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As much as she trusted Darien, a part of her was afraid there was more he was keeping from her. Maybe not anything that could hurt her, but something that could hurt him—another truth as bad as his bargain.

“So we’re back to this?” Darien said, his voice hard. He taped the last piece of gauze down and began cleaning up.

“Well, we didn’t technically get the chance to finish,” she said breathlessly. She peered over her shoulder at him as he moved about, putting things back in their rightful places. “You stomped out.” She knew she had played her own role in how their fight had ended—a role she wasn’t proud of—but Darien could have done a better job of handling himself, too. “I meant what I said, Darien. You’ve practically killed yourself—” Her voice cracked on the last word, her eyes stinging.

She dropped her gaze to her lap.

Get yourself under control.

“I understand why you’re upset,” Darien said. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him dumping his gloves and the blood-stained gauze into the trash bin. He turned to face her, hands hanging loosely at his sides. “But you could use a lesson on self-love too, Loren.”

She lifted her head and looked at him, her vision swimming.

Looking as tortured as he had in the waiting room, Darien explained, “You never take your medication when you should. You go for way too long without eating. And you use your magic when you know full well that it could kill you.” His chest rose andfell with labored breaths. “Am I missing anything? Even if I am, I think I just listed enough evidence to convince anyone that you need to start caring more about yourself, too. You even tried to hide your back from me. I refuse to stand by while you destroy yourself, Loren?—”

“Donottalk to me about destroying myself, Darien Cassel, not when you’re the king of self-destruction!” Her words snagged on a sob. “The fighting, the killing when you don’t have to, the self-hatred, thedrugs.”The last one made him flinch. “Yeah,” she said, her voice cracking again, “don’t think I don’t know about that. Ivy told me you’re addicted to Venom.”

His left hand curled into a fist. “I’m going to get off it?—”

“Don’t make it be for me this time,” she blurted, hating herself when she saw him wince again. But she stayed on her course of action and whispered, “Make it be for you.”

Speechless, he stared at her, his mouth a firm line.

She stared back, willing the tears not to fall.

“Nice little homecoming we’ve got going on, hey?” he said with a pained scoff. “We’ve barely been together for thirty minutes, I’m about to have a Surge, and look at you—you’re already crying.”

She looked away from him, staring down at her filthy boots. Not because she was intimidated, but because she couldn’t bear to see the hurt on his face any longer.

She needed to do better for herself—Darien wasn’t wrong about that. But more importantly,hehad to do better for himself.

She tried not to regret where this conversation had gone—not when she knew that all of this needed to be said. Darien was on a collision course with two versions of himself—the man he was and the person he wanted so badly to be. Those two men were so different it was like forcing two magnets together when all they wanted was to repel each other. He was trying so hard to dobetter for her, and she loved him for it. Gods, did she ever. But he needed to stop trying to change solely for her—he had to do it for himself, too.

Because if—when—the Widow’s prediction eventually came true, and she died before the age of twenty-one, Darien would need to move on from her. And she wouldn’t rest until she knew he could do it without destroying himself out of the grief and guilt he’d surely feel if he failed to save her. So what if his life was tied to hers? She still had time to undo the bargain—time to push him out of the path of the bullet he’d fired from his own gun. Weeks, maybe. Months, hopefully. No matter how long or short, she would use the last of her time wisely and do everything she could to fix what he’d done.

“Are you ready to get out of here?” Darien’s question was gruff, and when she lifted her head to look at him she saw that his eyes were a solid black that gleamed like pools of ink under the lights.

Another Surge. And with that newly broken hand of his, he couldn’t even use fighting as an outlet. Not that it was an option right now, given everything that was going on.

She slid off the table.

“Hey,” he called after her as her feet hit the floor.

She looked his way. Even with the black eyes, and even with the tension of their argument still crackling between them, he managed to speak softly to her.

“Be mad if you want to be mad,” he said. “Hate me if you want to hate me. But with all this fuckery going on outside—” He pointed at the door—at the city crumbling beyond these walls. “I want you with me at all times. Even if we’re not talking, you go where I go. Understand?”

She nodded, hating that this was where they were at now. “I understand.”

17

Intensive Care Unit

YVESWICH, STATE OF KER

“Then the waterfall took us south,”Roman said. “To a neighborhood in East Montgomery.”

Travis Devlin sat across from his brother in the ICU waiting room, listening intently as Roman explained the hellish obstacles he and Darien had been forced to navigate on their way here. The sword that had helped them see in the dark, the vines that had tried to strangle them in the tunnels, the droves of monsters they’d killed, the pit they’d fallen into.