadow should be. And then the beloved lines of him rippled and ran like wax held to a flame. The warm, dark eyes snuffed out into a flat, depthless black. His jaw sharpened, the whole of his handsome face sliding away into something far colder and far crueler than I could imagine. Something mockingly evil.

Shadows poured off it in slow ribbons. And as the last of the mask slipped, he smiled down at me with a mouth that didn’t belong to any lips I had ever kissed. Which was when I understood, far, far too late, exactly whose arms I had been pulled into.