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My blood seeps slowly through the stained white fabric, spilling down the skirt of my dress. I’m wobbling, fighting unconsciousness as it nips at my heels. I try to shout for Lonan. My throat won’t work.

I am Galvin’s bloodmate. He dies—I die with him.

And it will be Lonan’s hand that does it.

Darkness consumes my vision, and a horrible sick feeling wraps around me. I’m falling.

A pair of arms wrap around me. I can hear him shouting my name as the bell tolls—four o’clock. I want to wake up, to reply, but I can’t. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.

I will die with a broken heart.

Two Hours Till Dawn

LONAN

I’ve spent more than one sleepless night staring at the walls of my room, thinking about the screams that both my Light and my Dark have caused.

Virtue is a lie. The purity of the Light is nothing—worse than a fairy tale. It shines bright enough to blind us to the truth.

Here is the truth of magic. It is all devastation. It is all secrets and chaos and lies. Light and Dark. Whatever goodness my magic might have wrought, it is drowned out by the violence I was taught to wield it with. Nothing good comes from the slice of my blade, just as nothing good comes from the bite of my shadows.

Magic is death. They don’t teach us that at Gossemort. One moment of carelessness, one slip of the reins on my rage, and Vesper is screaming.

I swore an oath to protect her. I did not think to protect her from myself.

Chapter Fifty

“You’re making a mess.” It’s what I try to say as I’m jostled in Lonan’s arms. It comes out as a jumble of groans. He’s holding me. Running? And my blood is getting all over his shirt. For some reason, that’s what most concerns me right now. Saints, the school launderers are not going to be happy with us.

Lonan crashes through a door, and when I look up, I realize that we’re back in the Founders Hall. I watch the mural overhead—visions of Saints and dragons and gargoyles in the clouds. Why do artists always paint the Saints so angry? You’d think it’d be a nice thing, becoming a Saint. You’d think if anyone had little reason to complain about the outcome of their lives, it’d be the most powerful meigas in history. Although, quite a number of them did burn at the stake . . . or were beheaded by the guillotine . . . or were nailed to a cliffside and left to have the birds pick at their flesh.

A strange laugh escapes my throat as Lonan pushes us through another door. I’m well aware that it’s an insane, delirious laugh, which only makes me cackle harder. How odd to be laughing at this moment, but what is there left to do, really? All this effort to survive, all this strife. It might not even work. The pain sears, and I realize my cackling is making me bleed harder. Which, at the moment, is also very funny.

Lonan hushes me, and it’s only the abject terror in his voice that quiets me. Finally, he sets me down on a small wooden bench. Slumped against the wall, I’m finally awake enough to take in my surroundings properly. These halls are narrower, less ornate.

“Servants’ passages,” I murmur, stifling another giggle.

Lonan isn’t listening. He’s tearing at his tie, ripping off his shirt, which already hardly has a clean spot on it, and is pressing it to my stomach. The blood starts to soak through the white of that too, albeit more slowly.

“Stay awake, Fontaine,” he tells me.

Stay awake, he says. Sure. I’m too busy studying the way the muscles of his shoulder connect with his back, his neck, memorizing the planes of them. The branches of that birthmark, the Darkness shaped like lightning, curve over the lean muscles of his chest and shoulder. A few moles spot his skin here and there. My eyes trail up the scar—the one that falsely marks him as second-born—to his face. His olive skin has paled. He’s trembling as he focuses on the wound in my side, and sweat has beaded on his forehead and forced his glasses to slide halfway down his nose.

I lift a finger to poke his glasses back up his nose. “Boop.”

He drops his head in exasperation. “Fucking Saints,” he whispers. He lifts the shirt to study the wound underneath. “The blood flow is slowing. I need to take a look at it.”

There is no tear in that part of my dress—the cut to Galvin’s abdomen injured me without touching my gown. Lonan grips the fabric in both fists and rips it. And, Saints, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t like that a little too much. But he’s all business, shifting the fabric aside to inspect the skin beneath. I glance down, and nausea roils as I realize just how much blood there is. But when Lonan gently nudges the flesh of my stomach and then sweeps his fingertips across it, there is no pain. No wound.

He sits back on his heels. “The healing abilities of a siphon.” His head drops to his hands as he takes a long, steadying breath. “Saints. I could’ve killed you. If it had been silver—”

“It wasn’t.”

He’s still strung taut as a bow, shoulders tensed and shaking. With every moment, strength and normalcy return to me, and I have enough wherewithal to finally sit up. I take his head in my hands and wrap my arms around his shoulders, resting my chin on the top of his head. “It wasn’t,” I repeat. “I’m fine.”

He exhales long and slow, and then his hands find their way to my waist. It’s not romantic, not anything more than reassuring touch, as if to remind himself that I’m there, that I’m breathing, that we’re together.

But truth sinks into my chest with relief. We cannot kill Galvin without also killing me. What harms one bloodmate harms the other.