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“It’s all right.” He shook his head. “It isn’t your fault. None of this is.”

Slowly, carefully, she walked up to the edge of her kitchen table. She stared down at the carved wooden surface and the talisman in the center. Every time she looked at it, it made her skin crawl. But she had to accept that. She had to face it down. No matter what, she had to be strong enough to look her past in the eye.

She had made a promise, after all. “Gideon, I…”

“It’s all right.”

Shaking her head, she tried to form the words she knew she owed him. “These past few weeks, traveling the world, getting into silly antics with you while on some crazy mission—it’s the happiest I think I’ve ever been. I want to thank you for that.”

“Thanks aren’t needed. It was mutual.” His voice was soft, tender, and overfull of emotions. She knew he was probably tearing up. But she couldn’t look at him. If she did, she’d leap into his arms and tell him she change her mind, and she wanted to stay like this forever. In this state of unknowing.

But she couldn’t. It’d be a lie.

“Being with you has made me happy, Gideon.” She reached for the talisman, her hand hovering over it. “I won’t forget that.”

She picked it up.

The stone crenellations on the balcony dug into her palms. She could feel the grit as the edges of the blocks jabbed into the cuts on her hands. She had been running away from someone. Standing on the edge, she turned to look in horror at the man who had been chasing her. Dark robes swirled around him. Only his silhouette was visible, cut out against the firelight of the torches behind him.

He reached for her.

She let herself fall backward into the darkness.

Indigo wool fabric whipped in the wind as the world rushed past her. Someone screamed her name, but it was too late. Hewn stone walls of the castle exterior turned to rough, jagged cliffs.

Then…all movement stopped.

Her ribcage collapsed.

Her lungs flooded with blood.

Her skull cracked.

She died.

Jagged rocks had met her at the bottom of the castle. Its parapets were black silhouettes against a barely brighter sky. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t move.

She was already dead.

The silence of her heart was deafening. Her body was dead.

But she was still…there, somehow. Lingering. Stuck. Waiting for Death himself to fetch her.

Someone was suddenly there beside her. But it was not the reaper, although black robes swirled around him, caught in the wind she could no longer feel. He knelt beside her. Claws, long and jagged, as dark and shining as onyx, reached for her. Silver bands caught the dim starlight, stark in contrast against the shadows around him.

He spoke.

“You will never die alone.”

A promise and a threat.

Comforting and terrifying.

Angry…and mournful.

She was afraid of him. She was afraid of dying. But that wasn’t all she felt. There was something else there, lurking in the shadows of her stilled heart.

He lifted her in his inhuman hands, cradling her dead and broken body close to him. She watched, somehow within her body and without it, as he pulled a necklace from the depths of the darkness he was made from.